Ruination & Despair

We are pleased to announce that this morning we shipped an order of fine cards to the estimable Russian Hill Bookstore in San Francisco. It’s been a couple of years, and we are excited to be returning to Polk Street!

Once again our avid sales team has come through, adding the socially conscious pet-supply retailer The Big Bad Woof to the roster of fine merchants who carry Archelaus cards. We have a wide variety of animal cards on offer, and it was these designs that enabled our sales staff to woo and win.

Founded in 2005, The Big Bad Woof is located in the Old Takoma neighborhood, right on the border between northeast Washington and suburban Maryland, conveniently close to the Takoma Metro station.

This time it’s Left Bank Books in Searsport, Maine, a former ship-building center turned antique-shop capital on the Atlantic coast, some twenty miles south-southwest of Bangor. We sent them their first order this morning. Reportedly, one of the three owners discovered our cards on a recent visit to Washington and decided they needed to get in on a good thing!

This afternoon we shipped a first order of fine cards to Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh, North Carolina, a mere stone’s throw from Meredith College and North Carolina State University. Established in 1984, Quail Ridge Books is an award-winning independent bookseller, in short, just the sort of fine merchant who would choose to carry our products!

I see that Customer Service Minion #2 got the jump on me, announcing this month’s clearance sale before I could post our two new checkbox cards. No extra fish heads for him today!

We have been putting this off for awhile now, but unfortunately increases in our supplier and shipping costs are forcing us to raise some of our prices. We are attempting to hold the line, however, by limiting this affront to your sensibilities to our black-and-white cards, which will be coming up to the same price level as our color cards.

Thus, our smaller black-and-white cards, which up to now have cost $1.95 retail, will rise to $2.50 (wholesale price: $7.50 per half-dozen), and our larger black-and-white cards, which have cost $2.50 retail, will rise to $2.95 (wholesale price: $8.85 per half-dozen).

These lamentable but necessary increases will occur on the following schedule:

wholesale: 1 February 2011;
retail: 1 March 2011.

Our retail shipping-and-handling charges will also increase on 1 March.

This staggered approach is intended to give our loyal retail customers an opportunity to help us clear out inventory bearing the old prices. And, to facilitate this worthy goal, we are having a SALE! Throughout the month of February, not only can you stock up on our black-and-white cards at their old prices, but — if you are a member of the Archelaus mailing list or an Archelaus Facebook fan — you will receive a 5% discount on your entire retail order, whatever it may contain, if you enter the secret discount code at checkout. But then, if you are on our mailing list, or one of our Facebook fans, you should already know this, and the secret discount code to boot!

So, by all means, go ahead and order our fine cards as though there were no tomorrow, for, while (presumably) there will be one, our prices will be higher then. (I hope I don’t need to explain that that’s a metaphorical tomorrow, meaning March 1, not a literal tomorrow, meaning Groundhog’s Day, when, in fact, our retail prices will still be the same as they were yesterday. As an Archelaus customer, you should be sufficiently sentient to grasp that on your own, but this clarification is provided in case you happen to be a Lawyer.)

Today we shipped a first order of fine cards to Greer, a fine paper merchant’s in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood. It seemed like a good way to wrap up the year.

Greer has some pretty enthusiastic Yelp reviews, should anyone feel like reading those.

All members of our staff have left the office for an orgiastic corporate retreat at an undisclosed location. They will return, possibly somewhat the worse for wear, on December 31, 2010. We regret that we will be unable to attend to orders until then.

In any event, we hope that your preferred winter holidays have been/are/will be enjoyable. Unless, of course, they aren’t supposed to be, in which case we hope they are whatever else that might be instead.

On Saturday, December 11, 2010, Archelaus will be attending the Riverdale Park Holiday Market in Prince George’s County, Maryland. This will be the fourth year we will be selling our cards at this enjoyable event, and we highly recommend it to our customers (and prospective customers) in the area.

We were recently asked to design bookmarks for Ms. Cleto’s second-grade class at Edgelea Elementary School in Lafayette, Indiana. While we do not generally regard seven-year-olds as constituting our primary target audience, there seemed no harm in compelling our design team to see what it could do, with such results as you may judge for yourselves.

Cadwalader was having a little trouble coming up with a suitable holiday card this year, until I suggested that he simply reproduce his Uncle Festus’s always entertaining holiday letter.

The obvious advantage for our customers is that this fine card frees them from the odious responsibility of writing their own pedestrian holiday letters, which no one is going to read anyway.

In any event, chances are that Festus’s brood is more interesting than yours!

This morning we shipped a first order to Pennysmith’s Paper in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So, if you happen to live in that part of the world, now you can buy our fine cards directly from an established bricks-and-mortar retailer that’s been filling local stationery needs since 1979!