NEWARK

— After hours of searching, they were stumped.

Newark residents Fanny Aizier and Rahim Stennett scoured the city’s shops last November for a postcard of Newark that Aizier could send her grandmother in Paris.

A native of France, Aizier says she writes postcards as a hobby. Though she’s lived in New Jersey’s largest city since 2006, she says she’s been relegated to mailing postcards of the iconic images of New York City that are for sale in local Newark shops.

“At one point, I was like, no I want to send postcards of Newark,” she said.

She and Stennett, both recent graduates of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, recognized a business opportunity, plus a creative outlet, and decided to make their own postcards. Thus was born their custom line of city images, dubbed "From Newark With Love."

The dozen postcards feature images like Newark’s skyline, the iconic spires of Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, fountains in Branch Brook Park and the bronze statue of a pensive Abraham Lincoln overlooking the corner of Springfield Avenue and Market Street.

Each postcard is stamped with their brand logo, a hand-drawn single-propeller airplane trailed by the word “love” written in cursive, a design created by Aizier.

Fanny Aizier, left, and Rahim Stennett are developing their own line of post cards to promote Newark.

It’s been a labor of love for the 24-year-olds who are neither Newark nor New Jersey natives. Stennett was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and Aizier grew up in Aix-en-Provence, a city in southern France.

Aizier came to NJIT to study computer science and play Division 1 tennis and graduated in 2010. She works as a systems associate at Prudential. Stennett, a soccer player, transferred to NJIT his sophomore year. He graduated with a degree in electrical engineering last year and is searching for a full-time job.

The two met on campus and dated for a while and now, after graduating, find themselves as business partners with a shared passion for revamping Newark’s image, one postcard at a time.

So far, Stennett says, the postcards have made their way to a handful of countries: France, Jamaica, Italy and Canada.

Their company, founded in January, currently sells at about 15 locations in Newark and on their website (www.fromnewarkwithlove.com) for $1 per postcard. Several of the images are photos taken by Stennett and Aizier, both amateur photographers, but they have also purchased the rights to shots taken by other photographers. The reverse side of the postcards include a tidbit of Newark history.

Stennett, who manages the day-to-day operations of the business, acknowledged there’s an element of luck and chance mixed in with hard work.

Recently, owner Nil Patel of Gateway Newsstand near Newark Penn Station flipped through Stennett’s sample book and put down an order for 150 postcards. This was the second visit — it took a week for Patel to warm up to the idea.

From left: Abraham Lincoln statue on Market Street, Newark skyline at sunset, Cathederal Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Newark's motto, starry night in Newark and a clock in downtown Newark.

Stennett grinned afterward, saying it was their “biggest order yet.”

In their first week, 10 businesses came on board and agreed to sell the postcards. Since then, they’ve added another half dozen stores.

“If that first week had not gone well, I don’t think we would have continued,” Stennett said.

Starting on Broad Street, they hit up shops in downtown Newark, went down Halsey Street and got more confident and ventured into restaurants in the Ironbound, where Stennett lives.

He recently hit up the hotels around Newark Liberty International Airport, an area he sees as a potential goldmine. Getting a foothold at the airport “would be monumental,” Stennett said.

In an era of obsessive photo-sharing via social media, sending a postcard may seem old-fashioned for everyone but tourists. But Aizier says it’s a good way to personally connect with loved ones far away.

“Just a nice word — it makes people happy,” she said. “It doesn’t take much (and has) more impact than Facebook or e-mail.”

In fact, sending postcards was an antiquated form of photo-sharing, according to George Wagner, president of a postcard collectors club.

“If you have pictures, they get tucked away but postcards are shared and everyone seems to have postcards from their friends and family,” said Wagner, president of the Washington Crossing Card Collectors Club based in Titusville.

“It’s a way of showing off to people in other areas this is where I live,” he noted.

"From Newark With Love" has even sparked interest over at the Newark Public Library.

2 trchristie HINDASH.JPG

CONNECT

WITH US

On mobile or desktop:

• Like The Star-Ledger on Facebook

• Follow @starledger on Twitter

And check out our redesigned mobile site by visiting NJ.com from any mobile browser.

Aizier struck up a conversation with Heidi Lynn Cramer, director of central library services, at a recent library film screening and mentioned the postcards.

Cramer immediately saw the homegrown project as a perfect addition to the library’s Charles F. Cummings New Jersey Information Center.

The center mainly focuses on Newark — boasting research-level materials from historic and current sources — and is named after the beloved city historian who died in 2005.

As of March 13, the Newark postcards were added to the center’s voluminous picture collection which contains more than 835,0000 photos, including several thousand postcards.

Born and raised in the capital and largest city of Jamaica, Stennett says he’s not oblivious to urban problems but with Newark, he prefers to share its positives.

“We live here. Newark is not that bad. Newark is a really nice city and you grow to love it,” Stennett said. “The way we look at it is we can’t do anything about the bad things except try to counter it,” he added.

“Newark is a big city and should have its own” postcards, Aizier added.

While recently visiting her relatives in France, Aizier found that her cousin had, in fact, heard of her home in New Jersey thousands of miles away.

“I was amazed,” she said of learning her cousin had heard of Mayor Cory Booker and the Whitney Houston media frenzy last year surrounding the singer’s birthplace.

“Newark is making some noise and making changes,” she said.