Voices of Trade: San Francisco Letterpress Entrepreneur Shares Why Trade Agreements Will Help Small Businesses

We started out with letterpress greeting cards and distributed them through very traditional wholesale channels are going to trade shows using sales representatives to get our product into the hands of wholesalers.

A few years after we started doing that we started realizing that what custom wedding invitations

were an important piece of our potential business because they could offset the green card business and another revenue stream that experience gave us tremendous insight into global consumer demand for our products.

We had people brides from Singapore from overseas everybody wanting to order from us and we had tons and experiences trying to ship them their wedding invitations.

You know potentially getting them held up in customs in and these are extremely emotional people with me know very tight deadlines.

Many many stories of you know brides you know at their wits end because they can't get their petitions at customs or because the cost to ship to them is exorbitantly higher than what they could afford to pay.

So we we amassed a huge amount have export and e-commerce experience through being in the wedding invitation industry.

More and more our customers both wholesale and retail and users are shopping online and they're shopping for good and expecting to be able to shop globally.

So we do sell on Etsy our website.

And what we often find is that people all over the world want to you know get going our site and by a product from for some products.

The problem is our price point is you know five dollars me average order for card average orders probably around twenty or thirty dollars.

Now when you do you get a customer to check out and they see shipping cost to send the twenty to thirty dollars order to Australia or to China Malaysia wherever is forty dollars or fifty dollars that stops them in their track.

They have a huge demand an appetite for our products but they can't you know they've they won't think that they stop and they don't actually complete their purchase because of the shipping.

And that's just one barrier so to get around that and we've been trying to go through distributors & reach wholesalers or retailers on the ground in foreign countries.

But we see that you know through experience at the wedding is it and how quickly that there that grew through direct e-commerce consumers we see the potential.

We know that consumers out there wanting our products if we can sell them directly to them online and wholesalers are too increasingly ordering online and wanting to place orders online and manage their orders online.

And we can see that is growing at a small wage now small proportion to of our orders now but we see that that is just is that is where the growth is going to occur.

And so we're super excited about the potential to grow our business through e-commerce and are just excited to make that more viable than is now.