Printing my greeting cards on the finest quality paper

Printing my greeting cards on the finest quality paper

In my journey selling products made from my artwork online, I've come to find what paper products are liked the best by my customers. Greeting cards are the most popular of the products I sell, so I started by sourcing the best quality paper to print them on. Here is what I found.

The problem

I was originally using a thinner, inexpensive, semi-glossy card stock when I started printing greeting cards, but realised after a short amount of time that this wasn't going to cut it if I wanted happy customers. I received several complaints about the paper being too flimsy and the edges sometimes being rough and clipped. 

There were two important things I needed to do to solve this problem:

  1. I needed a printer that could handle thicker card stock paper, and
  2. I needed to find better greeting card paper.

The paper

Fortunately, I stumbled across Marrutt, a UK-based supplier of paper and other printing supplies. I had originally purchased some of their photo paper for small art prints on Amazon and was really impressed with the quality of the paper. Even using my old ink jet printer, they turned out looking beautiful. So I ventured over to their website to see what else they might have that wasn't available on Amazon and found that they also had a variety of sizes of pre-cut, scored paper specially made for printing greeting cards, as well as matching envelopes. I decided to try their 312gsm Smooth Fine Art Production paper for the greeting cards and it is amazing. Since I've been using this paper, I've been getting nothing but 5-star reviews from customers. I'll also add that they provide an excellent level of customer service.

The printer

After looking at many printing options, I decided to go with the Canon ImagePROGRAF PRO-300 printer. Although I did come across a bit of limitation regarding paper sizes, I ended up adapting in the end and am completely happy with the performance and quality of it.

The problem I had was that I print all my cards borderless, and the sizes I was offering were A6 and A5 (folded). Unfortunately, although the printer description noted that borderless printing was supported, it did not indicate that any particular size was NOT supported and much to my demise, the A6 borderless printing was not. I ended up having to change all of my product variants to offer a similar 5 x 7 inch size in place of the A6. So that aside, I would highly recommend this printer for high quality prints on heavy card stock paper.

I hope this article has been helpful to anyone who is looking to do their own art printing, particularly greeting cards. I also wanted to share my journey and discovery with my existing and future customers. Until next time...

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