Dear Paperlove Friends,
It is all a buzzzzz at the studio this week. So much is going on and the two of us are really excited about what we have been working on. Yesterday we had a lovely meeting with our brand new printing partner and we are so excited about what we will be bringing you in the coming months.
To celebrate, we decided to bring you the opportunity to be on our Creative Team.
We are keeping things simple this time around. You will be able to enter the Creative Team competition.
Requirements are:
1. Use our paper products to create ANY papercrafting or art project.
2. Post your project to the Ivytree Studio Friends group on Facebook by 7 June 2018.
The winners will receive a free pack of our brand new collection. You will then receive a "challenge email" with instructions on how to create a project for the Creative Team with that paper. So for each paper pack you will have to complete the challenge and send us good quality images.
Your Creative Team projects will be blogged about here on our blog and featured on our Social Media pages.
All images you supply us as part of our Creative Team will be copyrighted under Ivytree Studio but your name will be featured as a watermark on each image you supply.
So what do you get: Free paper, exposure and the opportunity to create and share your work.
Each new collection will have a new Creative Team, but if your work is excellent, we may want to include you in the next run anyway.
We will review the T's&C's for the Creative Team each year.
Your task is basically:
1. Create with the paper according to the challenges provided
Types of projects we may suggest in the challenges are:
Scrapbooking: Double, Single layout or Project Life
Cardmaking
Journaling: Art journaling, Bible Journaling, general notebook journaling
Planners
Pocket letters
Mixed Media Art
3D PaperCrafting
Party/Event Dècor
2. Take beautiful pictures in natural light
3. Submit your pictures
From time to time we may launch Creative Team competitions and ask the winners to do a blog post tutorial or video on their project.
So, if this interests you and you would like to enter, join our Ivytree Studio Facebook group today and start creating.
Contact me via email if you don't have some of our product in your stash. We have some stock available for this purpose and can courier it to you before end of May so you have time to still create a project with it for the competition. You can also just place your order directly in our online store here.
We hope to see your entries in our group soon! Can't wait! :)
Talking about the new collection....remember to keep your eyes peeled for it and keep visiting our Ivytree Studio Facebook page this week for announcements. We have worked so hard on this one and I am super excited to share it with all you #Paperlovers! If you are just half as excited about paper as I am, you will love this collection and all it offers you.
We want to make sure you understand who we design for, because we want you to know that we design for YOU!:
We don't just focus on Scrapbookers. We design for creative girls like us. Girls who have a love for paper and for creating beautiful things. We are memory keepers, but we don't just create for your traditional scrapbooker. We create for the girl who likes to think out of the box. I hope that's you! The creative girl...the artistic girl.
We are also Faith Girls. We believe in Jesus Christ and we desire to honour our King with the gifts He has given us. This is our heart and not a sales pitch. Our business is a Kingdom Business and we firmly stand on the Word and the principles in it. We don't suggest that we are perfect or better than anyone else. For us it is a way of life and just who we are. It is a part of us that we cannot separate form anything we attempt in life.
Because of who we are, we want to bring you products that you can use in any project and know that it will not open spiritual doors that you don't need in your life. So we will never create any product related to Halloween, fairies, mandalas, fantasy images like unicorns, magic related topics or anything that has an occultist undertone.
We love to bring you healthy, wholesome, light-filled products that will rather inspire you, give you hope, fill you with faith and a desire to create and honour the Creator Who designed you. This is our commitment to ourselves, to God and to you. I am including it in this post again, because we are so passionate about this. You can hold us to it.
We also believe in supporting local, not just saying but actually living it. We are local girls, our printing company is local, the people that work for them, are local and the products we bring you are locally manufactured.
We believe in supporting local small entrepreneurs and so we are working on bringing you a totally new way of getting in on our product. We are calling it our Ivy Brand Ambassador Program. It is going to be like a club.... a paper club that you can belong to but so much more than that. It will also be a way for us to inspire and support women in general. You will be helping us promote our brand and at the same time earn a commission. Now, that sounds like fun. If you are just starting out or you don't own a large store front, then this opportunity may make a lot of sense to you. You get to play with lovely products, help us promote it where you are and earn a little extra each month. Girls who are serious about business can grow this opportunity and turn it into a business. You wont need a tone of capital to invest to be able to start this Program. Now that's good news!
What about the retailers? We haven't forgotten about you. You can still buy our products. You can still earn discounts according to the size and frequency of your orders. Loyal customers are rewarded. This has not changed.
We just need you to understand a couple of things:
1. We are a boutique studio and not a large distributing company.
2. Each order placed with us, is "made to order" - we feel this is a more sustainable way of doing business and we don't want to waste one tree by over-manufacturing or by flooding the market with our product. We don't believe in "dumping"
3. Our products are special...really special because a lot of love and care goes into designing and manufacturing it. We are a family owned business and so you will receive a special and personal service.
4. We believe that any retailer will be able to purchase our products if they have the right attitude, are realistic about pricing and profits, aren't greedy or demanding and don't over charge the consumer.
5. Last but not least, we suggest that smaller retailers who cannot afford large stock investments because they need to stock a variety of products to serve their clients, should consider a PRE-ORDER system of their own. We launch our collections, you promote it to your clients, take orders and place your oder by the 7th of the month. You can add a little extra in your order to be able to have some stock, but mostly you will place a realistic order on sales you already have. Your risk is smaller this way and you don't lock your capital in large stock quantities that you cannot guarantee will be sold. That makes so much business sense, doesn't it!
While I'm on the subject of a PRE-ORDER system:
1. We have been wanting to implement a monthly order cycle since the beginning. Unfortunately our first printing partner couldn't get us their. We have been working with our new partner and we are starting with the monthly order cycle this month.
2. Our set dates each month in which you can place your order is: 27th of each month until the 7th of the next. You can however place your order any time, but when you place it will determine when it will ship. We will always let you know in advance.
3. Say you order the new collection before the 7th of June, we will be able to ship before the next order cycle start on the 27th of June.
4. As we have been working hard on sorting out all the new changes and getting things in place, that we will be able to bring you something new each month.
The conclusion you can take from this is that we run a Pre-Order system and that each order is "made to order". We don't want to keep large stock quantities for a variety of reasons. It also doesn't make sense for our type of business and for the market we are in.
Keep your eyes peeled for more announcements in the coming weeks and months on this subject.
In our next post we will be sharing some inspiration and also by then our new collection will have been launched.
Until next time.
Visit Ivytree Studio to see more of what we are up to: www.ivytreestudio.co.za
Buy some of our pretty paper here
Connect with the team on our Facebook page here.
Share your Ivytree Studio layouts with us here
