She attended Yale, planning to become a theater director. To help pay tuition, she painted cartoon-style animals onto blank cards and sold them to specialty shops. Over the next two years she water-colored 60,000 cards by hand. She was introduced to the founders of a small Chicago company called Recycled Paper Greetings, and signed a contract with them. At that point, the company was doing about $1 million a year in sales. Within five years their annual revenue topped $100 million, almost all due to the popularity of Boynton's cards.