Forty Years in the Card Trade: What Changed on the Production Floor, and What Didn't

The job was 20,000 cards, and it went out of here clean.

The customer sent it on to their own mail house for sealing and mailing — not ours. Somebody there put too much water on the flap. The water soaked through the glue and sealed the flap to the card inside. 20,000 times.

Then the phone rang, and the call was about our cards and our envelopes.

They sent a sample back. One look and it was obvious: the envelope had been saturated. Not a glue problem. A water problem, three steps downstream, at a vendor I didn't pick and never spoke to.

I held the line. I lost the customer.

I'd still like that order back. Not to win the argument — I won the argument. I'd like the chance to fulfill it.

The month is the lesson, not the water

Here is the part that took me a while to see properly.

It was a December order, placed and fulfilled in December. There was no time to redo it.

That same mistake in September is a phone call, a reprint, and a story nobody tells twice. In December it's terminal. The error wasn't worse. The calendar had already taken away the ability to recover from it.

Which is the real argument for ordering early, and it isn't the one people expect. Ordering early buys you two different kinds of slack, and they are not the same thing. Room to recover from somebody else's mistake. And room for the mail itself to behave. Lose the first and a fixable error becomes permanent. Lose the second and a perfect job lands after the holiday.

That customer wasn't undone by a mail house. They were undone by having no room.

What actually changed on the floor

When I started, there was lead type. It had to be typeset, and typesetting was a process — a real one, with hours in it, before a single sheet of anything got printed.

Then hand-fed presses. One sheet, one pull, one at a time, by a person standing there doing it.

Most of that is digital now. What digital actually bought us is narrower than people assume, and I want to be accurate about it rather than enthusiastic. Two things. The color is more consistent — it holds from the first sheet to the last, which it did not reliably do before. And the clock is shorter, because the time that used to go into typesetting is simply gone.

That's it. That's the honest list.

I'm not going to tell you the cards got better. Design got better in some places and worse in others, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something. What got better is the color and the clock. Those two I'll defend. The rest is nostalgia pointed in one direction or the other.

What didn't change — and actually got worse

So I asked myself the harder version of the question. After everything that got faster, what still takes exactly as long as it did when I started?

Customers wait until the last minute. They always did — that part is not new and I'd be lying if I said it was. What's new is why. They wait until the last minute now believing that because a thing can be on the porch tomorrow, a card can be produced in under 24 hours.

There's still a production process. There's still a shipping process. Cards are not picked off a shelf and magically appear in the mail stream.

Follow that through, because it's the true shape of the last forty years and it's not the shape anybody expects. Every improvement on my list compressed the production side. The customer's expectation compressed faster. Same-day everything reset what "soon" means for everything in a person's life — including an object manufactured one at a time with their name printed on it.

So the gap between what people expect and what the work takes is wider now than it was when I was waiting on lead type. The shop is quicker than it has ever been. It got lapped anyway.

The thing customers get exactly backwards

Self-seal envelopes and gummed envelopes. The self-seal upcharge is $24 per 100 envelopes, and it scales with the order, so 600 cards is $144 and not $24. Almost everybody guesses wrong about which one they want, and the guess costs more than the upcharge does.

The instinct runs like this: the self-seal flap must be safer on a big job, because fewer hands touch it and nobody has to get the moisture right, and $24 per 100 is cheap insurance. Perfectly reasonable. Also backwards.

It is the small mailing that wants self-seal — 200 or 300 cards you are sealing yourself at the conference table on a Tuesday afternoon. At $24 per 100 envelopes that is the cheapest comfort in the catalog, and you will be glad you bought it.

Mail houses do not want them. They prefer the gummed envelope. They just need to be more careful when they seal them.

Read that next to the opening story. On a big job, the entire risk of the thing sits in whether the person running the sealer knows how much water to use. That's 20,000 cards in one sentence.

Where's the break between doing it yourself and sending it out? It depends entirely on who's doing the mailing — but somewhere around 300, 400, 500 is usually where it tips. That's judgment, not a rule, and I'd give you a different answer for a different list. We work both ends of it: large mailings through a local mail house that does a much better job at this than most, and smaller ones in-house ourselves.

Big jobs run on an earlier clock

One piece of information the opening story has earned.

Jobs of 5,000 and 10,000 cards exist, and we handle them soup to nuts. But they have to be ordered in October — early November at the very latest — to get produced, delivered, and through a mail house and the mail stream without a crisis.

That is earlier than any calendar published on this site, and those calendars are built around an order of 250. If you're sending thousands, the dates you've read here are not your dates. Yours are earlier, and nobody is going to tell you that at the point of order unless somebody tells you now.

I'd much rather say it to you in October than explain it to you in December.

What I'd tell somebody sending their first one

Pick something that represents you — what you want to say, and how you want to say it. Make sure there's a memorable message in it. This is your opportunity to wish somebody a good holiday season, which is a decent thing to get to do in the course of a working year.

And it's a relatively inexpensive way to keep your message in front of them at this time of year.

Then start early. Think about it early.

Forty years, one 20,000-card job I'd take back, a thesis about same-day delivery, and a deadline for large orders that lands in October — and all four converge on the same sentence. Start early. Not because I want your order in September. Because the version of you who ordered in September is the one whose card is on the wall before the pile arrives.

Lead type is gone and I don't miss it. The clock is shorter than it has ever been. You still cannot buy room at the end of November, at any price, from anybody.