A Giveaway? Yes! And new mailing materials!

Yesterday I redesigned all of my mailing materials. It might not seem too important ("What? Stamps, right?") but since I sell many of my prints online, the only chance I get to really interact with my customer is often when they open a package from me.

It's an opportunity to say hello, thank them personally, and sneak a treat or two inside like a coupon or a tiny free portrait.

The new mailing supplies for the shop!

One of the things I love about designing a set of stationary is creating all of the pieces to match, yet at the same time look entirely different from one another. 

The sticker for the back flap.

Return address labels and "Do Not Bend"
 stickers to gently warn clumsy mailmen.

Remember that part about saying hello? This
little guy will take care of that for me on the address label.

Everyone chips in to help with the 'Thank Yous'.

"Thank you" stationary, ready for an afternoon note!

(I really like creating personal stationary, this may have been my favorite part).

A sample for the back of a new business card.
I like for the backs to be tiny prints of their own.
A "Mullet" business card, if you will. Business on the front, party on the back.

Instagram allows me to capture my work in "1970s Pretty Lady vision".

Lupin decided to help, in that way cats do.

I finally created a new Facebook page for Georgia Dunn Studio last night! You can find it here. I know it's a pain to switch from one Facebook page to another, so I'm hosting a free giveaway on the new one next Friday to make it a little more fun! The prize will be one print from my Etsy shop, your choice. The rules to enter are posted on the wall of the new page here.

Making this new page brought back some childhood memories, oddly enough. See, in elementary school we used to make these little mailboxes for Valentine's Day. We'd all bring in shoe boxes, struggle to cut a slot in the top with those thick goofy scissors that never worked, and decorate them. After they were covered in lace, paint, glitter, pom poms, googly eyes, fingerprints, and anything else a kid can think of, the teacher would have us set them on the edge of our desks. And then we would all run around the room, filling each other's boxes with paper valentines.

There was always this horrible terror when you got back to your desk, that you'd lift up the lid and your box would be empty. I don't think it ever happened, because most of our parents forced us to write valentines to every kid in the class (following the all inclusive "birthday party rule" that gym teachers never heard of when it came to picking teams). Still, that terror was always there, the feeling that I put all this work into this smudgy little box with feathers stuck all over it and now I was going to open it, and it was going to be empty. I'd be standing there, covered from head to toe in glitter, with an empty shoebox decked out in garbage and literally no one would care.

That's the closest feeling I can equate to creating a new Facebook page for my illustrations last night. I finished it, hit save, and immediately I was eight years old staring at a shoebox on my desk. Oh my God, I thought. No one is going to like it. I'm going to wake up and it's going to say "Georgia Dunn Studio, 1 Like" and I'm going to check the notification and find "Georgia Dunn likes this" and I am going to start to cry and all the kids are going to laugh and I am going to throw my desk over and get sent to the principal's office. They're going to call my Mom, and she's going to say "I told you, you should have been a pharmacist."

But that didn't happen! I logged in this morning to 31 likes! And now I have 38! Oh, thank goodness! I talk a big talk about Facebook being silly, but what it comes down to is it's hard to put yourself out there on any public forum. A lot of what I do involves holding something up to the world and shouting, "DO YOU LIKE THIS?" into the wind, whether it be in my shop, on my blog, to customers, to publishers. Rejection is scary, and folks are fickle. That made me very nervous to change the name of my shop, and then follow it across the Internet, changing all the other pages built around it. Everyone has been awesome so far though, and I am so grateful. Thank you very much, everyone who has joined the new page. I hope to gather up some more of the folks still over at Pseudooctopus in the upcoming week.

Anyway, enough therapy, go check out that giveaway on Georgia Dunn Studio's Facebook page! If you win next Friday, you'll get to see these new mailing materials in person on a print package addressed to you!