Have you ever heard of Zazzle, Café Press or Spreadshirt? They’re websites where you’ll get a choice of 1000s of notebook designs, but average prices, including shipping, will be $18+. Wow, that’s a lot for something that 9 times out of 10 is ultimately a disposable item (most of us don’t keep notebooks more than a couple of years). Our notebooks are high quality but only cost $7 plus Amazon Shipping. 

The business models of Zazzle and the likes are actually similar to ours in one way, but there is also one key difference. 

The similarity is that before you purchase a notebook it isn’t sitting in a warehouse somewhere on a shelf. It doesn’t exist. It’s printed after you’ve placed the order (called ‘print-on-demand’).  This means that we (and they) don’t have to hold stocks of every design we offer. We can have an infinite number of designs at very little cost. They all just sit in the digital ether waiting to be printed. Companies that do this don’t have to risk punts on which designs will be popular and hedge prices upwards to cover losses on those designs that don’t sell. This all means low costs which can be passed on to the customer … if the company chooses to pass them on that is!

So, if we’re doing the same as other big print on demand companies, why can we charge less than them?… the answer is there’s no middle man. Unlike us, they don’t do the designs; they are middle men, effectively using crowd sourcing from the artistic community. That means you get a lot of choice of notebook designs, some good, many … well, questionable! Anyone can submit a design to these companies and hope it sells. But they have to get their cut and the middle-man obviously has to add his to the final price also (and the latter cut is big meaning the final price you see is too!).  We, however, professionally produce and own the copyright to all our designs. So it’s entirely up to us how much profit we want to take. We love doing graphic design, it’s what floats our boats, so we are happy to keep the prices low, taking only a small profit from each sale, but to have many high quality designs. There you have it. Cheap really can be cheerful.

That’s us in a nutshell folks.