Promote Your Crafty Biz in Green: Business Cards


[Handmade business cards by Lizerati. Used with permission.]

We’ve had crafty business on the brain this week! On Sunday, Julie wrote about salvaged setups for outdoor shows, and yesterday, I posted about recovering after a long day of vending. So what about your promotional materials? It’s important to have some sort of take-away at your booth so folks who don’t have cash on hand can find you later. Here are a few eco-friendly resources for making or printing your business cards!

Do It Yourself
If you’ve got some spare time and energy, you can always make your own cards! Check out Autumn’s great tutorial on seed packet business cards. You could take that same idea and really make it whatever you wanted. Maybe try printing on the back of junk mail or cut up some brown paper bags? My pal Liz made her cards (pictured above) using discarded paper, stamps, and a corner rounder!

Printing Services
Sometimes, time is just not on your side. Never fear! There are a bunch of great resources out there to help you.

Berkeley, California-based Greener Printer uses soy inks on recycled paper. On top of that, they purchase offsets to neutralize their carbon footprint! They’ll even do rounded corners, though you might want to watch out with this one – it costs 10 cents per card, which can add up fast! You might be better off investing in a corner rounder of your own and doing that part yourself. Greener Printer does great quality work, and they’ve got excellent customer service, too!

I also recently discovered Bluegrass Print. They offer eco-friendly printing at no additional cost. When you place your order, you just select the “Go Green” options, and you’re all recycled-papered and soy-inked up! They also run weekly specials to lower your cost even more.

For an unconventional twist on the old business card, The United States Business Card Company is worth a look-see! They do letter pressed business cards on the backs of used cereal boxes. I think these would really stand out from your run-of-the-mill business cards.

Have you guys made your own business cards? Used an eco-friendly printing service that I missed? We’d love to hear all about it!

10 thoughts on “Promote Your Crafty Biz in Green: Business Cards”

  1. We use to print our own business cards from cereal boxes, frozen pizza, veggie burgers etc. We always got comments on how cool it was from our customers. We also used the boxes to make hag tags for our clothing. Now however our newer printer won’t let us run the boxes through it- so we’ve been using Moo cards. I’d love to get back to the recycling boxes again.

  2. Premier Graphics in Bellingham, WA uses vegetable-based (soy inks is a bit of a misnomer – vegetable-based is more accurate) inks in their print shop. They’re great to work with too.

    Most papers these days have a certain amount of recycled paper. The thing to look for is how much post-consumer recycled content it has. A great choice for post-consumer recycled paper is Neenah paper’s Environment line. They have a bright white and natural color in several weights that is 100% post-consumer recycled. If you go to 30% post-consumer content, you have a lot more choices and color.

    @Mel – have you thought of using the boxes as the cardstock to give the cards weight and adhering a sticker to them?

  3. It’s always worth seeing if they do bulk deals too. Here in Melbourne (australia) our group, the Craft Cartel does an annual postcard and business card printing bulk job through a local eco printer http://printtogether.com.au – they rule! By printing in bulk we not only save thousands of dollars collectively but it saves heaps of resources, especially paper, water and electricity. The last lot we got printed equalled out to a bill of about $100 each instead of the $500 if we’d have done it individually. Massive saving!

    It’s a bit of work to organise but the way we do it is that everyone chips in an extra $5 and subsidises the printing for the organiser as a way of saying thanks. Good vibes all round 🙂

  4. This one is truly looking just awesome post about business cards. As we all know that business cards are really playing the important role behind the effective business strategic. This one is really one of the most powerful marketing tool. So the business cards should be effective and impressive. And the existing cards design and regarding information are really looking promising for best of marketing.

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