Founder & Creative Director 2015–2025

Alicja Confections started as a hobby in a tiny kitchen in Ottawa. It grew into one of North America’s most recognizable indie chocolate brands — home of the #PostcardChocolateBar, a mailable chocolate bar that you can send through the postal system like a postcard. Over the past decade, I built Alicja from the ground up: self-funded, scrappy, and driven by brand, storytelling, and relentless creativity. From the earliest days of hand-stamping wrappers to building a 7,000 sq ft production facility and managing a team of over 20, I led every part of the business:

• Brand identity
• Packaging and product design
• Wholesale and retail scaling
• Direct-to-consumer operations
• Marketing, copywriting, and creative direction

The brand has been stocked in over 1,000 stores, including Macy’s, Indigo, Winners, and Well.ca, and has collaborated with major names like TD, Desjardins, Deloitte, and Canadian Tire. Our work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Lonely Planet, and more. We shipped hundreds of thousands of chocolate bars in the mail. We scaled to nearly $1M in annual revenue. We built a community of over 14,000 Instagram followers — all without outside funding. Alicja Confections is currently in the process of exiting after nearly 10 years. It’s the biggest thing I’ve built. It taught me how to build something from nothing, how to lead and scale a team, and how to stay inventive and resilient as both a founder and a creative.

Founder & Creative Director — Feb 2023 to Sept 2024

Flossie is a single-serving cotton candy brand I created in just 3 days — branding, packaging, website, mascot design, sourcing, recipe development — all from scratch. I built it as a direct response to the pain points I encountered scaling Alicja Confections. Where that business had high MOQs, long lead times, and complex customization, Flossie was designed to be fast, flexible, and fun from day one.

Once launched, Flossie moved fast. Within two weeks of launching on Faire, we were stocked in over 100 stores and completely sold out of what I thought would be months of inventory. Within three months, we'd sold over 50,000 bags and secured two major custom projects: a national Uniqlo brand launch and a collaboration with Ottawa Hospital that was so successful they repeated it the following year.

I handled everything solo — from production to packaging, to managing wholesale accounts and social media. But growth was explosive, and I made the call to sell before it started pulling too much focus from my main business. Eighteen months after launch, Flossie was acquired in a 6-figure deal.

Flossie proved a lot to me:

• That I could move faster and smarter based on everything I’d learned from 10 years in CPG.
• That small, strange, character-driven brands are powerful when they lean into niche internet culture.
• That a good idea doesn’t need polish — it just needs execution.

The new owners have since changed the look and feel (RIP Florence B. Cotton), but I’m still immensely proud of the weird, sweet, neon-colored empire I built in under two years.

Creator, Brand Strategist, and Designer

Postie is a modern rebrand of Alicja Confections, created to refine the user experience, streamline operations, and scale the core product to new audiences. While Alicja Confections built a beloved indie presence, Postie elevates it—turning a well-known novelty into a scalable, retail-optimized, DTC-ready brand.

After extensive customer research with long-time wholesale and retail partners, I decided not to replace the original brand, but to create a second one: the illusion of choice. Same product, entirely different identity. It’s built to meet the needs of both consumers and retailers—featuring a resealable, mail-friendly box that ships and displays beautifully.

Over 6 weeks, I executed a full redesign of the brand from the ground up:

• Defined a new visual identity and brand voice
• Developed a modern packaging system with over a dozen prototypes
• Narrowed the product catalog from 80+ to 25 hero SKUs based on historical sales data
• Built a new Shopify site and DTC experience
• Designed a mascot-driven storytelling framework featuring Postie, a mail-carrying bird

The brand has received overwhelmingly positive response from existing stockists and will relaunch under a new co-manufacturing model in Summer 2025. Postie represents everything I’ve learned as a founder: how to listen, pivot, and execute with clarity—and how to transform beloved products into scalable platforms with viral potential.

Founder & Designer — 2020–2021 (Limited Run)

OverEasy.shop was a maximalist fashion experiment born during lockdown — a bold, unapologetic response to the monotony of quarantine life. I wanted to wear something that felt electric, surreal, and alive. No one was making it. So I did.

The project started as a collab capsule between Alicja Confections and an apparel partner, transforming our chocolate bar artwork into wearables. But it quickly became its own thing — a fully realized line of all-over print clothing and accessories that mashed up Y2K nostalgia, absurdist humor, and color-drunk design. We sold out the entire collection. I led everything from concept to fulfillment:

• Designed the collection, adapting existing artwork into new formats
• Oversaw print placement, production, and quality control
• Sourced suppliers, coordinated with manufacturers, and managed preorders
• Built and managed the e-commerce platform, including all photography and copy

OverEasy wasn’t just a fashion brand — it was a one-woman art project disguised as a clothing line. It proved how fast a strange idea could turn into a sellout success with the right execution, the right audience, and the right amount of chaos.

Founder & Creative Director — 2023–2024 (Pop-up)

Highly Fresh was a short-lived but high-impact gift shop that stood out in a city where every store was starting to feel the same. I built it from scratch—literally and figuratively—because I believed Ottawa deserved a retail space that felt alive, curated, and completely unhinged (in the best way).

I also designed and built a companion iOS app for Highly Fresh. That included wireframing, user flow, design, and implementation — all self-taught, because I believe that if I don’t know how to do something yet, I just haven’t tried hard enough.

With a brand identity described as “a grocery store on acid in the sky,” Highly Fresh offered weird, wonderful products you couldn’t find anywhere else:

• Created all branding, packaging, sourcing, and merchandising
• Designed and built the entire retail space solo — including painting a ceiling mural of a dreamy sky
• Featured a wall-to-wall zine display and unique products like Highly Fresh patches, nail stickers, pens, puzzles, and more
• Built the Shopify-powered website, social media presence, and signage
• Turned a pop-up into a cult-favorite — customers came not just to shop, but to hang out

Despite nation-wide dips in retail sales, Highly Fresh performed well and became a neighborhood staple. It was proof that great branding, good vibes, and intentional design can turn any space—temporary or permanent—into a destination. This project also reminded me: I’m not just a digital creator. I can build the physical world, too.

Founder & Creative Director — 2024–Present

Lemon Squeezy is a bold take on lemonade — fun, vibrant, and unexpectedly craveable. Born from the realization that Ottawa’s drink scene (and Uber Eats listings) were dominated by bubble tea and lacked variety, I created a brand that brings craft-style flavor to a classic, low-cost product. From concept to customer, I built everything:

• Branding, identity, and product design
• Recipe development using high-quality ingredients to create unexpected, elevated flavor combos
• Packaging, sourcing, and operational setup
• Digital storefront via Uber Eats to instantly meet customers where they already are

What started as a small test in 2024 is now a functioning drink brand with future plans for summer pop-ups, street-side activations, and more. It shares the same spirit as Flossie: a simple product made special through creativity, storytelling, and premium ingredients — all done with scrappy speed and style. Lemon Squeezy proves that I know how to find whitespace in a saturated market and build something refreshing (literally) from nothing.

Founder & Creative Director – 2023–2024 (Pop-Up within a Pop-Up)

SNAQY was a playful, retro-inspired candy concept that lived inside Highly Fresh — a meta pop-up within a pop-up. Born from the observation that Ottawa had no fun, nostalgic, or international candy stores at the time, SNAQY filled that gap with a tightly curated, chaotic little sweet shop that felt like a time capsule and a candy rave.

It was its own fully branded world: different logo, tone, and customer appeal — designed to draw in a new audience to the same physical space. While Highly Fresh attracted zine lovers and design nerds, SNAQY brought in sugar seekers, kids, tourists, and pure chaos goblins. It created natural foot traffic cross-pollination between the two concepts and boosted on-site engagement, especially with impulse buys and high-margin snacks. The strategy worked so well, it was quickly copied — Ottawa now has several retro candy stores.

• Fully branded and designed sub-brand operating under the Highly Fresh umbrella
• Stocked international, nostalgic, and rare candies
• Created two brand experiences in one location, drawing in a broader audience
• Demonstrated trend-spotting instincts: within a year, similar concepts began appearing across the city

SNAQY wasn’t just about candy — it was about creating a world. I saw a gap, filled it fast, and built a brand-within-a-brand that served multiple audiences with a single space. It’s proof that I don’t just think outside the box — I build the damn box, brand it, fill it with weird snacks, and make it go viral. I know how to craft experiences that are fun, strategic, and revenue-driving — and I do it fast, scrappy, and smart.

Founder, Curator, Self-Taught Everything – 2006 (original) / 2025

I launched the original Rawr Radio when I was twelve years old. I figured out how to host and stream an online radio station entirely on my own — no templates, no tutorials, just curiosity and grit. It ran for a full year, and I’ve never really stopped building things since.

In 2025, I brought Rawr Radio back — not just as a station, but as part of this portfolio. I designed the brand, built the faux desktop interface, and embedded the player into a fully custom-coded environment. I didn’t go to school for this. I learned everything by doing.

I’ve been inventing, experimenting, and teaching myself new systems my whole life. From web development to branding to technical implementation, I approach every challenge with curiosity and persistence. I’m not just a creative — I’m technical, self-sufficient, and excited by the idea of working in a space where design meets interactivity.

I want to work at a company where experimentation is encouraged, where good ideas can come from anywhere, and where weird, delightful, human-centered design is the goal. I built this entire site because I wanted something that felt more like me. I can do the same for your brand, your tools, or your platform — just give me a problem worth solving.

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Community Grocer

A new kind of grocery store. Community Grocer is a concept built on one simple idea: everyone deserves access to good food. At its core, it's a grocery store that offers pantry staples and more — not just rice, beans, flour, oil, pasta, canned goods, and other essentials, but the good stuff, too — sold at cost. No markup, no profit. Just food, made affordable for everyone. In a time when food insecurity continues to rise and grocery prices are increasingly out of reach, Community Grocer is designed to serve, not sell. It’s about building trust, supporting neighborhoods, and creating a model where people come first. This isn’t about branding pantry goods as luxury items. It’s about dignity, community, and making sure no one is left behind at the dinner table. It’s not open yet — but it should be.

Designed by Alicja Buchowicz

I'm currently looking for my next role in tech, design, or something unexpected. Explore my desktop to see what I can do!

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