Hello Summer!
Believe it or not, spring has come and gone! The last six months have simply flown by at Noteworthy between juggling wedding planning, house building, family vacations, new product development, preparing for and traveling to the National Stationery Show and so much more. To get it all done we grew our team adding three new employees to the ranks: a retail sales associate, an additional letterpress printer and a production assistant. And this month we are celebrating our ninth year of doing business in downtown Missoula – woohoo! We can’t express enough, how grateful we are for the support that our customers, retailers, clients and FAMILIES have shown us throughout the years.
With the holidays behind us, we hit the ground running in January with our preparations for the 2016 National Stationery Show in NYC. Our goal for 2016 was to round out our wholesale greeting card selection and bulk up our gift offerings by adding brand new products such as notepads, wine glass name markers, digital cards and art prints, tote bags, zip pouches and new letterpress state postcards.
Along with all the other preparation we also brainstormed the show mailers and how to make them on par with what we sent out last year and stand out from the crowd. Since we were debuting some digitally printed designs at the show we decided to incorporate digital printing into the invitation to our booth. We then letterpress printed antique gold lettering on top of the digital art.
This was our 4th year exhibiting, and 9th year in attendance. Last year we went through a pretty extensive process with pre-building, painting and shipping our booth setup. This year we decided to simplify and go with the pre-constructed hard walls from Manny Stone Decorators. Manny Stone was awesome to work with and super helpful! Instead of shipping a crate back and forth like last year, we brought all of our new inventory and supplies in our suitcases and had our items that were in storage from last year shipped back to the Javits.
The show consisted of three days of set up and three and a half days of selling, selling, selling (and a little buying for our retail space)! We had lots of fun painting the walls a beautiful custom-mixed flat black and painting a flower pattern along the edges.
As always, the Paper Party, thrown by Oh So Beautiful Paper, was a blast. It was fun to catch up with old friends and meet new people in the industry! We loved this decorative wall they had set up on one side!
We also were honored to have two invitations that were finalists for the Greeting Card Association’s 2016 Louie Awards, one of which won in its category: Wedding Invitations – Deluxe Modern Printed , marking our 3rd Louie award win to date. Below are the two finalists. The canoe/outdoors inspired suite was the winner!
Since returning to Missoula, we have been busy bees packing up orders, getting through wedding season and plotting for next year’s catalog and show. This past weekend, we had the pleasure of selling our wares at the annual Missoula summer craft fair in Caras Park, along with lots of amazing vendors. It was such a fun day! Luckily, it wasn’t 105 degrees like last year where we almost melted!
We hope that everybody has a happy and healthy rest of summer. Below is a photo from a recent trek out to the Bitterroot river. We love being able to travel to New York every spring and see all the sights, but there’s really nothing like living in Montana! Until next time!
