Carlson Craft's Gold Group

I just got an email Tuesday that Antonia Rose Printing is now a member of Carlson Craft's Gold Group, based on sales volume. This is for the social and wedding printing side of the company, which has split off its business printing into basically a separate company, Carlson Craft Business Solutions. Anyway, that means we have a special email address, phone number and fax number to use to access customer service. We'll see if it improves the response time we get. The people on the other end are very nice but the proof is in the pudding. It is nice to be recognized, though.
The wedding orders have been coming in fast and furious as the season kicks into high gear, particularly wedding napkins and wedding program fans. Our wedding invitation sales have been up this year from last year, but still are a small piece of total sales.

Here is a particularly pretty wedding fan program we printed. I like the look of the reverse printed monogram, which is unique to Antonia Rose Printing's fan programs.

Printed Wedding Napkins

Despite the fact that our wedding napkins page is nowhere to be found in Google (it is less than 6 months old), we show up on Froogle results at the top of the Google results if you search for wedding napkins, and we are getting a lot of postive feedback. I did some research today, looking at the sites that are first page Google results for wedding napkins. They really ARE all the same thing, as a customer just told me yesterday! They offer the same napkin and ink colors as we do, maybe a few less, but many, many fewer motifs, none or one or two monograms, no option for sideways (corner) placement instead of the traditional layout, at prices that are about the same as ours!

I knew we offered more, but I didn't realize how much more until I did this research. Carlson Craft would print their entire line of monograms and motifs for these other dealers (as would Regency, the other most common source of the napkins I found), but the dealers just don't go to the trouble of offering it. Maybe they are scared off by the $10 die charge, I don't know. But when people find ours, they are thrilled. It is a replay of our successful custom Post-it notes strategy of offering more options. Now I just have to hope that Google sees the value in our web page before much longer, so I can't count on the fact that few of my competitors have Froogle feeds of their products!

We are listed in the Open Directory Project!

Yippee! Antonia Rose Printing is listed at www.dmoz.org, after a year's wait! We are under Business, Marketing, Advertising, Promotional Products.

What the heck does that mean, you ask? Well, the Open Directory Project (dmoz) is the largest human-edited directory on the web, and it is the source for hundreds of other directories and search engines, including the Google Directory. So being listed there gets you in to all the other listings.

It also makes you an "authority" site in the eyes of the search engines, improving your results placement and your Google Page Rank. They figure if you are listed in ODP, you must be a legit site with something to offer.

Many sites apply to be listed and never are. And you aren't told when you are listed or denied listing. So I have been checking the ODP for the last year to see if we got listed, and lo and behold the first week of April we were listed! We are celebrating, even though it is hard to explain why to most people.

(If you search ODP for Post-it notes you get only 10 sites, for custom Post-it notes only 2!)

No April Fool's Joke: Custom Printed 4x4 Post-it Notes Are Here!

I just got around to looking at a quote I received Friday and lo and behold, we now have 4x4 custom Post-it notes available for custom graphics at the same pricing as 4x6 Post-its. Yeah! I knew this was coming but didn't know when. I have been told 6x8 small quantity custom Post-its will be coming soon as well, but I don't have pricing on them yet.

These are the ones sold plain or lined as "Post-it Big Notes" and they are a great size for many things. We are the only place online right now you can get them with custom graphics in small quantities, though I am sure the other guys will catch up at some point. They won't beat our low minimum custom Post-its pricing, though! Our custom Post-its sales in general keep going up and up as more people discover ways to use them and that they are available.