Complimentary Calling Cards

Can you believe how fast summer is going?!? July is (almost) over and so we felt it was a great time for a new deal for our clients!

During the months of August and September, when you order a 4-piece suite (Invite panel, reply card, invite envelope, and reply envelope) you will receive free calling cards (also called At Home cards or business cards) in the same quantity. Calling cards are a great way to let your loved ones know your new address.

*This offer is available through our participating Spark retailers. Calling cards must be printed on our 1-ply paper and in one color letterpress, using one of the colors from the invitation suite. Please request this special offer at the time the order is placed, as it needs to be designed and printed concurrently with the rest of the suite. Offer does not include die-cut shapes. No cash value.

Retailer Profile: Letterheads

LetterHeads
Miami, FL

Owner: Maria Iznman and Marilynn Connell
Length in Business: since Oct 2008

Why did you choose to carry the new Spark albums?: We received samples in the mail and Bebe (Spark's owner) kept calling! No, but our store is in an artsy part of Miami and people really want letterpress! You guys have great prices!

Favorite New Spark Design: Calling cards and Amelie!

Social Media
Facebook- Letterheads
Twitter- @letterheads
Website- http://letterheadsmiami.com

Other thoughts about the albums: Great fit for our store, we are all about customizing and your company is so easy to work with that way. The pocketfolds are cool, everything is great quality. Love the designs!
Average client: A real mix, our "average" hasn't revealed itself yet.
Strengths as a retailer/store: Custom designs, we help clients find their "look". Our customer service can be described as inviting you into our living room and having a chat.

The ladies are a great retailer to work with and really know how to create custom pieces. If you are in the Miami area, stop by to talk with Maria and her staff!

Personal Stationery for Lindsey

The Lindsey design from the Stationery Love album features elegant orchids in a lavender ink on bright white cotton stock. Perfect for personal stationery, however you may select to use this artwork for any occasion.

The Lindsey calling cards are shown in a elegant circle and oval shapes as well as square, skinny and standard rectangular. Keep in mind that any of our die cut shapes featured in the Stationery Love album may be used at no additional charge other than our standard die cutting fee.

Our standard note cards come in a petite 4Bar, standard A2 as well as the skinny Monarch note - all available flat or folded. Our letterhead is ideal for those individuals who write serious correspondence for personal or business use.

Spark stationery products may be purchased at any of our retailers or through us directly if no retailer is available in your area. Contact Spark at spark@letterpresslove.com for more details.

And, more custom albums...

We know, you get it, right?

Thanks to our wonderful staff, we shipped more custom albums today. This may not be newsworthy, but since it took us months in the making, we figured it wouldn't hurt to post a picture from today. One of our pressman told us that a better picture would have been the UPS guy's surprise as he saw another large shipment from Spark. Poor guy, it was raining, too! Don't worry, we'll go easy on him the rest of the week...

Rustic Leaves

We are now printing Fall weddings, so it felt appropriate to showcase this invitation as an option for our Fall and Winter invitation ideas. Our Natalya design featured in our wedding love album has been a popular choice by couples all over the country. Most of the rustic leaf artwork (some samples shown above) has been printed in darker tones such as navy, royal, purple, eggplant, gold and teal. The original Natalya rustic leaf design is a dramatic black on black and white look.

Take note of the pocket folds! Artwork printed on our colored paper pocket folds take on a subtle beauty when printed with transparent inks. So if you are looking for that tone on tone effect, just request the transparent ink for your printed piece.

If you are looking for other design ides, just send us a note at spark@letterpresslove.com!

More albums are on their way!

We are thrilled to announce the albums are shipping! Those wonderful retailers we met at the National Stationery Show will be receiving their new albums later this week as long as UPS doesn't let us down (kidding). In the above photo Joy and Diedre are getting the slips onto the boxes and finally starting to breathe a sigh of relief.

In the photo below, you can see our finishing area where we have many people helping to get the final pieces onto their pages. We are shipping more tomorrow and can't wait to hear what the new recipients think of the albums once received. We hope you will fall in love all over again with Spark!

Welcome, Joy! Goodbye, Organized Sister.

Please join us in welcoming our newest employee, Joy Lussenden, to the Spark team. Joy is a graduate of Augustana College and worked for us as a marketing intern during her senior year. She recently completed a social media internship in Norway and is now back in the States to start her "real" job as she jokingly stated in her blog. We're thrilled to bring on board someone who is excited to soak up all that the stationery industry has to offer and to collaborate with our retailers in making them even more successful.

Joy is going to fill a much needed spot here at Spark as we say goodbye to Diedre Johnson, Spark's Organized Sister, when she and her family head to Hesse, Germany in September. Diedre's husband, Joel, is a professor of government at Augustana College and was recently awarded a Fulbright Scholarship as a senior lecturer at the University of Marburg. Joel and Diedre, along with their two boys, will make the trip to Marburg, a picturesque German town (see ridiculously beautiful image below).

All of us at Spark will miss having Diedre here as she has been the main contact for our retailers and helps out more than you know in our production area. Thankfully, she will be working with Spark on a part-time basis while in Germany, so don't be surprised if you hear from her! She plans to be a great resource to Spark in finding stationery trends and inspiration throughout Europe - so stay tuned!

On a more personal note, it goes without saying that the Creative Sister is sad to have her best friend be so far away for so long. I've shed more tears than I care to admit, but at the same time, I couldn't be more proud of Diedre and her family for embarking on this exciting adventure! For now, I am making goofy plans to buy extra clocks so we can have a visual reminder that she is seven hours ahead before we pick up the phone to ask her a few questions about pricing.

The next time you call Spark, please take a moment and introduce yourself to Joy. She'll appreciate it as she learns who all of you are.

Valerie

Making plans for the future

We bought two new presses recently and today they get hooked up with electricity. Even though I'm the art director, I still get excited about new equipment because it makes me think of the additional possibilities the presses will provide us.

One of the presses is another Windmill which is our primary press for the bulk of the jobs we run, so I kind of know what we will be doing with that one. But the other press is a Heidelberg Cylinder KSBA which is larger than our current KS model. I was so excited about being able to run a larger sheet that I could barely sleep the other night as I was having a successful brainstorming session with myself. Well, that sounds kind of sad, but in another six months when we roll out some new products, you might not think that sounded so lame!

So today I'm hoping to refine my ideas to create a more concrete plan. I'm one of those crazy lists people so it always starts with endless lists. I have a master list and then a list for each idea/product/service. I keep sorting through them, adding and deleting as necessary. Once I've thoroughly made my lists, I enter them in Word (or InDesign if I'm feeling a bit more ambitious and design-y). In addition to the lists I also have doodles and sketches on the back side. I hang onto all of this stuff because I continually refer to it while I'm designing.

As for inspiration - well that's a tough one. I like to keep an eye on what is going on in the world of stationery, but I'm also super cautious about making sure our ideas and designs are original. And that is a constant challenge. Some days I feel like everything has been done and there's nothing left to do. But most of the time I get all giddy about the possibilities.

Valerie