Ordering Custom Made Greeting Cards

So today, my huge achievement is ordering my custom made greeting cards! I finally figured out a way to upload the images, change the colour profile and have them of a good enough quality and size for the company to accept the order. This was definitely a labour of love because I found it so hard! I have paid an extra £2.50 to have my designs and upload checked because, although it passed all the checks, I’m still not 100% certain that I’ve got it right.

I thought I’d share my process, just in case you wanted to give it a go yourself…

Ordering Custom Made Greeting Cards

1. Your Design

The first thing you need to do before actually ordering the greeting cards is create a design. As you know, I am using my own watercolours as my designs. This immediately gets rid of any concerns regarding copyright. The pictures are mine and the compositions are mine. If you use other people’s images make sure you have their permission or that they are copyright free.

I intend to always use my own images because I have heard about people who have used images from a paid-for site (and therefore they had permission) only to find those images being removed from the catalogue and therefore all rights are removed at the same time (just something to think about).

Another thing to consider are the dimensions of your design. Of course, this didn’t even occur to me! I paint straight into my art journal which is not quite the dimensions of A5. This means I end up with an image that is close to but not exactly A4 in size.

I want my cards to be A6. When I take a photo of the image and upload it to procreate, at the same time as removing the fold in the page, I resize it to the dimensions I want. Unfortunately, because the art journal is not standard size, I often have to cutoff some of my watercolour so that it will fit neatly into an A6 landscape.

2. One Sided or Two Sided Prints?

You need to make the decision of whether you want your card printed on the inside with a greeting. I chose to leave mine blank, but you could add a happy birthday, or congratulations…or whatever you want. I want my cards to be as flexible as possible, in addition to my aim of keeping the printing costs as low as possible.

When you choose one sided print, this includes the front of the card and also the back of the card, and this is the next thing to consider.

3. The Back of the Card

Before I went about the business of ordering my cards, I wanted to put some thought into how I wanted the back of the cards to look. One of my favourite illustrators is Hannah Dale, so I looked at the back of her cards. I noted everything she included. I knew I wanted a specific design which would be on all of my products going forward, so I went into Canva to create one. This would include all the details I wanted from information about the design, the paper and envelope used and my website, which one day may have a shop attached to it.

Here is my final design:

This will be printed on the back of the cards, as you can see from the illustration below containing my first ever painting:

This is how the page will be printed out and the card is then folded in the middle.

4. Materials

The last thing I needed to consider was the materials I would be printing on. I mentioned in my last post that I wanted to keep the environment in mind when I chose how I would create my cards. To this end, I opted for recycled card and recycled envelopes. The envelopes are brown, which fits in with the aesthetic I desire.

Lastly, I opted for card catch stickers in place of a cellophane sleeve. Again, I designed these with my logo and the brand I was trying to create. This was my final design. These stickers are easily removable without any damage to the cards. Here is the design I went with:

5. Ordering My Custom Made Greeting Cards

I used Printed, a company in the UK which has lots of great reviews on Trust Pilot. The process of ordering was simple enough but I found uploading my art work really (really) hard. I blame this on me and not them because I don’t really fully understand what they wanted and what I needed to do to achieve it! I tried to do everything they suggested but to no avail. In the end I created a pdf of the whole card (as shown above), changed the colour profile from RGB to CMYK and uploaded that. For whatever reason, this was accepted whilst a PNG of the same image was deemed not high quality enough.

I paid extra for it to be checked because I just wasn’t really sure about what I had uploaded. I’m assuming I’ll hear back if I got it wrong in any way. My account is saying that they are currently being printed, so maybe all is well?

6. Pricing the Cards

I find pricing things really hard. I obviously don’t want to price them too high but I have watched a few YouTube videos saying that under pricing is worse than over pricing. This has led me to increasing my notebooks from £4.99 (with a 94p profit) to £8.50 (with a £3 profit). The reason I felt I could do this is because the covers are an original water colour art as apposed to being made from stock images. It remains to be seen whether or not they will sell.

The cards have cost me 56p each to have printed and sent to me, which includes the envelopes and the card catch stickers. The village shop, where I will be selling them, will buy them from me for around £1.50 and sell them for around £3. I will therefore earn just under £1 each card. If I sell these on Etsy, I will sell them for around £3. However, after Etsy takes their fees I will earn £1.44 per card.

My cards should be delivered on the 1st of August. I will therefore know whether I have got it right or not with regards to my designs. I will post photos for you, regardless of whether I have it right or not 😐