Thursday 24 September 2015

Retiring some old designs

When I first began KWS, I was using vintage letterpress blocks and a photocopier machine.  It was a HUGE pain, and didn't allow for a lot of the customization I do today, including changing up the paper with relative ease.  After a lot of thought, I've decided to let go of some of my older designs that aren't really that easy to produce.  

I've got an Adana 8x5 letterpress I've had for years but never used (check out this person's set of photos to see what I mean).  It was misaligned once I got it home, and no amount of reading and watching youtube videos helped me fix it.  I finally took it to the one specialist I could find in pretty much all of Canada, which was luckily in East Toronto, and now it's ready for pick-up.  I'm thinking I'll go get it next week sometime.  But what that means is that I can now use my letterpress blocks for legitimate letterpress uses.  I no longer need to photocopy prints of them to make stationery, and so I'm going to stop doing that.

There are two designs that have made it to safety in this virtual housecleaning.  I am really in love with my four page mermaid set, and my astronomer set.  I'm on the fence about keeping my oblivion set, which people seem to like but that might be a pain to reproduce if anyone who loves it ever buys it!  For now it's staying, but I can't guarantee that will always be the case.  

I am also considering revamping the remaining sets, creating a digital template for the lines and still working with the letterpress blocks for the images.  That would let me get more creative with the fonts and line spacing, which I'd love to do.  Unfortunately, it would also mean leaving Tomoe River paper out of the running, given that it really can't survive two trips through the printer!  

I won't be taking the designs out of circulation right away.  Instead I'll leave them up until the listings expire, and then I just won't renew them.  There are eight sets retiring, and their retirement dates vary from September 28th to January 4th.  



Friday 18 September 2015

A4 sized stationery coming to KWS in the next few weeks!

It's taken me a while to get all the pieces in place, but I'm going to start rolling out my new A4 stationery in the next week.

Before Kind Words was even a glint in my eye, I was trying everything I could think of to spice up the paper in my pen pal letters.  I bought stickers, and attempted to draw, and glued things onto the blank paper I had been using.  Then one day I got the bright idea to hunt on the internet.  Everything I could find was A5 (5.5 x 8.5) paper, and at the time, I absolutely hated using that size paper.  I was desperate for some regular sized sheets of fountain-pen friendly paper (8.5 x 11), and I couldn't find anything.  I eventually gave up and just starting using A5 sized paper instead.

Almost a year ago, a fountain pen friend in Toronto bought some stationery from me and at the same time asked about A4 sets.  I revisited all the reason why I hadn't yet offered them - could I find safe packaging materials in the right size?  What do I do about the cardboard backing?  How large should I size up the graphics?  It all felt a bit overwhelming at a time when I was just trying to launch KWS's new, colour, digital designs.

By now I feel like I've got *some* idea of how to do things.  And I figured out how to get my printer to handle A4 Novi sized Tomoe River paper, which was a big stumbling block previously.  So, over the next few weeks, I'll be updating all my current templates for A4 sized stationery, and I hope to have all of them transferred over by October 9th.  Of course, I've started with the Halloween sets already, and I've got An Unkindness of Ravens, Yes Mistress, and Frank's Night Out ready to go on Tomoe River paper.

To celebrate jumping this hurdle that I wasn't sure I'd ever get around to, I'm going to offer a bundle set for a limited time.  For the next two weeks, I'll have a special Halloween Tomoe River A4 Novi sized set available, featuring the three sets:

Frank's Night Out
Yes, Mistress!
An Unkindness of Ravens

During those two weeks, I'll work at moving the rest of the Halloween sets over to A4 sizing, and then keep going with the rest of my designs.  But once all the Halloween designs are successfully into A4 sizing, I'll pull down the special bundled listing I mentioned above.  So get them while you can!  :D

Halloween Bundle A4 set

Also, next week, keep your eyes peeled for news about some sets that are getting retired.


Friday 11 September 2015

Lowering my prices ... temporarily?

When I started KWS, the CAD and USD were roughly 1:1.  Looking around on etsy, I saw that a lot of people selling stationery had their sets priced between $10.50 and $14 USD, so I aimed for something within that range.  I roughly tracked how much envelopes cost me, and shipping of different types of paper, and came up with $12.50 as fairly reasonable for the set.

As I moved forward with KWS, I quickly realized that a lot of etsy shops can offer lower prices than I can because they outsource the printing of their stationery.  If you send a design off to Vistaprint (a Canadian printing company that has advertisements all over Canadian TV right now), you can get hundreds of sheets printed for a very reasonable price.  That's the cost though - tons of the SAME design.  I decided early on that wouldn't work for me.  I wanted more customization in the stationery I used with my own pen pals, and I thought it was important to offer that to my customers as well.

More than that, I was worried about the paper.  I'd tried stationery from several sellers who used the options available at Vistaprint, and while it was okay-ish for fountain pens, it wasn't what I would call fountain pen friendly.  There was bleeding with the thicker nibs I tend to use, feathering with a lot of inks, and in the places neither of those happened it was mainly because the paper/design combination meant the sheet wouldn't take any ink at all, making it nearly impossible to write on.  Producing stationery that is guaranteed to work with fountain pens is a tricky combination of the paper you print on and adhering to design principles that can often feel restrictive.  KWS came into being mainly because I wanted cute stationery for my pen pals that used Tomoe River paper, and no printing services were offering Tomoe River paper as an option.  I had to figure out a way to get it done myself.

Ultimately that meant I had to source access to an industrial grade printer, find somewhere to cut the paper for a reasonable price, and hand feed each sheet through the printer one at a time.  When I get big orders from my etsy shop, and I'm doubled over the printed sliding one sheet at a time into it to fulfill the 50 sheets, I feel ridiculous.  It's not a perfect solution in terms of how much work it is for me personally in comparison to how other sellers do it, but it's the only way I can produce stationery on Tomoe River paper and with the level of customization I want to offer.

Now that the dollar has fallen, some of my supplies have gotten more expensive while other have remained the same.  Earlier in the year I was hesitant to lower my prices because I thought that the dollar would rebound and I'd be stuck having to raise prices again when that happened.  Besides, Tomoe River paper in particular has gotten much more expensive now that the conversation rate is so terrible for Canadians.  Online, USA residents are rejoicing at paying $75 + a hefty shipping price for a large amount of Tomoe River paper, but that $150 price tag turns into well over $200 for Canadians, especially since the shipping to Canada is more expensive than to the USA for some reason I don't fully understand.

The dollar has been dropped long enough that I'm now willing to try lowering my prices for a trial period, to see how the budget balances.  I may have to raise it again depending on the exchange rate, by a little or a lot remains to be seen.  I'll never go higher than the $12.50 I was at originally, but for the next while at least, I'm going to try $10.75 USD and see how that goes.

Also, I spent a lot of time recently working on designing and photographing Halloween sets.  Check them out here at the new price!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/KindWordsStationery?section_id=17713227