Blog — behind the scenes

It's time for us to start updating our catalog for the new year, so I wanted to write a little bit about how I do that!  I work in InDesign for my catalogs, which makes it easy to visualize how the layout will be and to set certain styles across all the pages (like page numbers, etc.) I start with my previous catalog, which I had previously set up with meticulous grids, guides and style guides. So even though the first catalog took longer to set up, the good news is it gets faster from there! Although last year I decided to move to...

Shipstation If you sell on multiple marketplaces, Shipstation is kind of a must. It shows all your orders across all your marketplaces is one place - phew!! Otherwise it would really be a game of whack-a-mole for us to ship out orders. Essentially it takes all your orders, allows you to configure different shipping options, and lets you automate a ton of stuff so that all your orders can come in with the postage ready to print and ship. We use this one on a daily basis and I would have a really hard time running my business without it! Visit them here.  Printing Center...

One thing that's so important to us is being as eco-friendly as we can in our business, and we're always looking for where we can make improvements in our materials and process. We've been looking for a good eco-friendly mailer for some time and we finally found a good one that we'll be switching to! Our new kraft mailer that we'll soon begin shipping all our enamel pins and buttons with is made from 100% eco friendly recycled materials and is fully recyclable as well.  Our cards are eco friendly, too! They're now printed with organic soy inks and printed on FSC certified/recycled stock,...

We recently got a chance to visit the rare corpse flower at CSULB in Long Beach! If you haven't heard about this giant flower, it only blooms once every 7-15 years, and then when it blooms it only stays open for about a day. Sometimes even less!  And.. it stinks! It smells awful, plus we were there on a cold day and we were told it smells much worse when it's warm out. I think we lucked out a little bit on that. Here's a few pics of it below, and make sure you're following us on Instagram for more adventures!...

 My art process actually varies quite a lot, and a lot of the time I don't start with a sketch at all and just work straight in Illustrator. In this case though, I had this idea while sketching up some new ideas for CatCon, so I started with this little sketch.  I was too lazy to use my scanner (yep) so I just took a photo of it with my phone instead and then started drawing over it in Illustrator. I generally use a lot of circles and basic shapes first, then combine them and edit them with the pathfinder and pen...