Photo Address Labels?

This is a new product since right before Christmas--you can put a photo on address labels or To/From labels. I have done nothing to promote it, and they are only on our Carlson Craft catalog, but I am starting to sell them. So, following what has worked so far, now I need to promote them! It is a cool idea, you just upload your photo when you order and they are pretty cheap--$13.50 or so retail for 240, so 15% less from us. I think they will be especially popular with the brides-to-be who order from us, as they like to personalize everything as much as possible! New parents would probably also like them, if I could figure out how to reach them.

Custom Post-it Note Holders!

Yeah! Carlson Craft has vinyl imprinted Post-it note holders again! When we started this business two years ago, they were in the promotional products book, but were removed within a few months. They haven't been available until now, when they are in the new Presentation Essentials book (along with binders, folders, padfolios, etc.) AND they are in 26 different colors: brights and more traditional business colors. I am already figuring out how many to order to send to my preferred customers, probably in grey, along with a pad of my personalized Post-it notes.

Carlson Craft Distinguished Dealer Award

For the second year now, Antonia Rose Printing has been awarded the Carlson Craft Distinguished Dealer Award. Well, that is what it was called in 2004. Now they are splitting their Social Division and Business Solutions section into completely separate businesses, so we got two awards, one from each side. Few dealers work with both sides of the business as much as we do. Anyway, for a business that was just an idea in 12/03, not even two and a half years ago, we are doing pretty good.

Wedding Fan Programs

Our wedding program fans are hot again this year, the trendy program format for 2006. We are sending out samples right and left and starting to get orders in for April and May weddings for the Carlson Craft wedding fan programs we started offering a year and a half ago.


We are also now offering a different style of wedding fan program, from Regency, as they are also popular. Did you know Regency and Carlson Craft are both Taylor Corp. companies, with the same ownership even though they compete against each other? Kind of odd.
There is more competition with the wedding fan programs this year as well, although the retailer who comes up number one in the search engines for these, printedexpressions.com, is actually marking them up, selling them for MORE than retail! Maybe we shouldn't be discounting them...Business with these is just going to grow as more people see them and hear about them, so there will be plenty to go around, esp. as we are at the top of MSN and Yahoo and on the first page of Google about half the time for these keywords.

Broadband users vs. dial-up users

I have been struggling lately with trying to optimize my site for two groups of computer users, those with broadband and those without. If you have a fast connection, you want good quality graphics and lots of them if you are considering buying something. I want to see what it looks like in detail before I buy. I also get annoyed having to click through lots of pages to get to what I want. It is estimated now that 50% of computer users have broadband at home or work, and 61% of active internet users have it.

But that still leaves an awful lot of people with slow dial-up connections. I have been looking at the percent of my site visitors who leave in less than 30 seconds, and I know a good portion of them are dial-up users who get tired of waiting. I have been trying to trim my web pages as much as possible, but for some it is nearly impossible to get them under the recommended 100k, which is the magic size beyond which most dial-up users won't wait.

I have got my home page and main category pages down there. But I don't see how to do that with my wedding fan programs page, which shows a small picture of each style available. I have trimmed the picture size and optimized them as much as possible while still leaving them visible, but I can't get it under 167k. And forget about my motif and font selection pages! They are huge. I just hope people understand that if they are choosing a motif from a large selection, that selection will take a while to load.

I guess I hope that among Internet users, people buying online are younger and more tech savvy and therefore more likely to have broadband. And the numbers keep going up, esp as the price goes down for DSL

Still waiting for the magic answer here.