Bill Snail is in the Progressive Greetings Magazine

What a nice surprise to see our cards in the Progressive Greetings Magazine this morning.

Trade Website is Up.

Our new trade website for Afiki Designs is up and running.

Check in now and see the site grow!

Friendship Book Preview

-Click on the image for full screen view-

-Move the mouse over the book to the right

until you see a white arrow, then click to turn the pages-

A sneak peek of our friendship book. If you are interested in ordering, please comment here or contact us on our website www.afikidesings.com. 

Bill Snail's debut in book form!

We have had another land-mark day today. Yay!  - Ten prototype copies of Robyn’s “Funny Little Book on Friendship” were delivered this morning. Bill Snail has now been immortalised in print in a book! It's cute, touching and funny, with Robyn's own unique double-meaning witticisms - cartoons and rhyming verse - on each page. Bill Snail at his best. I just love it.
They look good, we are delighted with them, the colours have more or less come back as we hoped and the layout has worked. It is really exciting to see the book, large as life, a reality at last.
I am very excited that we can now add them to our website and catalogue.
We need, once again to get as much feed-back as possible from anyone and everyone, to decide whether or not it is worth publishing the book in bulk. We plan to publish them in a smaller version, but these were good for Trade Shows and to gauge the market.

I wish we had just taken the plunge and ordered  in bulk as I think they are such a cool present for any friend that it would be worth it, but my partner has a more cautious (sensible) business head! And she wouldn’t let me!

PostPals

If you have not heard about Post Pals, check them out.  Post Pals is a fantastic organisation.   It is run by several wonderful young women who all have serious illnesses themselves - plus crucially, an army of volunteers.  

 

The girls who founded Post Pals know first hand what a difference it can make to receive caring thoughts and attention from others when you are very ill.    Post Pals is an organisation which makes it possible for anyone to send cards and presents  to very sick children who need to know that people care.  The website speaks for itself, do click on the Post Pals logo above to go to their site and read about them.

We have been out having fun shopping for our two little post pals this week!

Stephanie Levy Prints

I just love the work of Stephanie Levy.

Her work has a wonderful mix of colour with clean bold lines.

She now has a collection of 24 designs as prints.

The prints are on Hahnemuhle archival paper using non-fading pigment inks.

Check out her blog and shop

Valentino Ink Jewellery

I bought some jewellery from Valentino Ink for a friend's Birthday present.

They arrived beautifully packaged and were even prettier than the photos.

Franky is a very talented Graphic Designer and Jewellery designer check out her shop

Valentino Ink Jewellery

"Valentino Ink Jewelry is a combination of 1960's throwback, metaphysical groove, the surrealistic painter within me and quite simply the desire to wear something pretty. The mood I am in and the energy surrounding me is what dictates each piece and gives Valentino Ink Jewelry many different personalities. I hope you love the collections as much as I loved making them!"

Photographing for the catalogue

Bit of an effort carting our first two spinner loads of Bill Snail cards into the courtyard to photograph for our catalogue. 

It was freezing and slippery and the light seemed to keep moving. You would not believe the contortions it involved to get the right camera angles - quite a hazardous struggle getting all the tripod legs and mine sorted out whilst teetering on the edge of the table. I felt like a spider doing yoga. Of course all the giggling and unhelpful advice off stage, didn't help at all.

Oh, the dilemmas of getting the right shots when you don't have a proper studio or lighting - and Scotland's grey days to contend with!

We wasted a frustrating amount of time trying different angles and areas to get close-up shots of the sixteen Bill Snail card designs. 

Finally we found that it worked best after we constructed a box and added a decent back-drop to unify all the cards.

Ooops! Lorry blocks lane

Big day! A massive truck arrived, bringing our first consignment of Bill Snail cards. We were relieved that he made it as far as he did, it had been touch and go all the way down the tiny back lane to our storage. Space ran out some way off, forcing us to block the whole lane while the driver unloaded.

We had to laugh at how insignificant our order looked in the lorry.

The driver and I had a hurried scramble unloading and manhandling the two pallets containing 48,000 cards, uphill, over cobbles to the store. Luckily nobody needed to get past till we were done.

It's going well...

Lots of great feedback, some people even included a separate letter with opinions and really helpful advice, which was amazing of them! 

Spurred on by the great response next stop- the printers

First Blue Envelopes!

It’s a rather nerve racking experience waiting for the postman these days. The moment the letterbox clinks silence falls and all the chairs get rocked back and necks craned to see around the corner waiting for a glimpse of anything blue.

This morning we got our first three blue envelopes. Our first real taste of outside trade opinion (that wasn’t said to our faces) so is hopefully more likely to be:

a) true and b) not sugar coated.

So, with much apprehension we opened them.

The first one turned out to be a bit of a heart-sink-(talk about not sugar coated!) I wasn’t sure if I wanted to open the next two!

However the next two loved them, with design comments like “Just Brilliant” underlined three times with two exclamation marks.

Hopefully we will keep getting responses in this vein rather than the first.
Fingers crossed.

Market Research.

I have been spending all my time at the moment designing and printing out our market research packs. We have now finished all 170 of them and will get them posted off tomorrow.

The Research Pack

Questionairre and Sample Tags

Card Designs Sample Tags

Finished packs all ready to post.