She was selling RBG greeting cards. Then she heard from RBG

Ginsburg disagreed, writing that ending the protections was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Soon after, a student at New York University’s law school started the Tumblr blog Notorious R.B.G., and then followed up with a book.

“There just weren’t a lot of people to make you feel good at the time,” Velencia says. “I just think there was — and still is — a big void of female leaders we can all look up to.” For a lot of women, RBG was that figure.

“We can’t all be like Beyonce or Taylor Swift, you know?” says Velencia. But for ambitious professional women in the white collar world, RBG was more relatable (though Velencia acknowledges not everyone can be a Supreme Court justice either). “We get a lot of orders from lawyers or law school grads.”

In the Card Bureau’s early days, before the RBG merchandising market became so saturated, her cards made up about 40 percent of Velencia’s revenue. “I only was really able to sell them in stores around Capitol Hill, which is where I lived at the time. And it just started out as a shoe box of cards under my bed.”