We have some exciting news at Design House of Moira that we want you to be a part of
Starting in April, we will be offering wholesale digital printing services on handmade papers
What we’ve found through our experience in the stationery industry is that while we all love and appreciate the beauty of handmade paper, many professional printers don’t quite share the love.
The professional printers willing to letterpress or foil on handmade paper are already few and far between, much less any willing to delve into digital prints.
digital printing on handmade paper opens a world of design options, like hundreds of colors, gradients, artwork, and watercolor
Personally, as a designer who loves adding custom watercolor artwork to every project, the lack of digital printing on handmade paper is an unacceptable hole in the current printing services in the industry
If there aren’t good outsourcing options out there for digitally printing on handmade paper, then it has to be done in-house.
Not everyone has the resources or time to not only purchase a professional caliber printer, but to then teach themselves how to calibrate their files and equipment for each new paper as well as execute the print jobs by themselves. Trouble shooting and correcting issues introduces a whole other level of frustrations.
It’s a lot of work! And it might not be worth it to everyone to do it.
But it is for us.
And we’d like to share that capability with the rest of the industry through M.Print.
here’s where you come in.
We’re super picky about the paper we work with for our own wedding clients. Before we ever propose a paper to our client, we’ve already tested the paper on our in-house printers, so we know the ins and outs of how the paper interacts with our inks and have set up our own preliminary color calibrations for production use.
We’ve also gone through the process of working with our paper suppliers already, so we know what the production lead times, prices, sizes, strengths and pain points are like before we ever introduce it to our client.
This is an integral part of our creative process for weddings, and we want to bring this expertise into our printing service as well. In order to ensure our clients receive the highest quality results, we will be offering printing services only on handmade paper we’ve already tried, supplied by papermakers we trust to deliver the high quality product we need.
Our goal is to have our selected paper makers represented on our website where our print clients will select the paper(s) they would like to print on
Clients will make the paper choice
we’ll handle the ordering, inventory, and printing
We will be offering…
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Digital printing with a minimum quantity of 40 prints
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A selection of luxurious handmade papers sourced from trusted papermakers, pre-screened for inventory availability within a reasonable timeline and tested with our archival pigment inks to ensure print quality
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Additional paper selections for envelopes and cards to complement handmade paper from well-known paper mills like Rossi, Arturo, ColorPlan, and Gmund
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Extra printed details that add value and customization to a suite, such as custom printed envelope liners in coordinating paper. Liners can be created for all of our papermakers’ unique handmade envelopes in addition to machined envelopes from other companies
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Printing on non-cotton paper types like vellum for translucent overlays
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Gorgeous white ink printing on select papers (not handmade)
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Sample packets of all the handmade paper selections from our papermaking suppliers
Here’s what we’re looking for from you…
Samples of your current paper inventory
We’ll be printing on and taking pretty pictures of your beautiful product to show for the M.Print website and Instagram page.
This will also give us an opportunity to ensure we can print digitally on the full range of your offerings (e.g. envelopes tend to be a bit dodgy), so that we know exactly what we’re working with before offering anything to our print clients.
For the most part, we are familiar with the papers you create and carry as we have worked with most of your work already. We would love to have stack of your gorgeous paper on hand when we shoot for the website so all our makers can be represented throughout the site. We’d be happy to return the unprinted pieces to your inventory once they’ve been shot.
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Information about you!
We’ll be including bios for our makers page and would love to catch your good side (we can pull this from your website if you have a bio page). Details here could include your name, a brief synopsis of the story behind your product, a picture, etc.
Sometimes what sells the client on your product isn’t necessarily just the quality of the product itself, but also the story behind its creation. Feel free to share why your paper making process is unique, etc.
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Inventory pictures & information
These will be used for the product pages for your particular paper. We can pull this from your website, but if there’s something in particular you’d like to add, or perhaps if you have upcoming inventory you’d like to feature that isn’t publicly listed, this would be a great way to share it.
Of course, as mentioned above, we’d want to make sure the new inventory works well with our printers before including it as an option for purchase.
In the same vein, we want to YOU to feel comfortable with the papers you offer up for inventory as well. If you have a line of paper that is particularly finicky to produce and you don’t feel comfortable meeting the turnaround time for those products, we are happy to accommodate that with the inventory. For example, rather than offering every single size and color combination, we can limit the sizes and color ranges to more standard offerings in order to accommodate the month turn around time and your own creative process.
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Turn around time guarantee
Most important!!
This is an integral aspect of what we want to be able to offer our print clients. We’ve heard countless stories from other designers in the industry who wanted to use XYZ handmade paper for their project, but the timelines for production of the suite and the handmade paper didn’t line up and they weren’t able to work with their paper of choice. We totally get it! Both processes are labor and time intensive. But we love both of these things, and we want to create a system that allows for a designer to be able to get their hands on quality handmade paper within their timeline (assuming their timeline is reasonable ha!) and include gorgeous digital printing to boot!
So what are we talking about here?
Basically, any paper offered for M.Print printing services should be something we can acquire within, at most, one month of lead time from M.Print placing the order with you to our having the product in hand.
Obviously, if you regularly keep inventory in stock, this is probably a breeze! But if you’re making orders ad hoc, we want to make sure (for our client’s, our, and your sake!) that we can receive the paper in a reasonable amount of time to get the printed products back in the client’s hands.
When you’re calculating this, please consider what your production may look like in conjunction with your other ongoing orders, not just how long it takes to create a batch in a vacuum. If there’s a product that you’re not comfortable guaranteeing, we’d prefer to leave it out for now. And if the production for that product changes down the road, we’re happy to add them into the selection!
current buying process with M.Print…
For reference…
here’s the buying process that we envision for our print clients
This will be a wholesale offering only
All of our print clients must be designers and artists in the industry, selling their designs to their own clients
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Our example print client, let’s call them Sam, goes through the sales funnel on our website. Here, they will be instructed on expectations, turnaround times, costs, color matching, product ordering, and quantities.
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From there, Sam will be able to read about each of our suppliers and makers (YOU!) and select from your inventory. As mentioned before, the inventory offered here will only be the papers you and M.Print have agreed upon for the “guaranteed” inventory.
Once they’ve made their paper selection, Sam can add those to their shopping cart.
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Sam then moves on to selecting their printing options based on the requirements of their suite design, adding the print job to the cart. With this, they will be able to retrieve a quote for the job + paper, streamlining the quotation part of the process for their creative process.
More importantly, this make sure that all parties are fully aware of the prices involved with the service of digital printing on handmade paper before anyone is engaged for a job. They know your paper prices, they know our printing prices, and all of it is available for them before ever quoting to their client.
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Once their order for paper & printing has been placed, we’ll review the order for any weirdness and then place orders with our suppliers (YOU!) for the selected paper.
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You receive the order, work your magic to produce the paper, and send it over to our studio. On your end, this should work just like any other paper order you may have filled before. Because we’ve gone over your inventory together before, this is a paper product you know you can provide within the one-month timeline.
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We execute the client’s print job and send everything back to them.
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Everything is awesome! Rinse and repeat.
ok, what next?
Email us! Send a reply back to the email where we reached out to you. We’d love to hear your questions, feedback, enthusiasm, whatever you’d like to share! We’ll coordinate next steps from there.
We can’t wait to get started!
xoxo
Design House of Moira Team