Stand with Eileen Hermann near one of the three aisles of If It’s Paper in Greensboro, even for a few minutes, and you can’t help but notice. The door opens, someone walks in, Hermann looks up, and the place becomes as comfortable as a front porch, as familiar as a nickname.
She expects it. Every time. “It’s like we should have rocking chairs out front,” Hermann says. “Everyone who works here knows everyone who walks in the door. We’re always like, ‘Oh my gosh, I haven’t seen you in forever!’”
Hermann and her 14 part-time employees help customers with life’s most poignant moments — from birth to death and everything in between. People come in to pick up a cake box, find party napkins, or place an order for a customized Christmas card. They come for wedding or party invitations; announcements of a birth, a baptism, or a graduation. Moments that frame lives.

“Paper Dolls” Dottie B. Nutt, Patti Stavrolakis, and Eileen Hermann greet patrons of If It’s Paper with big, warm smiles. photograph by Jerry Wolford & Scott Muthersbaugh
Those moments also frame the lives of the shop’s longtime employees. All of them have lived in Greensboro for decades, and they have a catchy collective nickname: the Paper Dolls.
To Patti Stavrolakis, her fellow employees are like family members. “While I’ve worked here, I’ve lost both of my parents,” she says. “And at my mom’s service here in Greensboro, I looked up and saw everyone I worked with. It makes me get teary when I think about it.”
So while this little shop may be all about paper, it’s also about family and community. The story of If It’s Paper is long and circuitous; it’s a story about the legacy of a family-owned company that’s undergone many changes, employed generations of local residents, and keeps delivering the paper, year after year.
• • •
The seeds of If It’s Paper were sown in 1978, when Harrison Stewart, a 22-year-old graduate of NC State University, returned home to create a life. He’d heard that Dillard Paper Company promoted from within and treated its employees with respect. So he met with the company’s president, John Dillard, in his walnut-paneled office in Greensboro, and he was hired.
The company had been founded by Dillard’s uncle more than half a century earlier. In 1926, Stark Dillard, a savvy 32-year-old entrepreneur with an eighth-grade education, left Lynchburg, Virginia, moved to Greensboro, and opened his little paper company downtown. Starting with one salesman and one secretary, he turned Dillard Paper into the largest independent paper distributor in the Southeast.
That’s where the company was when Stewart began in Dillard’s management trainee program. He stayed with the company for 36 years, rising through the ranks and earning a reputation as a compassionate boss with a whip-smart mind for numbers.

After decades as an executive with Greensboro-based Dillard Paper, Harrison Stewart — along with his wife, Sherrie (left), and daughter, Elizabeth — set out to revive Dillard’s beloved retail business. photograph by Jerry Wolford & Scott Muthersbaugh
In 1991, International Paper, the global company known as IP and based in Memphis, bought Dillard, and Stewart soon became an IP vice president with various responsibilities. Later, he moved up to group vice president, overseeing a few of the company’s divisions.
The phrase “If It’s Paper” had been the old slogan for Dillard. It was also the name of the retail outlet stores that the company had launched in the late 1970s. The stores sold paper products in smaller quantities, catering to the needs of regular people rather than companies. IP inherited If It’s Paper and operated 27 locations throughout the Southeast. That number, though, never grew.
In 2008, IP started closing some of the retail stores, and by the end of 2010, the company was set to close them all. That included the store in Greensboro.
This was disappointing to Stewart, and he knew he had to tell his wife, Sherrie. After all, Dillard Paper had helped make the couple’s life, and If It’s Paper was an important part of the company.

The signature stationery at If It’s Paper helps customers frame key moments in their lives. photograph by Jerry Wolford & Scott Muthersbaugh
So one night, after work, he sat her down and broke the news.
“International Paper is going to close the rest of the If It’s Paper stores,” he said with a sigh.
“Oh my gosh!” Sherrie responded.
“But I’ve got an idea,” Stewart said, perking up. “I believe we could open it back up. I believe we could make that happen!”
Sherrie smiled. “That would be kind of fun,” she said.
• • •
The conversation that night changed everything. The Stewarts bought the name for $500 and reopened the If It’s Paper shop in Greensboro in 2011. They created a place of friendship and camaraderie for the Paper Dolls, and Sherrie discovered a new outlet away from her former career as a diabetes educator. She also discovered a way to work with her daughter, Elizabeth.
As an undergraduate at UNC Chapel Hill and for a while after graduation, Elizabeth had led backpacking trips in Alaska, Peru, and Costa Rica. She planned to continue her outdoor adventures for at least another year, but a request from her mom put the kibosh on that.
“You’ve got to stay with me through Christmas,” Sherrie told her daughter. “You have to help me with the store before you live your dream.”

Dillard Paper’s legacy as a family-owned business extends to the family that now runs If It’s Paper. Harrison Stewart’s daughter, Elizabeth, treasures the vintage paper used by her great-grandfather for a love letter to her namesake great-grandmother. photograph by Jerry Wolford & Scott Muthersbaugh
Elizabeth did — and fell in love with it. She began working in the Greensboro store and started going on buying trips with her mom and Hermann to New York City and Atlanta. In 2013, Elizabeth opened her own If It’s Paper store in Raleigh, and she’s now expanded the inventory at both stores to attract younger customers. She knows what works for new families. She and her husband, Rob Belk, have two young sons of their own, Johnny and Carr.
Family and paper are as important to Elizabeth as they are to her parents. In her Greensboro living room is a framed love letter written in pencil by her great-grandfather. He wrote it on his 18th wedding anniversary and gave it to his wife, Elizabeth’s namesake. The younger Elizabeth treasures it so much that she can repeat the lines by heart. “If we ever had a fire,” she says, pointing to the letter, “this would be one of the things I would grab first. It means the most to me.”
If It’s Paper honors the family legacy of Dillard Paper, keeping its rich history alive.
Family and tradition are important to everybody involved with If It’s Paper. Stand with Dorothy Edwards Nutt, one of the Greensboro employees, and watch. Someone will come in, spot her, and exclaim, almost in a shout, “Dottie B.!”
Everyone knows her.
Dottie B. can trace her family’s roots in Greensboro to the turn of the 20th century. She’s lived here for most of her life. As for her nickname, the “B” is for her middle name, Brantley. Her dad began calling her that when she was a baby, and the nickname stuck.
“Greensboro is a big part of my heart,” Dottie B. says. “And community — that’s what creates your character. It makes who you are.”
If It’s Paper creates that kind of community by honoring the family legacy of Dillard Paper, keeping its rich history alive. In doing so, Harrison Stewart keeps alive his own feelings about the company and the strong bonds that it forged in Greensboro for nearly a century.
• • •
During the course of his years in the paper business, Stewart has hired Eileen Hermann twice. She began at Dillard Paper in 1994, a year after she graduated from UNC Greensboro. The first time Stewart hired her was to run the company’s customer service department.
Then, in October 2013, he called Hermann into his office to make her a second offer: He wanted her to be the manager of his and Sherrie’s revived If It’s Paper shop.
“I don’t know anything about retail,” she said.
“But you know paper,” Stewart replied. “You’ll be fine.”
There’s a family and company connection to Stavrolakis’s employment, too. Stewart knew her brother, Pete Moffitt, who’d worked at IP for 24 years as a sales representative. Moffitt died in 2013 from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS. He was just 51.
Stewart was once Moffitt’s boss, and to this day, when he comes into If It’s Paper and sees Stavrolakis, he’ll tear up almost every time. “I sure do miss your brother,” he’ll tell her.
When Stewart retired, he was presented with the walnut paneling from John Dillard’s office.
When Stewart retired from IP in 2014, the company presented him with a gift — that same walnut paneling from John Dillard’s Greensboro office, from the very room where Stewart was hired when he was 22. He’d spent a lot of his life in that office. Now, it’s in his home a few steps away from the front door.
Stewart’s life after Dillard Paper has been far from easy. In 1984, two years after marrying Sherrie, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a chronic disease that attacks the central nervous system. For years, the only noticeable sign of it was the way Stewart dragged his right foot slightly when he walked.
But after his retirement, the disease began to worsen. Stewart now gets around his home in a motorized wheelchair. He can’t walk. He can’t write. He changes positions often to prevent muscle spasms and to help himself breathe.
And yet, there’s a silver lining.
Stewart’s daughter, Elizabeth, has now settled in Greensboro, and so have his sons, Will and Grainger. Their dad’s needs were a big part of the pull back home.

Before Janet Newell began working at If It’s Paper, taking inventory of the shop’s newest items, she was a longtime customer. photograph by Jerry Wolford & Scott Muthersbaugh
The why behind their decisions is explained by the conversations the kids heard growing up. They’d be out hunting deer or doves, or gathering as a family at Camp Bryan, a 10,000-acre retreat in eastern North Carolina, and their dad would begin reciting the Scout Law.
A former Eagle Scout, Stewart would talk to his kids about the role that integrity, responsibility, and character play in any life. Those lessons have taken root. The company legacy that they’ve continued has helped ensure that.
So yes, If It’s Paper is all about paper. But for the Stewarts, and for everybody who works there or shops there, it’s about so much more.
If It’s Paper
212 East Cornwallis Drive
Greensboro, NC 27408
(336) 379-9874
445 Daniels Street
Raleigh, NC 27605
(919) 615-4333
ifitspaper.org