This holiday season I donated Haute Wrap holiday gift wrap to several local non-profit charities, churches and schools.
Here is what one group made with the Haute Wrap paper: origami ornaments!
Wrap Wrecycled!
I recently found myself wondering what to do with thousands of sheets of paper that had suffered minor damages in shipping and could not be sold as gift wrap. Sending it to a recycling center or back to my printing house would both be costly, and I thought there must be a more creative solution.
I thought about how I could use the imperfect paper in-house and came up with two ideas. The first: to have it cut and bound into spiral notebooks (just for use in our studio, because my awesome studio manager loves spiral notebooks to take notes) and the second: what about an envelope liner to decorate your boring, plain envelopes? I did both!
The envelope liners are so much fun and they make a great addition to an envelope. In addition to the envelope liners, I decided there had to be fun coordinating colors of envelopes and notecards to match!
Check out the Haute Wrap website for our collection of photographic envelope liners and complementary envelopes!
2014 and Still Wrapping!
We are excited to announce that Lynn Mitchell at the Los Angeles Gift Mart has signed on Haute Wrap! We will be represented in full force for the upcoming January gift show, taking place January 21st through the 27th. Below is a sneak peek at a wall display featuring Haute Wrap’s gift wrap at Lynn Mitchell Group. I will be on hand to answer any questions, and to lend my support to the terrific staff at Lynn Mitchell in suite #856 at the L.A. Mart. After all, Los Angeles is home away from home! Born and raised in L.A., I love a good visit to Southern California. It will most certainly provide me with more images to add to the Haute Wrap collection!
Wrapping Up 2013!
With samples being sent to potential new retailers and orders being shipped to existing customers, the holidays proved to be a fun, busy time at Haute Wrap. Our local clientele couldn’t get enough of Haute Wrap! We had so many great comments from clients out and about… “most beautiful wrapping paper ever,” “so many awesome images,” “don’t want to use it for wrapping paper, want to hang it as art,” “just makes me smile and happy when I wrap a gift in Haute Wrap.”
We introduced a few of our newest images early to give retailers more choices other than just holiday. The frames were jumping off the shelves, and we were busy in-house with new paper products and ideas, and awaiting the Italian woven scarves.
We developed our website (www.HauteWrap.com), this blog site, added a Facebook page, and made brochures and new collection series accordions to fit in the gift boxes for the consumer. We were busy behind the scenes like Santa’s helpers in preparation for 2014.
Wrap It In Lucite
When I went to the National Stationery Show in New York, I was thinking of a tabletop frame or a decorative way to announce my name and booth. I went to a good friend, a local framer in Sun Valley, Idaho. As an addition to her framing business, she manufactures a terrific lucite frame in 4 sizes. I took her several of my photographic images to produce in frames, and they were so well received that we decided to expand the Haute Wrap line with the addition of lucite tabletop frames. We took it one step further and started adding customized logos and personalized messages to the frames for clients.
A Different Wrap!
After settling in to my new studio and headquarters for Haute Wrap my mind was on a different wrap: Italian woven scarves with my images! I received samples from my manufacturer in Italy and they were spot on. I put together a limited collection of images to be produced on this first run of scarves. This project proved to take longer than I had expected – through the summer and in to the fall. Here is a sneak peek!
Wrapping Away in 2013
With the holidays behind me, during the first few months of 2013 I put together a collection of images to take to press for Haute Wrap. At the same time I began work on designing my logo, branding, and packaging.
I went to New York to pursue another project that I had been wanting to produce for over a year: Italian woven scarves with my images. While in New York I was approached by the National Stationary Show that is held in May. I wasn’t keen on the amount of time, travel and the money and I’d have to spend to enter the show, but they did a great job convincing me to come to New York in May and introduce Haute Wrap.
It was a splendid 2 weeks — in fact, there are a few new gift wrapping papers for 2014 inspired by my visit to New York!
Graphic or Photographic?
That set in motion more research. I started to call different paper printers in the Pacific Northwest, doing research to find out: how does one produce photographic gift wrapping paper? I learned about offset printing, different types of paper, the differences between stochastic and conventional printing, and received a flood of paper samples – paper weights and paper finishes (velvet, dull, glossy, uncoated…).
Over the years, I had bought enough gift wrapping paper to know what I wanted to do and what I didn’t. I narrowed down my choice of printers and, a week before Christmas, chose 12 holiday images to go to press.
After the printing was complete, I armed myself with poster bags, put an individual sheet in each bag, and went to local retailers and a few arts & crafts fairs. The response was overwhelming. The one comment that kept coming up was that everyone was calling it “happy paper” and telling me how fun it was to see all the boxes under their trees with these beautiful images. People loved giving their packages away with the holiday images on them, and some people even used them to hang as art.
Now, did I know I was onto something? All I knew was that it made me just as happy then as it does now. There was a huge learning curve, but in that, the journey has been fun and continues today.
Haute Off the Press
It was a year ago this month that I setting up a photo shoot for a local publication. The photo shoot required holiday themed wrapped boxes. The retailer I was shooting for had forgotten wrapping paper to wrap her boxes with. I was photographing holiday ornaments for her product shots anyway so knowing I could photograph in the studio and print simultaneously I told her not to stress, we’d make our own. I began photographing and in succession printing on my Epson 9890 with cheap presentation paper. We wrapped her boxes and she said, “Nina, this could be great wrapping paper.”
What she didn’t know was that the wheels were already turning! I had recently come up with this idea of printing my photographs on large paper as a way to review images I might chose for a home decor line in mind. I was in my studio printing and on a whim wrapped a coffee table book in my studio, and I was thinking… wow, this is really cool! Then I wrapped boxes, stacks of magazines- anything I could wrap. I printed all types of images from my library and continued to wrap until I was surrounded by over 100 “happy” boxes on a ledge surrounding my studio. Everyone that came in went nuts! It was visual candy for all!
After the hundred “happy” boxes were displayed in my studio, the question became why had I not seen anything like this? And, was there such a thing in the marketplace? I scoured the internet searching for photographic gift wrapping paper. I came up empty. I thought, “well, it’s either there and I can’t find it, or there is a reason it doesn’t exist!” And, if not, why not? Every wrapping paper in the marketplace was graphic. The question then became: graphic or photographic?