I thought up what seemed to me an original solution for marking my packaging. I now have a coloured stamp with my company's logo. Two stamps, in fact: one for the text and another for the sun. With these I can quickly and easily put my logo on anything: paper bags, price tags for fairs, boxes and cartons, even little packing bags sewn from linen.
Until now I had heard that custom stamps can be ordered online from China or heaven knows where. I have also dug about on the websites of local stamp firms, but neither in the price lists nor in the sample photographs did I see anything to suggest that you could order a coloured stamp with your own logo. So ordering a stamp was left where it was for the time being; in the first year there was more than enough to do to get going.
To my mind the price lists on the websites of quite a few fields are like rocket science. Take printing price lists, for instance. If I order business cards or even some leaflets, should I have to know beforehand what the difference is between offset, screen, embossed, foil or thermal transfer printing? Yet that is exactly how the printers' price lists looked a year ago. When I looked them over today out of interest, they had become friendlier: the price list consisted of a list of business cards, large format prints and so on. So technology based price lists have become product based price lists. Yes. 🙂
So why a stamp?
Above all to create consistent packaging. When products are small, or at least more or less the same size, creating packaging for your product seems a little simpler. My work, though, is mostly rather large and of very different sizes: large and small quilts, kannel bags, beanbags and a great many smaller sewn pieces of very different sizes and weights. And then there are times when it feels as though creating or buying stylish packaging as a small maker is like banging your head against a wall.
First: you can throw any kind of custom order straight out of your head, because sensibly priced quantities start at 100, 500 or 1000. It makes no difference whether you order printed paper bags or cardboard boxes or anything else. Well, what do I do with those 100 plus 100 plus 100 paper bags in different sizes, or where do I put 1000 cardboard boxes for kannel bags, another 1000 for quilts and a third, fourth and fifth size for smaller products. Packaging in those quantities would last me 10 years and more, never mind the space and the money such a quantity would take.
Ordering a separate beautiful box for each particular product is an idea too, but a handmade box the size of a shoebox already costs from 30 euros. If you ordered one like that for a quilt, it would probably add half the price of the quilt. Correct me if I am wrong.
So first of all I used large plastic bags, plus business cards and sometimes stickers with the logo. The plastic packaging in turn went into a paper bag decorated with little fabric flowers. For handing a product over in person it was quite an acceptable package. But for sending by post a paper bag cannot be used, and for safety I had to stuff the plastic package into whatever box came to hand. The result was, to put it politely, dreadful. 🙂
Ah yes. How I got the stamp or stamps.
A friend who is currently setting up her own business too made a scientific discovery: the stamp we were longing for is called, in professional language, a FlashStamp. So I decided to take the matter up again: a Google search, local makers, price lists. And there is no need to order from China :-)))
I wrote to three stamp makers asking about making a stamp with a multi coloured logo. From one of them I got a terse reply: a two coloured stamp cannot be made, the gap between the two colours has to be 3 mm.
The second company, the largest of them as far as I know, has not answered at all to this day. Presumably a large firm in the capital is too busy to spend its precious time answering some unknown enquirer.
The third, a Tartu company (Humal Templitehas), sent a long and charming letter that gave me clear answers to my questions. The decision about which company to use was made.
Stamp impressions on paper and on various fabrics
Since my logo has two different colours on top of one another, I understood that I would need a separate stamp for each colour. Alongside everything else that is needed, that does not seem a large investment at all.
The choice of colours seemed a little more complicated: colours for the stamps are not mixed. From the digital pictures of stamp impressions in various colours it seemed a little difficult to decide how the colours in my logo (brown and yellow) would come out on kraft paper, on a cardboard box or on other materials likely to be used in future. At the suggestion of a Humal employee, I sent them various papers in an envelope and got them back by courier with stamp impressions in the colours I wanted.
If you have questions about this stamp, you can find the description of the flash stamp HERE.
A few working days after I confirmed my order the stamps were ready and arrived by courier. So sweet. Beautiful, lovely. Look for yourself. At the moment I have no proper price tags to show yet, but I took a few pictures of how I intend to start using the stamp.
Stamp impressions on paper bags
A small digression: the stamp works asked me to send the paper samples by ELS courier. I had not used a courier service of that name before and tried to find information with the help of Google. Well, help. The search turned up 101 companies that mention the service among others in their web shops. But information from the service provider itself... When I finally reached the Omniva page, I could only guess that it is a service of Omniva or Eesti Post. But I found no heading or description of a service or anything else that hinted at an ELS courier service. Of course I could not be bothered to read the whole website through; presumably it was hidden somewhere in there.
Since I had to go to Eesti Post the same day, I asked there whether ELS is an Eesti Post service and, if so, whether I should post the envelope into an Omniva box or could send my item from that very office. The post office employee answered that she did not know, she had not used the service herself. 🙂 But she took my item and promised it would arrive as a courier delivery. 🙂 Arrive they did in any case, and I received my stamps by the Omniva bus, so it must be an Omniva service after all.
But the stamps are honest and I will start using them and trying them on different materials with a will.
Any kind of lovely comments on stamps, packaging and other subjects are welcome.
