The Boss of You

In one of the chapters of our book (coming out Spring 2008) we deal with the many, many marketing materials you could put together when you start up your business (or that you’ll redesign and develop throughout the life of your business). Because our book isn’t aimed at folks who are inclined to do things the conventional way, we’ve included all kinds of examples and tips from folks who have done creative (and often uber cost effective) things with their marketing materials.

There’s a photoset of business cards up at Flickr right now that could serve as an awesome gallery for inspiration if you’re on the hunt for your own cards. Many of the cards there are pretty fancy and would be quite pricey to produce, but the examples are full of inspiration that could be morphed into less expensive options. I really like the example pictured here. It’s for a homegoods store that bills itself as a “general store” (though it’s filled with fancy housewares. While actually having a card like this produced through a printer would be quite pricey — I’m guessing it’s higher grade paper stock and the unusual cut on the edges plus the die-cut in the centre wouldn’t be cheap — you could have a stamp made up to look like this and actually take those paper tags and print your card on them. Given that, in our experience, you almost never need all 1000 of the minimum card order most places have, simply rubber-stamping a few dozen cards as you need them could work for some folks.

There are plenty of other gorgeous examples in the photoset, go take a look.