30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 12

Yesterday: Review your wholesale process. Come up with 3 ideas to streamline your process and begin implementing them.

L-R: packaged wholesale order ready to ship, Wholesale street in DTLA near the studio and a display of Ink+Smog Editions cards at Urban Radish in the Arts District in DTLA.

Over the past two years, we've been slowly building up our wholesale presence. You can see some of our retailers here. One of our objectives is to turn more towards the wholesale end of our business. This was the main impetus for upgrading to a Heidelberg Windmill press a few years ago. In order to do this, we have spent a lot of time recently reviewing our wholesale materials and trying to rethink our wholesale process.

We've spent a great deal of time discussing where we want our wholesale business to be, but have only just begun working on how to make the process simpler and faster. Yesterday's exercise was really great, it forced us to think about all the different ideas and obstacles we've been talking about but then we had to boil everything down to three ideas.

Working on the wholesale exercise yesterday with coffee.

One thing that keeps coming up time and again in this project, is that it is more than time for us to build our own website. It would be particularly helpful in this regard since it would allow us to create a wholesale portal that would simplify the process both for us as well as for our wholesale buyers.

The second idea we discussed involves our invoicing process. At the moment, our invoicing is cumbersome and a little complicated. We need to do some research into a new method for creating as well as keeping track of invoices.

And third, we would really like to move to Freshbooks. This is very much tied to our second solution. In order to do this, we need to change banks since ours is not currently supported by Freshbooks.

These three ideas are really just a beginning, an entry point into a much more complicated discussion. We will start with these three and see where we go from there.

L-R: A display of our cards at Los Angeles County Store in Silverlake (photo courtesy of their Instagram), the cover of our 2015 Look Book, some of our cards on the Beautiful Things LA bus (photo courtesy of their Instagram)

Today: Assess your product line. Lay out one of each of your items in such a way that you can see exactly what you’re producing. Does everything work well together? What is missing? Where do you go from here?

new stockist: Lundeen's in Culver City

As of a few weeks ago, you can now find a good selection of Ink+Smog Editions paper goods at Lundeen's in Culver City! From books and stationery to candles and jewelry, they have the perfect gift for almost any occasion. Go take a look!

Lundeen's is located at 9726 Washington Blvd. in Culver City.

Take a look at our full list of stockists to see if a store near you is carrying our paper goods!

sorry for the radio silence!

It's hard to believe that April is already half over and May is almost on it's way! We've been very busy setting the agenda for what is left of the year, slowly getting the new studio up and running around with some lovely guests from out of town!

L-R: Our new addition wish list for this year, lilacs at the Hollywood Farmer's Market, sketching new card ideas.

It's always nice to sit down and talk about the designs we want to introduce next. It's especially fun to start sketching some of those ideas out! We've been working on some of these ideas for over a year, just waiting for everything to fall into place. It's been so hard to keep some of our new ideas under wraps, we're really really excited about some of the cards coming up!

L-R: a very full drying rack, getting some wholesale orders ready to ship, a corner of our studio in the sun.

Along with our regular Etsy orders, we've also had some wholesale orders keeping us busy lately as well as keeping our drying rack pretty full. We can't wait to announce some new stockists very soon! It's been challenging trying to meet these deadlines before we've transitioned to the new press. It's so tantalizing to think about how much less time it would take! But alas, there's just a little more work to do before we can plunge headlong into the future!

L-R: Wildflowering LA Site #38, Site #44, Site #38 again.

Rosemary's mother Nancy is also visiting from Montreal and we're having a great time running around Los Angeles doing the things you only get around to doing when you have guests visiting from out of town! The two of them headed off to the deLaB (design East of La Brea) tour of two of the Wildflowering LA sites as part of their Making LA Series. If you haven't checked out Fritz Haeg's project commissioned by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) in collaboration with the Theodore Payne Foundation that sowed 50 participating yards across Los Angeles with native wildflower seeds, you should! If you head over to their website, they offer a map for self-guided tours of all of their sites. Hurry though, before the weather turned too hot and the flowers start to go to seed!

L-R: Everyone's favorite letterpress ice cream cards, Eastside Handmade display ideas, our bottle jack press.

We've also been getting ready for the spring edition of Eastside Handmade in Highland Park on Saturday April 19th from 11am-4pm. It's kind of crazy that we officially launched Ink+Smog Editions at this show a year ago, it seems like yesterday! This will probably be one of the last chances to get your hands on stock printed on our handmade bottle jack press! We'll be transitioning over to the new equipment very soon and as a result, we'll be offering some discounts on our holiday collection as well as bringing back some old favorites like our letterpress ice cream cone cards.

So hopefully we'll see you this weekend!

Best,
Rosemary+Robin

have a look...at fall/winter 2013

We're hard at work on our 2013 Holiday Collection that we'll be sharing on Instagram over the next few weeks. In the meantime take a sneak peek at our 2013 Fall/Winter Look Book below.

For all wholesale inquiries, send us an email and we'll be happy to send you our complete wholesale information package.


We hope you've had a great summer!
Rosemary+Robin