Bloomin' Flower Cards

Good News – We made the news in Denver,  9 news, Denvers #1 news source.

Bad news – it’s  5:30 am at the paper making facility.

It was awesome. Satellite dishes in the parking lot and everything. Don did a good job. He barely looks sleepy.

Thanks for coming by Bloomin Gregg, it was great to meet you – Tom

Where in the town is Gregg Moss

If you get a chance check out the clip below.

http://www.9news.com/video/default.aspx?bctid=102791170001#/Where+in+the+Town/102791170001

We may have produced our first seed paper wedding invitation over 14 years ago, but we haven’t done much with it until about a year ago. We started making greeting cards in 1995 and dabbled with a few invitations and promotions in the years to follow. Although we continued to make retail products over the years, the ad specialty industry consumed much of our time and interests over the last 10 or so years. We hadn’t put much energy into invitations and so we just produced a few here and there.

During one of our weekly meetings last summer Don and I discussed the idea of putting some custom invitations back in the mix. I mean, how hard could it be? We have  a competent and growing art department, eager sales team, and a group of customer service people that just love to help people. To top it off we were moving forward with a serious website development and media company called Mango Media Corporation that could put together some cool online invitation customization tools for our redesigned website. We thought we should be able to have this whole thing up and running by late winter, just in time for the spring invitation season.

We had a BIG company meeting to tell everyone what we were up to, that we were moving forward with a whole new project – CUSTOM INVITATIONS. Then the development team rolled up their sleeves, kicked off their high heels and got to work. It didn’t seem that complex at first, an invite here, a response card there. A splash of color on the save the date card that matches the seed paper place cards. But wait, what should be seed paper and what should be card stock, and how much seed paper is too much. Is 80# cover stock thick enough? How many colors should we offer? How many envelope sizes do we need to stock? How do we demonstrate that on the website? What, we can only buy that 120# cover from the mill but they have to make it first, maybe next month. Aahhhhhhhhhhhhh!º•ª¬˙ #%$#!!!

Saying we underestimated the complexity of offering a plantable wedding invitation line is a gross understatement. Hey, if it were easy everyone would do it right.

Thanks to our outstanding employees like:

Abby Simon

Brijanna Carbone

Emily Burrows

we are getting this done, and done well. Hey Don Martin you have done a great job on this too. Thanks to you all from the rest of us at Bloomin.

Although I say done, this is just the beginning of some great wedding and other custom invitations. Although Mango will hopefully have our new website up soon, for now please go to www.bloomininvites.com to see our designs and learn more about bloomininvites.

Our first complete wedding book.

It may not be perfect, but it is a great first book.

I really enjoy watching our seed paper sprout. Every week or two we take samples of some random or specific  sheets of paper to “loosely” test for germination. No we are not always super scientific about it, we send our paper off to a lab for that. This is just to make sure that our paper is growing like it is supposed to. We average about 50% germination – give or take, anyway, when our paper is wet in our germination trays, the colors look so saturated and rich and the sprouts are so green. I can’t keep my eyes off it. Here a couple of pics I took last week, I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.