Transcripts
1. Intro to Self Publishing Greeting Cards: Hi there. My name is Dolores Task Ridge. I've been an artist for over 40 years. I know, right? Have you ever considered selling your own greeting cars? Are you trying to find ways to create a passive income you sell at craft sales and pop ups and want to try to figure out a way to make a quantity of cards at a fraction of the price ? Creating and selling greeting cards can be a fun and profitable business. If you know exactly what to dio, I have experience. My experiences ranged all the way from selling my own handmade greeting cards to bulk production printing to sell wholesale retail I've sold through P. O. D. Sites have sold through online marketplaces. I have experience with almost every different venue of selling greeting cards. I'm even a licensed artist, but I had to start somewhere. The technique somebody teach you today are gonna take you through all of the different methods that I am currently using, and I have over 30 years of experience selling through craft sales and pop ups. I sell through one of the biggest show producers in Canada, and they both getting over 40,000 visitors through their shows. I've been there and honestly, it can be super crazy. Also, a new thing that I've been doing is selling True Carnal, which is a company that has kiosks where people know an order, a card with your artwork and customize it for their needs. This has been super successful for me. I had the best selling Mother's Day cards for Mother's Day in 2019. That's something to be proud of, right? So if this sounds like a course for you, let's get started right away. I've got several lessons in the first lesson. What I want to do is review. The industry in less than two will discuss online marketplaces in Less and three. I'm going to give you some pointers on Wholesale in lesson, or I'm gonna give you some ideas on printing with an online printer so you can create a bulk amount of cars at a fraction of the price, and the last lesson will focus on card I'll and their unique way of selling cards for you
2. Lesson 1 Overview of the Greeting Card Industry: but to see you decided to take my course. So in this first lesson, what I want to do is just give you a little bit of a brief overview off the greeting card industry and just some fun backs to know. As you plan your journey. I look for some facts about market size, and what I could find is that there were seven billion greeting cards purchased every year . Retail sales and greeting cards are estimated at over $7.5 billion. Nine out of every 10 households buys greeting cards each year, and the average household buys 30 individual cards per year. Women account for 80% of greeting card sales. When I was designing greeting cards for Russ, there were mainly two categories that I was designing in the 1st 1 was everyday cards, and the other one was seasonal cards, top selling everyday cards or birthday cards, which account for over half of the total sold. This is followed by wedding anniversary. Get well in sympathy and friendship cards, of course, and I've definitely seen an increase in cars for encouragement as far seasonal cards go Christmas and holiday cards were definitely high on the list. These account for more than 6% of seasonal sales there, followed by Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, Father's Day and grad cards. Out of those for me, Mother's Day cards have definitely been my top seller. Again. Those are all average figures, so it doesn't necessarily reflect what happens in the handmade industry or in the industry that you're trying to break into. But they're just kind of a general figure. The steps that you should take when you're trying to break into the industry for the first time, you definitely want to create your own browned. One of the first things to know about greeting cards is that it's super, super competitive. Just do a quick search, and I think on, etc. The last time I checked, there was almost 300,000 cards available, so that's something to keep in mind. What's gonna make you stand out? Identify the types of greeting cards you'll be designing an offering and then check out the competition for that particular niche of cards. The goal is really to find an untapped original niche that has lots of buyers. For me, it seems to be like I said, Mother's day cards. But another one that's high up there is sympathy cards. Who knew If you'll be handling your own printer, I really urge you to find a good pro. I would suggest you get samples from all the Pio decides to compare carefully and consider costs when it comes to your finished product to things will dictate your success, the quality of your cards and the cost to produce them for a start up like you. This will take careful planning because you don't want to print too few and run out or print low quality and never make a sale, depending on the quantity you print. That can really affect the price that you could sell it at and therefore the margin for profit. The best cards air printed on premium paper stocks and equal friendly, recycled paper with a mat cover seems to be my most popular and is my preferred choice. It has a nice, velvety finish, and it's nice and stiff even get reading cries printed in almost every size. But remember, you have to get envelopes as well, so stick to the most popular sizes. I now only produce cards and two sizes and That's the A two, which is a 4/4 by six inch card. And then, of course, the standard five by seven. Marketing your cards is a vital part of your success, but it's not part of my course here today. This class is going to focus on the self publishing aspect. I hope this lesson has given you all kinds of food for thought. You ready to learn a little bit about online marketplaces? All right, that's what we're gonna do in the next lesson.
3. Lesson 2 Online Marketplaces and Ecommerce For Your Greeting Cards: Hi there. Welcome to lessen, too. So in this lesson, what I want to do is discuss online marketplaces with you. And these are a great way to sell your cards. The one thing that makes these marketplaces so attractive is the fact that they have such huge online audiences. You ready to get into it? Okay, let's get started. It's a little confusing knowing the difference between e commerce, online marketplaces and P O. D sites. I'd like to clear up a little bit of that confusion right now in this lesson. So an online marketplace is a marketplace where you can open a shop and saw your cards. You don't need to understand how to set up a website. They're usually quite customizable and orders or emailed through you and you send out the goods within a specified time. One of the pros of selling on an online marketplace. It's a great place to test the waters before you spend a lot of time and money setting up a website. What a few of them have a real community where you can network with other artists and share your work. Some of the smaller sites have a real niche market. Check the mode and decide which one best fits that kind of cards you're gonna produce and what other things. That there's a great collective promotional power or drive general traffic to the site. Most of these sites are very supportive and could help him just dip your toes in for the first time. The only thing I don't like about them is that the shop is not yours, and so it can really be closed any time and you'll lose all of the work that you put into them. And it's super competitive. Customers who find your shop or products online may end up buying from someone else on the site. Customers probably won't remember you specifically. People tend to say I bought it from etc. Rather than I bought it from Delores Art, and it's really hard being noticed among the crowd. So the difference between that and e commerce e commerce allows you to create your own site . I like it because I already had a website and I switched to Shopify because it was so customizable and I wanted to open a store front that was absolutely my own. So the store, the site everything belongs to me. There are some beautiful, customizable themes you can buy some of them, some of them are free. I personally used a free one. So check out my site and see what you think on Etc. And Amazon. In places like that, you can't do that. You're stuck with exactly what they let you use. One of the big negatives about setting up your own e commerce site is that you have to do it all yourself. So if you have never done this kind of thing before, it is a lot. Set up can be very complex that also hire somebody to do it. But you have to think about where you want to put all your eggs right now you want to develop your product, or do you want to start working on a website? If you're just starting out, I think you need to focus on getting your product all figured out first. Now, in my case, I had, you know, many, many years of products, hundreds of artworks and some of the products are things that I personally make and stock here and some of the products that have sourced through P O D size, so P. O. D. Is print on demand. If you find a good wholesale print on demand site, a lot of times the shipping is taken care of for you. The other thing is, you have to figure out how you're gonna get traffic to your site. Unlike the online marketplaces like Zazzle and Amazon, you have an actual audience already built in. You don't. So, unless you're already very popular in social media or have a huge client list, this could prove to be quite a challenge. So you can probably tell by now there's no one size fits all solution when it comes to selling. Hopefully, these tidbits have helped you narrow down what your options are. Maybe just try out a platform first and see how it works for you. I've got several other ideas for you in the upcoming lessons, so just hang in there. So we've come to the end of this lesson, and you can see that this is probably one of the easiest ways you could first start selling online. Good luck with this and remember, try to find in dish Market. That's the best way to make sales. I'll see you in the next lesson.
4. Lesson 3 Selling Cards Wholesale: Hi there. Welcome back In this lesson, what I want to do is discuss wholesale with you. One of the things I did 15 or 20 years ago, actually, I've done it a couple times was to attend a wholesale gift show. So wholesale give shows are where stores go around and try to find products to sell in their own stores. This actually turned out to be really great for me. At first I thought, Man, I've only picked up a few clients here. What's so great about that? However, in the long run, I would get orders maybe four times a year, and those orders could range from 200 to $400 apiece. Believe it or not, that really adds up when you're doing this kind of business. So I want to talk to you a little bit about that, give you some facts and some ideas for producing your cards in a more scalable way and being able to sell at a really reasonable price ready to get into it. All right, let's get to it. When it comes to your finished product to things will dictate your success. The quality of your cars and the cost to produce them for a start up like you. This will take some careful planning because you don't want toe print too few and run out or print low quality and never make a sale. The two main methods for fulfilling the printing challenge is print on demand or finding your own printer and working directly with that preacher. Both of these have pros and cons, so the main thing that I have found with P O. D sites is that your profit margin will be quite a bit less if you want to be able to offer your retailers a reasonably priced a wholesale item in Canada. Here, I've worked with art of wear, and you could only buy cards wholesale in packs of three. So you'd also have to have clients that are willing to buy in multiples of three price that I'm currently paying is $12 for three of them, so that makes my wholesale cost $4 apiece. And that means they need to retail for $8 when $8 card is a fairly expensive card. In my view, you can also purchase the cars to the online marketplaces like Zazzle and you couldn't often get them for about $2 apiece. But the one thing that I have found is that livery could be very slow, especially in Canada. I'm not sure about the U. S. But this is definitely something that you'd have to investigate before committing. It's also very important that you have consistent quality. So my main suggestion is that you get samples printed by all of these different places. Online marketplaces are gonna put their own logo on the back, so you have to figure out a way, Teoh. Add your logo or somehow identified as your brand and working with ah, wholesale supplier like art of where? Remember that it's very time consuming to upload all of your files and prepare them for their specific set up again. I urge you to get samples, try one or two first and see how they look and make sure that your positioning and bleed and all that kind of stuff is worked out. One of the things that very early on I decided to do was to find a printer myself to do the printing and therefore be able to buy and stalk a number of different cards right here on site. I live in a rural area in Canada, and I've got a lot of storage space and have commandeered my attached graduate to be a studio in workspace and a huge warehouse space. So this is something to keep in mind. You do need space to be able to stock your own wholesale product. The main size of cards that I sell here is the fourth quarter by 5.5 size cards. So the a two card and through a lot of experimentation, I have found a way to print the's at a really reasonable cost. The supplier I uses Vista print and I use one of the postcard setups, and I also have inside printing, which is one of the little things that differentiates my cards from most other cards. The cost of printing the cards this way with Mr Print is very reasonable. For 50 cards. I pay around $20 that really brings the individual costs down. So give my customers and added bonus oven envelope seal, which I make with the return address labels that Mr Print carries. They're also very reasonably priced. I have a complete system for inventory. And I also add an envelope and prepackaged all of them in cellophane round. So that brings this lesson to a close. And in the next lesson, what I'm gonna do is show you all the steps I take to take my printing from Mr Print and get it ready for wholesale or retail sales. I'll see you in the next lesson.
5. Lesson 4 Printing: be there. Other promised the last lesson. What I want to do in this lesson is show you how to produce your own greeting cards in a more scalable way. In other words, producing a quantity of quality cards that you can sell and make a really good profit from the company. I'm going to focus on its Vista print, but there are many other online printers out there. Do your homework and figure out what the best alternatives are for you. Check locally. I've often worked with printers right here in my hometown. The important thing is creating a template and uploading to order my printing. And then I wait for my order to get into my hands. I'll demonstrate the whole ordering process of Mr Print and then the steps I take to get that card retail or wholesale already. So here are the steps that I take when, when I'm creating a greeting card that I'm gonna have printed at Mr French, I've got a template that I have set up and that I use. And on this template, I've already positioned my logo and the text that I use on the back. It's taking a lot of experimentation to figure out some kind of a back that's gonna work on all of my cards. I'll show you one that's an actual card already set out. So here is the card artwork without the back showing. And here it is with the back outage. So like it to be fairly subtle. I always match the colors, select the text and sample something that's already on the artworks that have bought similar colors, always working in the backgrounds here. Like I said, I like it subtle. So I keep this fairly late example of color and then just lighten it or neutralize it a little bit. I've already got my pre made signature here that I colorized using hue and saturation so I can colorize. Then I can change the hue of it until I get what I want. Villarreal. Maybe with saturation and the lightness or darkness, and there's my basic set up for the card. So the size I use is 8.647 by 5.593 and it always keep the resolution very high, 300 pixels per inch. I'm gonna attach this template so you can actually just benefit from this work I've already done. I've got guides already. Put on the page for where it's gonna fold center front, center back. And then remember that there's always going to be, ah, bleed around all of the ages that will be cut off. So make sure that if you use this template, you keep in mind that anything in this outside area is gonna be cut right off in the printing process. Okay, so you've got this template. You import your arch. I've still got my art layer. I can move it around if I watch. My background is one of the backgrounds that I created in my art journal. So it's can that in and brought it in and did some adjustments to the coloring. And that's become the background for this card. Once I'm completely satisfied with the layout, I save it as a J pink and I'm gonna save it right here on the desktop. For now, I've actually got a master file for all of my artworks. But just to speed up the process here, I've saved right onto my desktop. Now, the other thing I do is I duplicate my art, turn off the front and back, and then I turn off any of the text layers. Anything like that that I've got in there, I could see I've got some effects applied here, So I am going to flatten. This is the copy. Anyways, my original layered art is still there. I can get rid of these layers, and then I usually lighten this up to about 30%. And this is gonna be the inside that I print on my cards. So I say that as inside. Sure. It's a J pig. Now I'm ready to get the vista prints sight. I've got a shortcut here because I use this so often. And remember, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to the marketing materials, and we're gonna go to postcards using a horizontal Leo 5.5 by 8.5 Standard paper thickness . I really like the premium. So they have your stock. It is more expensive, but it does give you a much nicer card. In the end, I like a map finish that's completely up to you. You can experiment. I would suggest maybe getting a sample of each to see which one you like. the best, and I only print 50 cards. So I'm gonna start designing and they've really improved their interface. So it's a lot easier to get through all those steps. I've been working with them probably 15 years. And believe me, it wasn't as easy as this the first few years of using it. So I'm gonna upload my own complete design, go to the desktop and upload the front that I just created. It doesn't take long to upload. If your internet connection is really nice and fast Next step Riverside printing. I'm gonna do full color again. I'm going to upload my image. This is the inside that I saved. Click. Next, you get a lovely walk up of your image. Check it all out. Make sure that everything is exactly as you want. You can actually view it larger if you need to. Then hit next. Of course, all the different quantities air presented here 50 is the quantity that I want Course trying to up sell you here You can just click, go to cart And then there's your card I had previously uploaded This one says when we just uploaded and you can see the difference here in price is because of the options that I chose. So in this 1st 1 I use the basic stock and this one I used the better quality stock. So that brought up my price by $3. They've always got special is going on. So once you've signed up, you're gonna be getting emails from them with their latest promotions. 40% is to be what they just about always have on here. So it's pretty good deal. Remember, this is for 50 cards. So then you go to check coat and then choose worshipping. I always try to plan way ahead so they can use the economy. Shipping. And so 3 99 for shipping is a really good deal, and it's really fast shipping. I get them usually at my door within a week, sometimes less, even though it says 10 business days. Remember that this figure here has to be added to the cost of your card. So the more cards you order on one order is the more that gets watered down. So 3 99 I'd have to put $2 onto the cost of my card, my 50 cards. So that's something to keep in mind as you are doing your planning and then you go through to your payment. You can really stop right there. So for $40 I'm getting 100 cards. So do the math. That makes some 40 cents each. So think about how much less expensive that is. Then, having purchased from a wholesale supplier or from a P O. D. Site, this became the most important thing in my business was bringing down this cost. You still need to add the cost of your celeb pain and your envelope, so the 40 cents is probably about 50% of the cost. I tried to keep the cost of my individual cars down Teoh around a dollar that was awesome for craft sales and pop ups, because I was able to sell my cards at a really reasonable price, and eventually I would sell them for about $4 each. And I could offer deals of buying 10 cards or 20 cards, and at the least, I was getting $2 for card. You wouldn't believe how many people would come with either 10 or 20 cards, too. Check out. So that's super important to remember, and a really good insider tip. So once I received my cards and some days it was like Christmas, I'd get a big box of cards, and there was nothing more satisfying than taking out all of the Bunches from Vista print. You could still smell the ink and was just lovely to see my artwork in its finished form. Remember that these were postcards, so the first step I'd have to do is to score the cards. I was court enough for whatever job was at hand. If it was for a wholesale order, I would only score the amount of cars that I needed was heading to a cross sale. I knew that I would have to have 20 or 30 year, whatever the amount wise of a particular card. So I go through the process of scoring and most the time I would do them by hand when it was a small quantity. If I had a really large quantity, I would take him to a local printer and have um, scored on one of their scoring machines. But of course, that's something I'd have to pay for, So I didn't do that very often, mainly tried to keep it in house. So the little scoring machine that I use I've had several. My favorite one is this one here. It could do quite large cards. Like I said, I mainly only do this size of card, but was more than big enough for me. It comes with this little scoring tool and you just basically put in position and run the tool into one of the grooves and your car is ready for folding. Once it was folded, I witch choose. Ah, coordinating envelope hand. In my case, I always created an envelope seal so I would cut the envelope seal to the size necessary. And I would package all three together and clear cellophane route in Canada. I've been buying from crystal clear bags. I believe they sell in the US as well. And yourself ceiling so I had to do was pull off the little strip and fold it over, and, uh, my card was ready. My suggestion is that you start small, produced a very small quantity of cards produced maybe your talk tan, and then just try the moat. Through years of experience and trying many different products, I have found that greeting cards are my number one top selling product. So good luck with it. Time to get into the next lesson. I'll see you there.
6. Lesson 5 Start Selling Today with the Cardisle System: Hey there. I'm thrilled that you've made it to my last lesson. And in this last lesson, I want to cover an amazing new platform for artists, a company called Card I'll. The Cardinal platform is free and simple, and it's made for artists. You get your name and artwork in front of thousands of potential clients through their canon printed home partnership and dozens of e commerce businesses across the country. A standalone kiosks. I'm not being paid to promote this, by the way. I just think it's a really cool way for young or emerging artists to get their foot in the door there. Just give it a try, see what it's like to publish for the first time and make some sales. Now, the cool thing about Card I'll is that they've got these amazing kiosks where a customer can go into a mall, go up to the machine and create their own card. Your artwork has posted there, and they can produce a custom card and have it printed right out of the machine. It is so amazing. Ready to get started. Okay, let's get into it. So you go to their website card. I'll dot com and you'll have to create a new account. But of course I've got one. So a log in once signed up, you go to the artist portal up here in the right hand corner and course, I've got all of these cards already loaded there, and believe me, I didn't do them all at once. I go to add a new card, and their interface is one of the easiest I've ever seen to deal with. I'm going to demonstrate how easy it is to use their interface. So once you've logged in, you click on this at a new car link. And here, of course, we're gonna put in all of your information the name of the card I have found for myself that a numbering system is necessary to keep track of everything. But that's completely up to you. And, of course, you rows to your computer to upload an item. I'm gonna go to one of my completed cards and I'm gonna show you all the different settings here. So I've got a numbering system, as I said uploaded my artwork here, and at this point over here, I would actually go through this whole process Teoh enter in all of the information that I want associated with the card. These categories sentiments and tags. All of these things make it easier for people to find your card. So it's really important to go through this process and very seriously think about all of the different things that you're putting in here from my CSB file. I've got things like the sentiments that I want included. I've got a bunch of tags that I would use. So this particular card 13 54 I would located here. I would copy my tags that have already created, and I would go in and put them in here. Now they do have a bulk uploading feature that you could use if you already have a bunch of existing cards. It's done with a standard see SV file that they'll give you. You can fill it with all your information. It looks something like this, and then you can send it to them with your image files, and they'll do the upload for you. If you're interested in that, you'll have to contact them directly and they can explain it to you. If you don't have a CSP file or you haven't really thought about your tax before. You can add them here, and they've got a process where they've got a whole bunch of bags already entered. So if I was to type in a word like joy, it comes up with a whole bunch of different options. So you could pick. You could type that word again and pick something else, which would allow it to be more searchable. Remember that these terms here that you're putting in thes tags are something that would come up when a person is actually shopping for card and they would type into the search bar . So if somebody was looking for Christmas Joy, for example, they would type it in, and if you had that tag, it would come up here. So let's say we type in the word Mom for Mother's Day. If we clicked on that and you had four mom in your tags, anything that had been tagged for, Mom will actually come up here. Okay, so that's the reason for the tags. So it's very important that you do think about these and make some really good choices. It really helps when people are searching that it comes up. I mean otherwise. Look at how many cards there are to choose from. The more specific your tags are ism or searchable, they become. So I would go through and I, which choose all the appropriate tags for it. I think I'll just put general here. The sentiment in this case is very simple. Recipient could be anyone Did you have a choice of family, friends, All kinds of different things here, adult child for anyone? So this could be for any age. It's illustrative if it's just typography you would put in typography, I guess this once kind of typography more than anything here, you can specify where you're located. And then, of course, a bunch of tags that I think people might search for in case of somebody traveling. So I've got all of these entered here, makes my card very searchable, and then you can put in your own text for the inside. This section is customizable by the clients, so when a customer creates their own card, they can change this type. It's just really nice to have it in here. It's just one more thing to make it more searchable in my opinion on some punctuation there . Always check it and double check it. It's really embarrassing to have heirs and then you would save the changes in this case, I'm updating one that I already had here. So it has said that its updated and just click OK, And then you could move onto your next card, then the course. You could check and see if that particular card was uploaded. 13. 54 should be coming up soon. Period is here and it has been uploaded. So that's really cool. I really like this. And of course, I've got this Pinterest share link, which is awesome. You can promote your stuff on Pinterest. I've got a lot of my cards on my Pinterest site. Check me out there. I've got lots of artists related kind of stuff. So what do you think of this card? I'll system pretty easy. Hate? It's such a streamlined interface, don't you think? Just spend a day or two here and there are a couple evenings and upload a bunch of your cards and then just wait for the sales to happen. So this is another cool thing. Here you go to your dashboard and see how many cards you have sold in that particular quarter. You get paid four times a year, so every three months you get paid. This has a very interesting statistics for you. And obviously, for me, Mother's Day was a big one because that one shell was quite a few sales. So if you show this table, you get some very interesting statistics. You can see how many of each card sold, which cards in particular have sold. Which cars were your top sellers? You can see how many times your card was viewed. It's just a really neat learning opportunity for you to see what cards are being viewed, what cards are being purchased, and this can inform your decisions as to what you actually fall into the best I can see from my list. Obviously, this Mother's Day card was my top seller. His roots and wings also sold a lot, and that's probably because of Mother's Day. This beautiful memories is a sympathy card that I sell. So I really liked this chart, especially at the beginning, for helping me figure out what kind of cards could sell, and what should I be making what kind of cards sell the best and what kind of things I should be focusing on making. So that kind of wraps up our heart. I'll unit our card I a lesson. If you have any questions, make sure you post them below.
7. Closing Thoughts for Self-Publishing Greeting Cards: So what do you think you're gonna do? First? There's no right way or wrong way. Like I said before, there's no one size fits all approach. I would definitely suggest that you focus on the creative first and maybe just pick one of these to start with. Remember, you can always come back and replay any of the lessons that you need further help with. It's always gonna be there. I really hope you've managed to take away a few tips and tricks. Remember to share your successes below. I would love to see them. And also, if you share on social Media, could you please hash Tag me, Delores nascar int slash skill share and I'll comment on anything that you post please visit any of the links that I mentioned and please give me your links so that I can check them out. Remember to post any questions that you have below. You know that any question you have chances are somebody else is gonna have the same question to so it helps everybody out and please check out my other classes. I'd love to see you there. Bye. For now,
Delores Naskrent, Creative Explorer
