Our boxes and packaging supplies shop, Funky Box Studio has just turned 3 years old, while our letterpress and hot foil shop, Funky Print Studio has just turned 1! Woohoo!!
It’s already our 3rd year selling paper goodies online and i can’t believe how much we’ve accomplished, how much we’ve learned and how much we grew during this time! However, regardless of how much we’ve accomplished, there are still new goals and new targets to beat, as much as we’ve learned, we still find out new things each and every single day, and despite the fact that we grew so much, there’s always room for better. Well the absolute best part of it all is that throughout our studio’s 3 years of existence we only went upwards. Looking back, i re-read the roundups for our first and second year and still think, just like back then: when did the time fly? You can read the first two roundups here and here.
We still get new challenges each day, we still learn, we still experiment, we still do our best for each project and we still remember Nichole, our very first client 3 years ago. I guess she will never know how special she was and still is for 2 people across the globe! Ugh! This is getting a bit too emotional! Hehe!
The most significant moments for our studio during this past year are:
- gaining experience – this might not really seem like much, but it’s actually a crucial thing. Letterpress printing brings new challenges every single time, whether it’s about hand mixed ink colors, finding the right hue for the edge painting, working on difficult designs and so forth. You always have to be prepared for the unexpected. Well after one year in letterpress printing, i’m finally getting comfortable with the unexpected!
- starting hot foil printing – we decided to make an investment yet again and expand our activity yet again, so we got a hot foil printing machine! This was just another challenge on top of all the others, but it was definitely worth it.
- repeat customers on letterpress printing, having regular customers on the packaging shop – even though we started the printing shop just a year ago, we managed to have repeat customers already! On the other hand, for the packaging shop we already have customers who have been purchasing our items from our very beginning!
- direct selling – while etsy has been and still is our main selling platform, many people have started contacting us directly on our email and that was actually one of the points where we realized we’d grown! :)
It was a great year for us and our studio. Even though we’re still not doing this full time, we can actually see it happening now. We have enough starting experience, we already know how it’s like, we have numbers, facts, calculations. I don’t know if this is the year when we’ll finally turn our studio into a full time job, but i can still dream and think positive, right?
At the last roundup i was curious about how many sales we’ll manage to have on our packaging shop at the next roundup. Well there aren’t 700 as i was hoping for, but there are 569. So we have a total of 229 sales for this past year! However, these are just the etsy sales and they’re already not relevant anymore since we’ve done a lot of direct selling.
The end of our last roundup still applies today as well, so without further ado:
It’s been a roller-coaster, but still a fun ride altogether. There were countless nights spent working in the studio, frustrations because of so many reasons, but also wonderful people who helped us wake up the next day and do it all again, small successes that made us feel like we’d just saved the planet and all of this makes it all worth it.
Thank you for your support!
The Funky Studio team wishes you, as always, a colorful day!
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