The Studio Flash Strategy

Studio Flash =

We start brainstorming, the most crazy ideas first. There is always somebody (me, Jolien 😉 ) keeping the brainstorming crowd in the Real Life,

stating things like ‘we need a card for a newborn’ or ‘wait, we do not need Christmas ideas now, that’s next collection’.

After the brainstorm, we start sketching. And next step is drawing it on our iPad.

Important: our drawings always consist of max 2 colors.

Because:

We print all our greeting cards ourselves in our garage on an old printing press “Heidi”, from the 1950s.

That is labor intensive and that is why we limit ourselves to 1 type of paper, 1 format, and max. 2 colors.

Because every color is a new print run.

By printing ourselves, we can really stay on tops of things in terms of popular or less popular designs and we have a larger margin to put in our own pocket per card.

That brings us seamlessly to part 3, because by printing ourselves, our margins are quite good to do:

We do not sell directly to the end consumer. That strategy would however make more money per greeting card.

So why don’t we?

We choose to only sell to (the coolest) shops. As a result, we earn less per greeting card, but we can invest a lot more time in designing and printing, which we enjoy doing. Shops are returning customers. Once you have one in your pocket, they usually keep on ordering rather large orders for years to come. Because we print and design ourselves and try to keep everything as efficient as possible (see previous points;)), this strategy allows us to offer good prices for us, the shops and the end consumer. I think this balance is an essential element in our success. Everybody happy ;).

I’m not saying the Studio Flash strategy is the only successful one,

Certainly not!

Other competitors apply other strategies successfully,

With, for example, a mix of custom work or no own printing but both B2C and B2B sales, …

Everyone their own recipe for succes! 🙂