10 lessons from 1 year of my greeting card business 💌

hello creative friends welcome to another video where I'm going to talk to you about art business stuff now when I am making this it is the time of the year that for most of us who do markets or just sell anything this is the craziest time of the year it is mid no early November not mid November yet but it might be when this video comes out I actually don't know when I'm releasing it important thing is that I'm going to talk to you about being a gree and Cur designer today because it is now a year since I started doing that and I'm just going to tell you what I've learned over a year doing that probably should have some greeting cards here to show you hold on they're in a box over here okay I just grabbed a big handful of greeting cards just to prove to you that I do make them I don't know I don't I didn't need to prove it to you uh but this is just to show you kind of what my style looks like if you haven't seen it before so I have you did excellent my style is basically like a pastel brush on procreate um I also do pastels in real life too but most of the cards are digital U digital pastels so uh I have like that this one is cute it says you bake the world a better place I have hope your day is very nice I also have art cards that are just like prints that I've done that I just made into cards like this one which is very popular they're in little um plastic sleeves hopefully they're not too much glare you can see them I like this one hope you get whale soon I got whale card I also have like this thank you card which is a lot more of a simple design and I have a couple that are just like really simple but cute like this little golden retriever puppy this is just literally a handful of them I also have like Christmas cards and ones for different holidays but this is clearly the stack from like General General cards we'll put those back there okay so I wanted to talk about everything that I've learned running my greeting card business now if you've seen my channel before you probably know that I run an art business lucky sprit studio and I make uh art and that doesn't that is very Broad and I and purposely so because I just like making stuff and I do markets and so on and so forth but I decided last year to kind of do like like a sub brand of my cards so I have little Sprout cards which is just I don't I don't know just seemed easier in my head to organize it if I made my greeting cards Their Own Line rather than just putting it under the big messy umbrella of all the things I make in my art studio so that is what I've done over the past year now I sell cards on my website and at markets and I wholesale them as well so this is just a bunch of things that I wrote down on a note on my phone and also researched a little bit to fill in the gaps of things I learned in one year being a greeting card designer seller artist sound good okay let's just get into it we don't have to um do a big Preamble I think that I think I made that all clear so lesson number one I learned from doing greeting cards for a year is that you have to know your card sizes when I started I I just didn't really understand what card sizes were um because I was doing art prints before so little context again I've been doing my art business for like five or six years um but last year I got really serious about it and that's when I started doing the greeting cards as well so there are three greeting card sizes that you kind of need to know and I like I said this is stuff I didn't know at all before I started but there's A2 A6 and A7 sizes in inches those are an A2 card is 4.25 in by 5.5 in which is like a small the smaller size of card an A6 card is 4.5x 6.25 in and an A7 card is 5 by 7 in so that matters because different suppliers that you may work with if you're ever wholesaling may have a preference for card sizes so I prefer to make all my cards 5x seven which is an A7 size that's because that's the size that cards are at like the grocery store or like any any like commercial um card shop you would go to it's probably going to be a 5x7 or something close to that I also just like the size like I like the bigger card maybe it's because I'm very verose and like to write a lot of messages but anyways but uh one of the businesses that I wholesale to only likes A2 size card so the smaller one and the difference for me is that my printer does a really good job making the A7 ones doesn't make very clear A2 as soon as I scale it down so I have to actually Outsource for those ones so just something to know you may want to copy down those sizes if this is brand new information or just remember to look it up later but uh the retailers will usually go by the A2 A6 A7 system as opposed to telling you the inches you can look it up anytime but I didn't know about those before I started so there you go the second thing I learned is that envelope quality matters I do include envelopes with all of my cards so that means that I am purchasing or getting them from my printer depends on how I'm making them which I'll get to the making of them in a little bit I have found that people really like the envelopes with these pre like you peel off the sticker and it's pre sticky what am I trying to say pre-sealed whatever it's not the kind you lick it's the kind you that already get a sticker on it people seem to really like those and think of it as a higher quality envelope I do all white envelopes on my cards uh because it's just simple and I can just buy them in bulk but you may want to do colorful envelopes which you can certainly that's that is certainly a fine choice to make my concern is that envelopes are not the thing that are generally going to make break someone buying your card unless you have like a very Exquisite handmade envelope I guess and my priority was always to get the cost of that envelope as low as possible so when I was starting out I was buying you know a pack of a 100 envelopes or something but now that I do it more I buy you know a th000 envelopes at a time and every little scent matters because with greeting cards the margins can be thin especially when you're wholesaling so if you can get your envelope from like 18 cents an envelope to like 5 cents an envelope that matters when you're selling a couple hundred cards to somebody and sometimes those uh colorful cards are more expensive so it may not necessarily be worth for your bottom line to use colorful envelopes but again that's something you can decide on third thing I learned is that paper sourcing is difficult especially in Canada so I'm Canadian based in Canada and Nova Scotia in particular if you're interested and I have found what I think is my favorite paper it is wait let me tell you exactly what it is it is one-sided glossy 12 point paper I don't have a brand name to tell you because I have only been able to get these through Staples print center not for sale at Staples but through their printing center so I can send documents or whatever and get them printed on that paper but they will only sell me 20 sheets at a time and I think they actually may even have stopped carrying it in store and you have to like wait a week to get it shipped if you order on that paper so this is bad for me because it's my favorite paper it is like what you would find a commercial greeting card where it's glossy on the outside smooth and matte on the inside for writing on I have been able to find a paper mill in the US that uh sells it and I will link that in the video description because I know a lot of my viewers are in the US but to ship them with the customs and the freight to Canada would not make that paper worth it for me anymore so that's just it's just been hard however I have found a matte paper that goes to my printer well that I can access uh that I do like I believe it's 120 lb card stock and I get it from Michaels in their scrapbooking or like their paper section it's just like a white card stock in like a brick and it's pretty well priced so I like that stuff and it looks good when I and it's nice to use it looks professional but my top tier paper is the one-sided glossy stuff so if you are struggling with finding the right paper for your greeting cards if you're making them at home just solidarity I I feel that pain too I think there's a lot of trial and error in fact I know there is because there's a huge pile of I'm just looking at my printing station uh papers I have tried and not liked so there you go but uh you definitely want a heavier weight paper um 12 point in the paper I was referring to is a way of measuring the weight of paper uh there's so many systems across so many countries and measurements that I can't keep track of them all but 12p point or like 110 130 PB uh car stock somewhere in there is good but yeah paper's a struggle that's one thing I learned for sure another thing I learned is that you need to cover the big holidays ASAP and the big holidays uh what I would refer to as the card giving holidays are Christmas birthdays Mother's Day and Father's Day um those ones you should do right away I basically spent the full calendar year creating cards for every holiday as they came up and I felt like I was always playing catchup so if you are planning to do greeting cards and want to have like a full line of them not just like card versions of your art prints which is totally fine too I also have those um then I would say aim for the the big the big four yeah birthdays isn't like a you you know what I mean anyway but once you get those in your catalog then uh you will have something you can show to wholesalers or just have cards available for those High purchasing times of year and birthdays obviously are year round but um people buy I would say I probably sell Christmas and birthday cards I probably sell the same amount throughout a year because Christmas you sell a ton one time of year and birthdays a bunch the rest of the time that's my observation okay the next thing I learned let me read this off so I get the wording right a strong cohesive visual style equals higher quantity purchases okay so what I mean by this is that when somebody likes your art style they are more likely to buy multiple things in your art style as opposed to if your greeting card collection is very eclectic and you have like a little bit of everything and some things are like a watercolor and then you have like a fancy calligraphy and then you have like a bunch of things I find that that means that customers will just buy the one they like and go whereas when people are buying cards generally I do find that there's a good percentage of customers who will buy multiple cards uh as opposed to just one offs and I think it's because when they find a card style they like they're like oh perfect these ones will be for me uh this matches my vibe and what I give people so therefore I will get some for a few upcoming occasions I definitely have customers who will stand and there are you get a lot of good data when you work at markets so I I this is inperson markets where I learn this people will and look at my display which is quite large and has like uh 5x five so like 25 cards on display at once I believe and you can see all the fronts and they will stop and look at them and they'll just be like oh I love them all so much and they'll really like struggle over the decision of what one to get and then if I'm doing like a buy like 5 for 20 or 5 for 25 sale then they want to buy they want to take advantage of the sale so yeah I've just noticed that when you have that cohesive collection that they all are recognizable as your artart um that's a big benefit which is true for like any art business of course but greeting cards I feel like because there's so many occasions it can be tempting to divert off into different styles but you should try and stay strong and stay true to your art style for them the next thing that I learned is that besides the holiday stuff the best sellers are local Landmark cards and text based cards so I live in an area that is very touristy in the Summers here in Nova Scotia specifically Halifax we have like iconic historical buildings there's like Peggy's Cove Lighthouse um even the public gardens has a beautiful big rot Iron Gate that is Iconic so I have cards of all of these things and those are some of my best sellers either to uh people who are visiting who just want a souvenir like a postcard or just a regular card people who are sending a gift to someone from a away and want like a local representation in that gift um or I I don't know other people buy them for other reasons but but I know they do really well and uh so I would recommend considering if you have local landmarks you can take advantage of for cards additionally cards that have text or sayings uh seem to also do really well like I said I do have a several of my art prints just turned into cards and people do like those but they definitely are being outsold by cards that have a funny pun like the you did exellent or any of the others with with text on them so definitely add text if you can uh outside of holidays those are the two that I think are important to have okay a little bit more on the business side of things one of the things I learned is that when you wholesale it is done in quantities of six I don't know why it just is uh there probably is a good reason for it but anyways uh any wholesale account that I've ever looked at also like if you're selling on Fair or any of those like online platforms that wholesale greeting cards are bought in lots of six so um that's just something to know to be prepared for and anticipate uh when you're doing your whole sales that no one's going to order like one of each of your cards unless they're like not typically greeting card Resa retailer um something like that but yeah multiples of six so um just a cool fact about the industry I guess that I learned next thing if you are going to try and wholesale your cards I would recommend designing a catalog for yourself that you can send because obviously if you have a lot of card SKS in your collection you don't want to just send them like pictures of all of them I just created a PDF catalog in canva and think it looks really cute I update my catalog quarterly with new designs and I have them divided by category and like type of card inside so the way that I've set it up like I said I just made it in canvas so it's not very complicated I have a title page which just says like what edition of the catalog it is and then my business name and logo and whatever and then I have the next page is about my business just so they know what my whole deal is and then it goes into several pages of products and the last page is a say how to order processing times shipping information contact information so like the technical stuffs at the end and that's it I just have it as a PDF and I can just email it to anyone who's like let me see what you have um you can also put your prices in there um as well as like SKS I I use I made up SKS for all my cards I don't know so that that's that's really useful and like I said I update it quarterly so four times a year I also don't put all of my cards into my catalog I leave out uh a lot of the art print cards cuz some of them um some of them are just not okay I wasn't going to actually this wasn't a point I was going to make in this video but I will say that I do have a selection of the cards that I've made that are like filler cards because I bring them to events and when a card has sold out I don't like to have a gap on the display so I will put in that design it's a design that I know probably won't sell very rarely it does but it's more just like cards that I just have on hand that are cute I and I like them but they're not ones that I know sell well so I don't put those in my catalog because they're just in my head filler cards and I always have at least two of them so that I can fill in a display if I sell out of something which does happen the next thing I learned is that you should make sure your prices line up so that means both making sure that your cards are priced appropriately so that you get paid enough and also that you are charging the same for your cards everywhere if you are wholesaling they will definitely want your cards to be the same price everywhere so you need to make sure that you are starting from that position rather than having to price up when you eventually do want to wholesale now I'm doing a whole other video maybe even a video series about pricing art stuff because people ask so many questions about it so I won't go into it here I will link the video if it's already up which it probably will be but when you're figuring out how much your card is going to cost so the first thing you need to know is your base cost so that is the cost of manufacturing the cards that's printing either yourself or sourcing it elsewhere then the cost of your envelope and your packaging and the packaging could be a little plastic sleeve it goes in uh it could be a belly band like a paper one if you want to do a no plastic option um and then also your time and labor into creating that the time labor can be a little tricky to figure out because you have to figure out first how much am I paying myself am I getting paid $20 an hour $30 an hour whatever that is then you have to figure out how many cards you can make in that time uh and when I say make that means both factoring in the making of the actual card like folding it putting it in the sleeve whatever and then also um the time you spent designing it so uh these these are a little bit variable again if you want like a really in-depth pricing thing I will do that in other videos but you need to figure out that base cost for me when I do it that base cost is about $150 uh when I have to get the cards printed externally when I print them at home that cost goes down like to like 45 so it's a pretty big difference then one way to calculate your prices beyond that is to take that cost let's say it's a $150 times it by two that would take it to $3 total that would be your wholesale price so you would sell cards to shops at $3 a card which would mean that you're making a $150 profit Plus getting paid back for your labor and the materials that took to make it and then the shop would sell it typically at uh double that which is the retail cost which would be in this case $6 that also means that you whenever you are operating as a retailer which is what you're doing when you're selling on your online store or at a market you are the retailer so you have two jobs you the Manu facturer and the retailer then the rest of the money goes to the retailer so so that means if your card is $6 and you sell it at a market then you are making $450 profit on top of paying yourself back for your time and materials most greeting cards are going to be in the range of like $5 to $10 with the low end being maybe a smaller size card and the highend being a more handmade card but I find that uh cards you get at the grocery store are very very expensive nowadays and I don't think it's necessarily justifiable with how expensive they are I see cards for like yeah like a like a printed two like a very normal greeting card no bells or whistles or anything for like $8 $9 I I don't know I just find that very very expensive which is another great reason to support smaller card makers plus they often get a much cuter design anyways you want to do all that math beforehand especially before you start wholesaling so that you make sure that you are actually getting some profit in there and this question of pricing and how much cards cost also ties into the last point I'm going to make which is that you need to figure out whether you're going to Outsource your printing or do it at home now I do a little bit of both I get my cards printed externally and I've have used a couple different sources like I said I've used Staples because I really like their paper but I don't use their greeting card printing option I have uh when they had a huge sale on it and I could get the cards down to like 64 cents a card from ordering a large volume uh that is a sale that happened like Last Christmas I think so I'm hoping maybe it happens again when you order it through their like card section it comes pre-cut and scored down the middle with envelopes so all you have to do is fold it in half put them together put in a sleeve you're done it's very efficient but it is still uh 64 cents a card and these are Canadian dollars I'm talking about um but just use it as a point of reference so that's during this sale when there's not that big sale on and again I'm talking about Staples because there's it's very accessible and there's a lot of them but you could also work with a local printer and these general principles are also going to be true in order to get a good price you're going to have to buy a large quantity of cards and these scaling discounts apply per design not per just how many cards you're buying in total which really sucks because it's like when you get over a 100 cards that's when you're starting to see some discounts but you probably especially if you're smaller don't need a 100 of one design just just a guess I've never needed 100 of One Design except for um like uh corporate orders so if you go on these sites you'll find that if you're printing one two even up to 10 cards they're going to be charging prices like over $2 a card for printing that's not sustainable for a business that's okay for if you just need them for your friends or for like personal use but that's not a price that makes sense for business because as I mentioned if you're wholesaling like at those rates that I explained like for my cards my profit margin is $150 so it's it's going to disappear mostly if my printing cost is well over 250 so I mentioned that I don't use the greeting card pre-made thing at Staples if I do use staples I go through their document printing service I just get the cards printed on a full sheet and cut them myself and that's where I'm able to get that one-sided glossy 12o ideal paper um and it's I believe a120 taxes in per sheet which is not great but but um it is a really nice quality and I will mostly do that for cards that I'm selling at markets so I'm getting the full cost up to the $6 as opposed to just getting the $150 does that make sense I hope that's clear I know I'm talking about a lot of numbers I have numbered disc calcula disc calcula number dyslexia so I have to like really focus hard to make sure I'm saying everything accurately here so hopefully that was clear that's getting your cards outsourced and a couple other options for getting your cards outsourced so like I said you could use Staples do like a document printing or use their greeting card Production service you can use Vista Print I found that that's very expensive unless you're doing a very big quantity but again a nice quality card you could contact a local printer again the cost are is going to maybe be a little bit lower at a local printer than at one of the big commercial ones but again if you're trying to get the prices down you're looking for volume to improve your margins I have not tried sourcing my card printing overseas I have had other things produced overseas uh now and then um it's it's a pretty big commitment because again in order to make it worthwhile you are ordering large quantities but these are things to keep in mind maybe when you're further down the road if this is a big business for you so the other option other than Outsourcing which like I said I do sometimes but I also print at home this is where you're going to want to find the paper that you like you can test out a lot of different papers like I said I currently mostly use a uh matte card stock 120 LB White um in my printer and it is fine even though I would prefer the glossy one-sided what can you do it still makes a nice card it looks good the image is crisp in terms of the printer I get so many questions about my printer and I'm happy to tell you the one I have but I'm not necessarily going to recommend it I have the Epson ecotank 2400 I don't even know if they make the 2400 it's only a year old but I think they might have moved on to upgraded numbers I don't know um so I love the ECOT tank because I have never bought ink since I bought this printer over a year ago still on the original ink it came with so that's huge considering how much I print and how many shows I manufacture for and all sorts of stuff the thing that it doesn't do super well is it doesn't like heavy paper so in order to print greeting cards you kind of have to feed the sheets in one at a time it is very timec consuming and not practical I have this is my full-time job and I am just like home all the time so I don't mind like watching a YouTube video and doing a little C and also just like feeding a paper every minute that's fine to me but that's not realistic for most people so that's why I can't say like oh definitely get the printer I have I really like it I think it prints beautifully and like I said ink costs fantastic but um it's just an issue that I found with the Epsom printers in general is that they don't like heavy mediums so uh paper media mediums um so that's just something to keep an eye on I believe that other versions of the e tank may not have this problem but I do not own one so I cannot confirm it for you that is what I have to say about printers um I will link the one that I have down below so you can look at it if you want to see the specs um it is a great printer and I use it for all my notepad uh stationary other stuff um it like I said it's great for ink so um I will put it there for your reference eventually I am going to invest in a big heavy duty art printer but I'm just not ready to do that yet so when I do trust me I'm going to be talking about it a whole lot on this channel so that's pretty much it I think that's everything meaningful that I learned in my first year of running my greeting card business or greeting card sideline I don't know what you want to call it but it has been a lot of fun I love making greeting cards it is fun to it's sort of like designing or drawing a picture with a prompt as opposed to just using your free creativity like if I know I'm making a Christmas card then it's like okay now I have parameters in which to try and draw and it's more of a challenge I just find it fun and uh it's also fun to see someone's eyes light up when they see one of your Cs and it really resonates with them I don't know people are so cute man like people at markets I don't know I've just had lots of really good experiences and people are very complimentary and um I just love seeing someone pick up a card read it laugh call someone else over and be like look at this and doesn't it remind you of somebody and it's just it's the cutest in the whole world this is why I also love doing markets like even the ones that are stinkers there's always going to be stinkers um you learn so much about people and what they like that it's the best kind of market research for an art business so um yeah I won't wa poetic about it this video's probably been long enough but those are my thoughts on greeting cards where did my cards go here they are dropping them everywhere this is this is I'm very proud of all of these and I think they're very cute so um yeah I hope this was helpful I hope this was insightful if you made it this far um you clearly care care about greeting cards so therefore I wish you very well in your greeting card business it is fun and cute and creative and also feisty I've uh the greeting card world turns out there's drama in it I'm not part of any drama nor am I about to propagate any or um share any but just just uh I just make cute cards and tell you about it if you like this video I have lots of others if you haven't checked them out maybe you have in which case I adore you already but if you haven't and want to check out more I have like Studio Vlogs where you can hang out with me and see what my creative life is like I have tutorial videos where I teach you how to make stationary products or give you business advice to run a little creative business like mine um and I probably do other third category that I don't remember hope you have a really great day wherever you are make some cool cards I hope you make some people smile with them okay love you [Music] bye [Music]

Channel: Rebecca Wilson

Views: 17,716

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Id: fkZAyduh2oA

Length: 27min 6sec (1626 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 12 2023