The last few days before we were due to travel to Aldeburgh brought frenetic activity and not a few panics. Fingers were crossed as some of the printing timescales were going to be tight and it was very clear that we were going to have to make at least two trips in the car to get everything to Aldeburgh. We had booked our accommodation to start a few days before the start date of the exhibition and this proved to be vital in sorting out the logistics.
One thing that I wanted to do before the exhibition was to get my paintings professionally photographed to allow for prints to be made at a future date. I had arranged to take the paintings to ‘Little Pink Cloud Limited’ https://littlepinkcloud.com however the person making the booking hadn’t remembered that there was an extra bank holiday for the coronation and so had to delay the session for later in the week, making things very tight for packing up for transport.
Having three bank holidays in the same month caused all sorts of problems with scheduling and it became touch and go as to whether the catalogues would be printed in time. Part of the problem was that we weren’t able to guarantee what space we would have in the entrance hall of the gallery if there was a late booking of the large upstairs gallery room. We didn’t get the final all-clear until the week before our booking and as this impacted on our catalogue this was another source of stress.
The greetings cards printing was done by SixPrint http://www.sixprint.co.uk/Greeting-card-printing.html who specialise in greetings cards and who offer mixed design pricing on their print runs. This is a great bonus as it allowed Linda and I to get a large number of different designs done with 12 cards of each design at a much cheaper price. They are also very good quality cards and the company supports the Woodland Trust and is carbon neutral etc. The cards turned up two days before we were due to leave and we then had to set about folding, inserting envelopes and putting into the cellophane wraps and sealing for over 500 cards. Family were drafted in!
As well as the eight-page catalogues we also had to get the A2 posters printed together with business cards, these were all done by a local printing company which meant that we were able to pick things up rather than wait for postal deliveries.
The poster is a combination of part of my Wave painting and Linda’s photograph of The Walker on the Beach. This seemed to work well and we had good feedback about it.
The catalogue we decided would be an 8 page A4 booklet and the printers have a minimum order for booklets of 200.
Front cover – page 1
Inside pages 2+3
Inside pages 4+5
Inside pages 6+7
Rear cover page 8
Business card front and rear (QR code takes you to my website)
Finally we had to wait for delivery of the card readers for our business accounts and set these up, these proved to be vital in terms of making sales as people don’t seem to carry cash these days and even greetings card sales were usually done either using bank cards or phones. We used SumUp as they offer a free business account when you purchase their card readers with no monthly fees and only charge about 1.5% transaction fee. Their readers also have built in sim cards to allow usage where there is no wifi.
Thankfully all the last-minute issues were sorted and we were able to put the exhibition together as planned.