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.

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.

Wedding Programs, not the fan kind

We have been receiving so much traffic from the wedding fan programs that I decided to see how it goes with regular format wedding programs, and I added around 70 to the site over the past few days. I especially like the photo wedding programs and the ones tied with ribbons.


I also got delivery of some sample wedding fan programs I ordered so I could give them out as samples. I think the mocha ink on the pink paper is lovely. I've already sent out 9 samples of the pink fan programs.

Signature Line Personalized Post-it Notes

We have a new category of Post-it notes online, our Signature Line personalized Post-it notes. Based on customer orders and my dh's insistence, we are offering post-it notes with a two line quote or saying at the top and your name at the bottom. You could always do this with our Design Your Own Personalized section, but putting them off by themselves helps people find them and get the idea better. I have had several orders a month for these, with people putting their favorite quotations or sayings on them. You hardly get an email anymore that doesn't have a signature quote or saying attached to it. So the time is ripe. Get them while they're hot!

New Wedding Fan Programs, cont.

My dear friend Theresa, owner of www.littlebridalshop.com, scanned the fan wedding programs brochure she got Friday for me, so they are up on the site already! When I get my own brochures today, I will scan them and get better images up, though my internet is down today. (We have cable internet and both TV and internet went out this morning. They are working on it down the street. Thank heavens one of our neighbors has DSL and an unsecured wireless network within range, or I would be panicking about being offline all day.) Here is an image of the colored fans, though the green looks like yellow here, not sage, the red is too brown and the pink is too light. I need to order a set and scan them as samples for my site.

Colored stock wedding fan programs in sage, pink and red.

New Fan Wedding Programs Designs!

Carlson Craft just came out yesterday with a new fan wedding programs brochure, which I will have in hand on Monday after UPS gets here. So the new designs should be on my site by Monday night! I don't know any more than I can tell from the picture to the left, but that shows a shell-shaped wedding program fan, a full-color picture on a fan, and a light pink stock.

I put together my own pdf wedding fan programs brochure for these fan programs because people keep asking for a brochure on them and the Carlson Craft one (the old ones, two versions actually) do not include all available designs. I anticipate the same problem with this one, as it is the size of the other two so will not have room for all the designs. Between the brochure and free samples I will mail out, my customers should get all the info they need.

This product is really an exciting one for us as it was SOOO popular last spring, the first spring and summer it was available. We anticipate even more sales in this area this year, so we are anxious to offer everything we can. There are not many other people offering these online, although more now than last spring, and most are not discounting as much as we are. Nobody has as many options posted as we do, including all the monograms and motifs, etc. And most are charging extra for a proof (or at least a second proof), colored ink, and so on. Overall we offer the best service and options on these at the lowest price, so we are expecting a booming business in them as the wedding season progresses. We have already sent out hundreds of samples and a few orders are starting to come in.

Post-it Note Business Cards

I just sent out a newsletter to my customer list announcing this product, and within 10 minutes I had my first order for Post-it Note Business Cards! Same day I put it on the website!

Business Card Post-it Notes Are Here!

A few days ago I got a flyer in the mail from Carlson Craft with a note from the Post-it Notes product manager that they were coming out with a new product - Business Card Post-it notes, in the standard business card size of 2.5 by 3. She sent me the info so I could put them up on my site before they are officially unveiled in a month or two.

So here they are! Colors for the paper are white, cream, light grey and canary yellow. Ink colors are black, blue and red, and two color printing is available. I think these are going to be really popular as people hear about them. I'll post more pictures later. I think these are really cool. I'm going to order some for myself!

History of Post-its

I found a good article on The Rake about the history of Post-it notes that goes beyond the usual 3M promotional stuff. Our sales of personalized Post-its and custom graphics Post-its have been doubling every six months or so. The more people have them, the more they want them. This article puts them in the cultural context.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Christmas was a big success for Antonia Rose Printing! We had more than twice as many visitors to the website as last December, although down a bit from this November: over 7000 unique visits!

The conversion rate to sales is low but not bad from my understanding of online web sales in general. Almost all of the Christmas sales were of personalized Post-it notes. The motif on the one to the left is from our Just For Fun postits line.

Almost the day after Christmas, the wedding stuff started picking up, with requests for samples of wedding program fans and orders for wedding napkins and monogram cake toppers. So it looks like an early spring for wedding items.

Stealing my website!

Well, I found out through some of my regular Google research that a woman from FL with a website copied my entire Wedding Program Fans page last summer, around July, and put it up on her website as her own. (I have tweaked it since then.) All of the text was mine, I did not use the wording in the Carlson Craft wedding program fans brochure. She even copied my order form! I was so mad. I am still considering have a good friend who is an attorney send a letter, as my email to her did not get a satisfactory response.

My main consolation is that my page was indexed by Google first, so hers should be treated as duplicate content and not show up in search results. (I found her through her pay per click advertising on Google. She is under allspecialoccasion.com.) Her website is full of grammatical errors, broken links, etc., so it is not like she is real competition. It sure makes me angry though, to see my hard work appropriated by someone else. And get this--she even has a copyright statement on HER site, under her legal notice link, warning about others doing this to her! Grrrrrr.

We are still at the top of Froogle for wedding program fans and we expect the orders to pick up around March, when it warms up down south. The southern brides come first, then everyone else follows for June weddings. This is only the second spring these have been available, so I expect them to be HOT.

Check out some of our sample program fans--you can do a lot with them!

Custom Post-it Notes for Attorneys

Martin Lerner is a very smart New York attorney who has created some custom Post-it note designs that any attorney's office could use. Aside from using personalized Post-it notes in-house and as client giveaways, custom Post-it notes work wonderfully as routine office forms.

Most popular gift ideas so far

The Christmas orders are coming in daily! So far the two most popular options are: 10 personalized Post-it note pads in an acrylic holder ($15.73 plus $7 for the holder, total: $22.73 before shipping); and 2 cubes of personalized Post-its ($22.48 before shipping). Most people order one of the preformatted Post-it note designs, and most people order more than one set; six sets is the most common number. So go with the flow and get your order in! Speaking of which, I need to get my orders done as well.

Holiday cards are not flying out the door, but orders are slowly coming in, mostly for fall themed ones so far, and all business customers so far. I don't think most people are even thinking of buying holiday cards yet.

Wedding napkins continue to sell, and we did our first order for holiday ones as well. (Great for the company party!) The wedding program fans have really died down and I expect we will only sell a very few until next spring. Hopefully our listing spots on Google and Froogle will stay high for them through the winter, so people find us again come spring. On MSN we have great placement, but Google is more variable.

You have about a month to order and get your stuff by Christmas, so don't wait too long!