After 10 years of living and working in Los Angeles, California, Marcy and Andrew decided that the time was right for an adventure and quit their advertising jobs to bike through Southeast Asia in the Spring of 2016. Marcy has been painting her entire life, and continued to do so as they progressed along the first leg of their tour, from Hanoi to Saigon, Vietnam.  To escape from the intense midday heat of the Vietnamese sun, they found cafes or roadside food stalls to take long breaks from biking. During one of those midday stops, Marcy began a series of sketches that resembled emojis, and somehow the combination of heat and caffeine resulted in an idea - to turn Marcy's paintings into an iPhone sticker app.

A couple of months later, Marcy and Andrew biked into Saigon’s notoriously insane traffic filled streets and ended their bike tour of Vietnam. Work on MarcyMoji had continued sporadically since it’s inception a couple of months prior, but instead of continuing on the bike tour to Cambodia and Laos, they put the bikes aside for a while and flew to Bali where they rented a house to focus on MarcyMoji until it was ready for launch. 

The next few months were spent working on MarcyMoji every day - with Marcy painting hundreds of emojis, and Andrew writing his first iPhone app.  Working on MarcyMoji together was so rewarding because they both realized their passions were being combined into one potentially awesome project.  The beaches and jungles of Bali weren’t too bad either.