The State of Bromstad Printing

This time last year I was a new member of the Greeting Card Association, fresh off exhibiting at my first tradeshow NY NOW, preparing my entries for the 35th Louie Awards and planning my booth for Noted, the Greeting Card Expo in the coming April.

A year later, I'm a Louie Award-winner, my 36^th Louie Awards entries are submitted, and I am helping to plan and run the 2025 Atlanta Louie Award judging hub as a member of the GCA’s Louie Awards committee. Louies Louies Louies!

I am also fresh off a GCA retreat in Denver, Colorado where members met to talk shop about all things greeting card, including highlights from Ladyfingers Letterpress about the value of having values, Aaron Draplin of Field Notes about, kind of just being creative in the way you see the world, and then dark horse speaker Tom Day, a systems engineer and the Vice Chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission, who really made me feel vindicated about how terrible USPS service got in Atlanta earlier this year with his slide showing a graph of the absolute cliff of on-time delivery falling to 11% in February.

The various panels and speakers at the GCA retreat gave me plenty to think about (licensing?? a b2b portal for wholesale customers?? gift wrap??), but it was the mingling with peers and colleagues in the industry that was the most enjoyable. I continue to be pleasantly reminded that paper people are the best people. There's a sense of camaraderie and willingness to share that I think a lot of other industries probably lack.

CFA Cat Show

Prior to the retreat, I made the two-day trek up to Cleveland, Ohio to vend at the Cat Fancier's Association Cat Show & Expo. What an event! I didn't know what to expect, but the cats were bountiful and beautiful, and the customers were excited about cat stationery, so I'll call it a win.

My sister tagged along to help and I was glad for the company and aid. Of course the night before the show I decided my setup was too bare and we made an emergency trip to the art store for supplies. Two hours later and I had myself a hand-lettered chonky little loaf cat sign to complete the booth. Would it be a work trip without last minute panic?

And now, finally back home after all that travel, I am preparing a big 1,800 card order for a super special customer, and diligently working on reprints of sold out cards and notepads to send to my new fulfillment center in Virginia.

Deciding to partner with a Fulfillment Center

The fulfillment center has got to be the biggest surprise of 2024 for me. I fully expected to remain in my little home studio groove for the foreseeable future. But after a gangbusters Faire Summer Market where I was drowning in orders (good problem, but problem) I swore I would not go through that fulfillment nightmare again.

It had gotten to a point where my inventory was taking up more and more space in the house outside of the studio, and it was difficult to switch between manufacturing and fulfillment. The choice was either get a bigger space and hire more help to run it, or hire someone else to do it somewhere else. All my time was being spent on packing orders and not at doing the creative part I liked to do.

And I love what I do — I love the printing and the folding and the assembling and even the marketing. But I do not love the fulfillment, and frankly I am not great at the fulfillment. In many ways I am a detail-oriented person, but with fulfillment I would make mistakes like missing a SKU or getting a quantity wrong — not like all the time, but enough to be something I wish I could improve on.

Turns out I COULD improve on that and also not be drowning in fulfillment and that was by hiring Shipfluence to start fulfilling orders for me.

I met Janie of Shipfluence when she introduced herself to me last year at NY Now, and at the time a whole ass fulfillment center seemed like a pipe dream to little ol me. Like not something I could see myself needing. But not a year later I came crawling to Janie and begged for her help. I didn’t even shop around, I knew immediately this was the partner for Bromstad Printing. Here is a woman-owned business, and not only that but a card business owner-owned business—Janie and her business partner Alyssa also have their own stationery and candle business The Card Bureau. The warehouse (climate controlled!) and fulfillment operations sprang up around their need for quality fulfillment for themselves first. So they GET what we are doing here.

There have been bumps along the way of getting up and running but I continue to feel we are in great hands! My relief is palpable. Shipfluence has a whole team of folks who’s only job is to carefully pack your orders and send them along their way lightning fast (typically in 1–3 days!), and with far fewer mistakes than you got when it was just me doing it all.

All through August and September I was working furiously to get all my cards and notepads and stickers and art prints case packed and organized on pallets while also making a record number of our limited edition 2025 calendars (1000!) and packing those up too. I had the help of Aoife, my summer intern, and Rachel, my studio assistant, without either of whom I would not have made my end-of-September deadline to get inventory sent off.

Once those initial pallets were on their way, I was already packing up a third one with more things that didn’t fit on the first. The beginning of October was spent getting the backend of the warehouse operations set up — all my products checked-in and barcoded, all the inventory data and platform syncing set up (or so we thought haha, it’s been a learning process).

But all because of the work that we put in to getting operations going, I was able to do two different out-of-town trips last month without worrying about filling the orders in my absence. An order that came through after I talked with a shop owner at the GCA retreat shipped before I even got home. That’s service!

The downside of course is I’m a little less nimble on restocks because I need to first make things then ship them to the center before they come to you, and it usually makes sense to wait and ship more things at once rather than piecemeal. Right now I’m planning a pallet for mid-November. But this isn’t fast fashion, and I have faith my customers will be patient about these things. You will be patient, right?

Anyway all this just to give a big picture update of the state of Bromstad Printing Co. as 2025 closes in. Things are going mostly good! It’s all that I could hope for.

There will be some more announcements about wholesale things in the coming months but for now, I can be found this weekend at the Indie Craft Experience at the Yaarab Temple with the usual riso goods plus some new art print exclusives. It’s my last in-person appearance of the year and YES there will be calendars so come scoop yours up before they sell out! There are just a few hundred left in the edition. Tick tock!