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Letterpress wedding invitations, business cards, custom designs & life lately

May 24, 2016 Andreea

There are a lot (looooot!) of things going on at our end lately, so obviously, there’s no more time to update this blog as often as i’d want to. That’s why i kinda took it to Instagram for “live updates”. It’s a lot easier than to plan a whole blog post. And i get to share with you the latest projects we’re working on while we’re actually working on them!

There were so many great projects we took on lately that i’m not sure how i’m going to write a separate blog post for each one… Therefore, this one will be a general introduction for several of them.

We worked on some custom bow tie boxes that we hot foil printed on! This was actually the first hot foil printing project we took and they turned out so cute!! We made some samples with the foil we had available at the time, so we used silver, gold, copper, matte red and a dark brown.

Since then we actually took on several other hot foil projects and i’m so very excited about this! They turn out so beautiful and elegant that i decided to change my own business cards and make them entirely hot foil!

Then we worked on a set of business cards and tags and we used a unique ink color here; very delicate and subtle and incredibly difficult to recreate actually! :)

The above is Gemma’s photo and you can see pictures of her amazing work over here.

We actually hand mixed the ink so that it would get to the hue she was after and we were thrilled that she was happy with the result!

Then we worked on a couple of round business cards and i’m starting to like them more and more (actually we just took on another project involving round business cards!).

I was a bit nervous when we worked on the Arisdot letterpress project. Usually letterpress doesn’t work well with large portions of pressed paper, but they actually turned out great! Not only that, but we took on another similar project with pressed background and that one too turned out great!

After that we took on a custom design project that i totally loved and we were praised for!

Finally, the last project i’ll introduce to you here is a custom design letterpress wedding invitation. Well actually it’s an engagement invitation to be more precise.

These are only a few of the projects we worked on lately, but there are so many others i have to talk about! I decided i have to have a separate blog post for all the hot foil projects we did and another one for all the projects involving edge painting. I absolutely love edge painting!

Hopefully i’ll be able to update this more often!
The Funky Studio team wishes you, as always, a colorful day!

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etsy, funky box studio, funky print studio story, rant

Funky Box Studio turns 3. Funky Print Studio turns 1. Roundup!

April 7, 2016 Andreea

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!

(photo)

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March mood board. Hello, pastel spring! Please, be good!

March 10, 2016 Andreea

My March mood board is probably the one that i like the most out of all 12 chapters of a year. After so many months of cold weather, lots of clothes to put on and trying to keep warm, finally spring is here!

(source)

I realized i liked March and spring in general more than i thought. Though i’ll always be a summer girl, spring is the one i’m eagerly waiting for when autumn starts. I am in love with blossom cherry trees and magnolia trees and spring flowers. Since i am a total Japan lover and Japan is famous for its sakura trees (cherry blossom), this mood board reflects my love for the both.

On my last month’s mood board i was talking about the 2 apps i had just begun using: the one reminding me to drink water and the workout one. Well, one of them stuck with me, the other didn’t. Yes, the water one did. February was an incredibly busy month for us and i’m really really thankful for it. Thanks to our “free shipping in February” promotion, we received many orders and we’re still working on about 4 different projects at the moment. The downside was that i didn’t have any time left for my workout app routine. Still, i’m not giving up on it and i plan on picking it up again.

The lack of free time is also keeping me from taking photos of all the new boxes we made and they’ve really been piling up! The time for them will definitely come, though!

Getting back on track, here’s what my March mood board looks like:

Source: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Well, hello there, beautiful spring! It’s time to get ready for some colorful and sunny days!

The Funky Studio team wishes you, as always, a colorful day!

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etsy, funky box studio, funky print studio story, letterpress, rant

Funky Studio updates. What have we been doing lately?

February 22, 2016 Andreea

It was about time i put together a Funky Studio updates post. Even though i promised myself i’d blog as much as possible this year, we’re quite busy lately. I’m over the top happy to say that our Free Shipping letterpress in February promotion has a lot to do with our busy schedule.

We’re currently working on a bunch of different letterpress projects and each one has something special: lovely letterpress wedding invitations with two ink colors, round letterpress business cards, custom designs for some business cards and on top of all these, we’re also making about 1000 different boxes for our packaging shop. All in all, we’re working hard, so we definitely needed a Funky Studio updates post!

Moreover, we’re also preparing for something big: expanding our little studio’s activity again! We first began with our boxes and paper supplies, were thrilled to throw ourselves into the letterpress world and now, finally, the time has come for the ultimate upgrade: hot foil printing! Although we haven’t officially introduced hot foil as part of our services yet, we’ve already had our first project using this kind of printing and we’re ecstatic! We’re also reminded of our letterpress beginnings: just like it happened now, we took on a letterpress project before even opening our website or shop! Well, stay tuned! Hot foil printing will soon be available in our shop, even though, of course, we can already take orders, so please contact us at office@funkyprintstudio.com if you’d be interested!

The Funky Studio team wishes you, as always, a colorful day!

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