23 August 2013

Our most popular cards this month


Here is a selection of the best selling designs for the month of July!



We are just finishing off next years Fathers's Day cards then straight onto our New Relation Range, before starting on the Everyday and Occasion ranges that need to be completed before Christmas, whilst trying to fit in Christmas designs for gift wrap and bags, all of which will be launched at The Spring Fair in February.  It is all go as usual here in the Paper Salad Design Studio.

We had a lovely lunch out last Friday at Australasia in Manchester with Janet from G.F.Smith.
We enjoyed cocktails and some gorgeous food.












It was a lovely afternoon and a real treat, thank you for your company Janet!
`

20 August 2013

New Social Stationery Packs

On Friday we took delivery of Five Brand New Stationery designs to add to the ones we launched in the Spring, our first batch concentrated more on new baby, christening and small children.  We felt we needed some more generic packs and some more suitable for school age children.










There are 6 invites per pack and are printed using neon inks and finished with silver sparkly flitter and our bespoke patterned envelopes, and packed in a headed cello bag.   RRP £3.95

15 August 2013

A Few New Additions to the White Lace Range ....



We have added four new general birthday designs to our 'popular' White Lace Range ...


Everybody loves an owl ...


Pretty Flowers ...



and Cats and Dogs .... to match the new wrap designs just launched by Glick!




Paper Salad Gift Bags and Wraps are available through Glick on 01274 655980 Email:sales@glick.co.uk

13 August 2013

Copied Camper Van Design

Whilst I was away on holiday I received a text from Claire saying she had spotted one of our designs on a range of toiletry bags in a Gift shop whilst she was away for the weekend.  The design in question (below) was one we had created at least six years ago.  We knew we hadn't licensed the design to anybody other than the company who produce gift bags and wrap.  



In fact ourselves and everyone concerned had made the decision to withdraw the wrap and gift bags from sale after realising that Volkswagen had licensed the shape of the camper van and even though our design didn't have the VW logo on we were still breaching the copyright law.  This came has a huge shock to us at the time and only came to light when a shop in Germany who were stocking the wrap received a letter from Volkswagen asking for royalties.

So, even though it was a best selling design we decided to pull the associated products and put the mistake down to experience! 

Claire started to do some research and after googling 'camper van fabric' was amazed to see our design all over the internet on Etsy, Facebook, Ebay and Amazon not too mention loads of small designer/maker websites.  It suddenly came to dawn on her that the design had been copied several years ago, probably in China when we had sent the design to be printed for gift wrap.  

We have taken legal advice and now have to write to the importers of the fabric and tell them we do not endorse them using the design as it has been produced without our knowledge or consent.

So any of you thinking of sending any designs overseas for printing or even licensing to companies who use China for production, make sure you use a reputable company, we thought the one we used was reputable and they came with lots of recommendations from companies within our industry, this same company has since gone out of business but apparently copying in China is rife, so please beware.

We are so pleased we switched all of our printing back to the UK and only use reputable companies!




The above photos are of a cosmetic bag featuring our design, with a piece of fabric Claire purchased from Ebay.




A piece of our original gift wrap on the right, with the copied design on fabric on the left.



09 August 2013

Jam packed Summer part 2

In July we visited Harrogate Home and Gift to catch up with some of our agents and also to take a peek at the Glick stand where we had some brand new product being launched.



One range of bags features cakes and lace with lots of sparkle!



and matching tissue papers




and another range consists of spots and stripes using neon spot colours and matching neon handles in a variety of weights and colours.













It is always good to meet up with our sales agents, here is Claire with our Midlands agent Ian Bradley and his lovely wife Lorraine.


Ian is also the New Midlands sales agents for Glick as well,


Myself and Claire at the show!

Hope you all have a lovely weekend, more pics to follow next week!



08 August 2013

Jam Packed Summer!!

Sorry it has been so long since we have posted, we have had a jam packed Summer here at Paper Salad.

First of all Claire is now Married, Yippee!  She is now called Claire Williams


Following the wedding Claire and her husband Gareth spent three weeks travelling around Vietnam









The week before Claire's wedding we exhibited at PG Live, seems a lifetime ago now!


We are ashamed to say we didn't take any proper photos of our stand but you can just see the corner of of it on the left hand side of the pic.

It was another great show for us, we showcase our new range printed on brown paper, which was a great success, we also met with The Waterstones buyer and have just received our first order for this store!!

It was also good to catch up with some of our overseas distributors, we have just produced a range of our new 'White Lace' cards translated to German,  from an order we took at PG Live.




Here are just a few of the cards with the changed text!

We will post more from our 'missing summer" tomorrow, we have no excuses now that we both have brand new DSLR cameras!!