For those that print their own cards?

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emmylou74

  • #1
    I am going to start printing my own cards so I can add more personalisation options, plus I am getting asked for a certain type of card but cannot find these so am hoping to do my own.

    For those that do this, what software do you use and printer? If you don't mind sharing, I would really appreciate it :)
     
    L

    Lunazzurra

  • #2
    We take our own photographs of local views, then print and sell them as mounted prints and greetings cards.

    We use Photoshop CS5 and an Epson Stylus Photo A3+ R1900 8 Ink Printer.

    For card stock we use 7" x 5" pre-scored 250gsm card from www.vantagecrafts.co.uk who also do matching polybags and enevelopes.

    You probably don't need to go to the extent of CS5 or the R1900 if you're just going to be doing greetings cards, Photoshop Elements would be much cheaper to start off with and you could find a cheaper but good A4 printer for the purpose. Just make sure it has individual ink cartridges for each colour which will give a better result than the 3-colours-in-one type of cartridge.

    Printers never print out quite the same colours or vibrance as you see on screen, so be prepared to waste a bit of ink and card on trial and error settings to begin with.

    We print directly on to the card, but I have seen similar cards done with a proper photo mounted onto the card stock.

    We also do our own art cards, by means of using Photoshop and various graphic methods including (only commercially free) patterns, brushes, gradients and so on available on the internet. It depends on how deep you want to get into designing you're own cards but making use of these patterns and brushes can be real fun and inspiring if, like me, you're not an artist at heart.

    We make sure our logo, contact details etc are also put on the back of each card.

    Each polybagged card costs us about 38p excluding VAT to produce all in and we are able to sell these quite well at £1.99. I'm sure for personalisation you could bump this up a bit more.

    Hope this helps for the time being - if you have anymore questions please just ask and I'll do my best to help. :)
     
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    ashbash

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    Jan 26, 2011
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  • #4
    Yes thanks to Luna for a full reply, I print my own cards too but on a much more basic level,however I have sold thousands in the past four years and the ability to personalise is really useful.

    I use different size cards, from my own shop I sell A5 (a4 folded), as I have spinners and racks that accept them. They look impressive and sell at a good profit .

    I have tried a number of different printers, but for me the most successful has been the Canon pixma range, they have taken a lot of abuse from me and keep on chuntering along. They accept heavyweight card stock -270 -350gsm, loaded from rear tray, and even print well on watercolour paper.

    I use basic Word, with text and images centred in a text box, and so can add a name quickly . I find it easier than publisher, just from lack of knowledge and training had to do it the simplest way, and it works well for me.

    With all costs including labour (mine, envelope stuffing at all hours) my cards come in at about 25p each, cello bag and envelope included. I could get them professionally printed for a little less, but would have to add envelope and cello bag costs, plus lose flexibility over stock

    Please feel free to pm me if you wish, happy to share what knowledge I have.
     
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    Doodle-Noodle

    Doodle-Noodle

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    Oct 11, 2008
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  • #5
    Yes, we also make, print & sell our own cards, mostly personalised to order. WE also use a Canon, we're paying less for our card stock than the others - my personal favourite card size at the moment is 8"x8", with envelope & cello bag we're paying 12p per card and selling mostly for £6.50 but that includes hand worked stuff on it too. Very simple though, anyone could do it, just use WordArt and a bit of imagination.
    Will try and upload a photo (I'm rubbish at that!)
     
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    emmylou74

  • #6
    You guys are the bestest thanks so much!!!!!!

    Thankyou for the very kind offer to pm you as well Ashbash :)

    Doodles please upload a piccie let me see :)

    I am so excited with all the changes I am making its like opening a shop for the very first time :D
     
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    Lunazzurra

  • #7
    Hey guys, seems like I should ask you where you get your card stock from. I don't buy in massive quantities (100 or so at a time) so I realize that will have a bearing on price. But some suggestions of alternative suppliers would be great.

    I did once find a local printer to us that did small prints runs of 250 per design, which worked out at about the same price each as I could do them for, but with over 30 designs or so in our range that is still a lot of cards especially when on top of that there was a £25.00 set up charge per design. Hence, the reason why we started doing them ourselves with the no hassle option of personalisation when we needed it.


    Also, are any of you into foiling cards?

    We went to a local (consumer) craft fair, I think it was last September, at Westpoint, Exeter and found the following which may be of interest to some of you: www.patsymay.co.uk

    We saw the foiling machine in operation at the show and I was quite impressed by the the ease of use and quality of the finished card. I know some professional printers can offer foiling but this could be good for one-offs as well as longer runs. It's the sort of thing that's certainly on our future wishlist (when money allows) and of course suits the personalisation end of the market very well.
     
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    ashbash

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    Jan 26, 2011
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  • #8
    Hi Luna

    Re card stock, I was getting my supplies from Liz's Crafts, sadly they seem to have suddenly gone out of business, which is a shame and a nuisance as they supplied envelopes and cello bags to size so I could order all I needed from them.

    I am researching different suppliers, and having been at Progressive Greetings Live trade show last month, I think GF Smith offer the best range for me and they will supply a sample box on request.

    I do think you need to plan on ordering 1000 cards and envelopes at a time, most companies have that as minimum order and I think it is worth it for the lower costs from dedicated board manufacturers.

    I am thinking about getting a range printed professionally, the Imaging Centre offer a way to print up to twenty different cards in one order of 1000 cards, and prices are surprisingly reasonable, but you may end up with cards that don't sell, but that is always a risk in this business,

    .Getting them printed removes some stress and frees you up to do other things that make money!

    May I suggest you get hold of a copy of Progressive Greetings magazine, it's a monthly trade journal for the greeting cards industry, costs £50 for the year and carries ads from all trade suppliers and gives good info on marketing and trade issues

    I will dig out all info I have and post tomorrow

    Tell me about your Epson printer, what are the running costs, ink quality etc, is it good for photo quality printing?
     
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    Lunazzurra

  • #10
    ashbash said:
    I am researching different suppliers, and having been at Progressive Greetings Live trade show last month, I think GF Smith offer the best range for me and they will supply a sample box on request.

    May I suggest you get hold of a copy of Progressive Greetings magazine, it's a monthly trade journal for the greeting cards industry, costs £50 for the year and carries ads from all trade suppliers and gives good info on marketing and trade issues

    Tell me about your Epson printer, what are the running costs, ink quality etc, is it good for photo quality printing?
    Click to expand...

    Hi ashbash,

    GF Smith:- I've only just recently thrown out our sample pack from GF Smith that I must have had for about four years. Yes, they are good but I personally found that their card stock mostly wasn't suitable for putting through my printer, since they seemed to concentrate alot on coated and coloured cards.

    Progressive Greetings: Yes I do know of this magazine:- one of our greeting card reps used to regularly forward her copy to us gratis after she had finished with it - but she left to start a family some time ago now, so have only seen the odd copy since. Although we do get (free) copies of Gift Focus & Craft Focus sent direct to us from KD Media Publishing which can be very useful.

    Epson Printer: I bought the R1900 printer about five years ago now. We paid not far short of £400 for it (a good price at the time). This model has long since been superceded but ours has never been serviced and just seems to plod on regardless (touch wood). At the same time we also spent about £300 for a mountboard cutter as our original intention was to photograph and print local views in hand cut mounts catering for prints and sell them at various sizes up to A3+ size which, of course, we still do. The cards were a natural spin-off about three years ago now and I'm glad to say that we covered the initial outlay a long, long time ago!

    Running costs: I've only ever used genuine Epson inks (having before had a really bad experience on another printer with replacement inks - oooh! shudder, never again!). Surprisingly, despite trying Amazon and quite a few others, I've actually found Epson's own website to be the most competitive and above all reliable with usually immediate despatch. Each colour cartridge costs a little over £11 with a Gloss Optimizer cartridge at about £8 (but you get 2 in a pack for this). It's is incredibly difficult to work out how much each print costs to produce because there are different requirements of each ink supply for each design, but by dividing my costs over a period of time, I normally base my costings about 5-6p's worth on a greetings card and up to £1.50 on a larger print.

    I find the print quality excellent on the Epson, but since I normally work with RAW images from my camera I have to at least do some amount of sharpening and colour balancing via Photoshop first. (That's just the nature of RAW images I'm afraid). As I said before on the previous post, you also need to do some experimenting with colours to begin with and it's best if some level of colour calibration is done so that the match between print-out and screen is as close as possible. Some paper/card suppliers can supply a 'Profile' to help overcome this. I've found that the R1900 generally tends to print out slightly darker than on screen and colours can appear to be a bit muddy sometimes for which I just dial in some custom pre-set compensation within Photoshop.

    I'm sorry if this has been a bit long-winded but I hope it helps in some small way.
     
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