ABOUT US
From the Block to the Beach.
WELCOME HOME.
You already know this feeling.
That exhale. The one that happens the moment you close the door behind you, kick off your shoes, and let your shoulders drop for the first time all day. The moment the world stops requiring something from you and you remember — quietly, almost accidentally — who you actually are.
That’s why you’re here.
Not for the apparel. Not for the jewelry. Not even for the words, though the words will find you when you need them. You’re here because something in you recognized something in us. And that recognition is its own kind of coming home.
THE BLOCK.
Before the beach, there was the block.
And we mean that in every sense of the word.
The auction block — where our ancestors stood stripped of name, language, and the right to belong to themselves. Where the distance between who they were and who the world would allow them to be was measured in chains and silence. Where the most profound act of resistance was simply remembering — holding somewhere deep and unreachable — the sound of the drum, the taste of the water, the feeling of ground beneath feet that were still, in some unbreakable way, free.
The city block — where their descendants landed generations later. Concrete and sirens. Survival arithmetic. The particular weight of a world that was built on your ancestors’ labor and still finds ways to make you prove you belong in it. Where brilliance gets buried under pressure. Where peace feels like a luxury you haven’t earned yet.
Both blocks share the same truth.
They were never the whole story.
They were just where the journey began.
THE BEACH.
Our ancestors knew something about water.
Not just the terror of it — the Middle Passage, the crossing, the distance from everything that had ever been home. They knew the other side of it too. The restoration. The way the ocean receives whatever you bring to it without judgment. The way standing at the edge of something that vast makes everything you’re carrying feel, for one merciful moment, smaller than it actually is.
When segregation tried to close the shoreline, Black families didn’t retreat. They built.
American Beach. Virginia Key. Highland Beach. Oak Bluffs. Atlantic Beach. Chicken Bone Beach. Sanctuaries carved from hostile geography by people who refused to be denied the right to exhale. Who understood — in their bones, in their blood, in the part of them that remembered Africa before the crossing — that rest was not a reward. It was a birthright. That joy was not something you earned after the struggle. It was the very thing worth struggling for.
They built beaches the way they built everything — with what they had, for what they believed, against everything that said they couldn’t.
And they left them for us.
THE BRAND.
paperxpencil© was founded in 2018 on a beach in Fort Lauderdale.
Not in a boardroom. Not behind a screen. On the sand, early morning, before the world got loud. Paper in hand. Pencil moving. The Atlantic doing what it always does — arriving, receding, arriving again, unbothered by everything I was carrying.
I am Jude Caze. Afro-Caribbean-American. Brooklyn raised. Florida shaped. Florida A&M educated. Engineer by training. Creator by nature. The son of people who carried entire worlds inside them across water and built something beautiful on the other side.
I spent more than a decade in corporate engineering reading systems, tracing invisible currents, understanding what holds complex things together under pressure.
The ocean taught me everything those years couldn’t.
It taught me that the same water that carried our ancestors away still holds their echoes. That the beach communities they built were not escapes from reality but the most radical possible engagement with it — a declaration that Black life deserved beauty, stillness, and space to simply be.
It taught me that inner peace is not the destination at the end of the journey. It is the practice you return to. Every morning. Every tide. Every time you choose yourself over the noise.
paperxpencil© exists at that intersection.
Every piece of apparel we make is a wearable reminder — that beneath the pressure, the performance, and the constant proving, there is a version of you that knows how to breathe. You carry that version into every room you enter.
Every piece of jewelry is an ancestral thread — a physical connection to the people who crossed water and built sanctuaries on the other side. You wear their resilience on your body as a daily act of remembrance.
Every word we write is an invitation — into a world built around the one question that drives everything PXP creates. What does it mean to be fully human, fully at rest, fully alive in a world that never stops asking you to be otherwise?
THE JOURNEY.
From the auction block to the city block to the beach.
That is the arc of our people. That is the arc of this brand. That is the arc of every person who finds their way here feeling like something is missing and leaves remembering what it is.
You are not the first person to need this.
You will not be the last.
But you are here now. Guard down. Shoulders dropped. Somewhere between who the world has been asking you to be and who you actually are.
The water is waiting.
It always has been.
— Jude Caze, Fort Lauderdale
Founder, paperxpencil© Creative Design Lab
SAY HELLO.
We'd love to hear from you. Feel free to shoot us an email or text.
hello@paperxpencil.com
PHONE
754.207.2940
HQ
2950 West Cypress Creek Rd.
Ste. 333 (PMB# 1069)
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