Blog

UPDATE: WE ARE NO LONGER ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR THIS POSITION

JOIN OUR TEAM
Smudge Ink is a design and letterpress printing business in Charlestown, MA. We manufacture and sell greeting cards, gifts, and custom invitations. Our team is friendly, hardworking, and a little silly.

Help us continue to grow by bringing your organizational skills, attention to detail, and enthusiasm. This part-time position is a great opportunity for somebody who wants to learn more about letterpress printing and small business!

JOB DESCRIPTION
This is a part-time position with flexible hours Monday and Tuesday. We are looking for somebody to work 12-16 hours per week (exact hours TBD). Start date will be January 2019.

A shop assistant is a crucial part of our team and plays a major role in making sure our products are produced in a timely manner. Responsibilities include (but are not limited to):

Trimming plates and setting up folders: We use plates for the printing process. All plates need to be cut to size and organized. 

Oiling presses and cleaning drip pans: Presses must be maintained and the work area needs to be cleaned regularly. 

Paper Cutter Maintenance: Like the presses, our industrial paper cutter needs care including regular blade changes.

Prep and finishing work: This includes prep-cutting press sheets, finish trimming, gluing notepads, mixing inks, edge painting, and folding cards.

Cleaning up and recycling: The press room can get pretty messy when we're busy. To keep things moving, the shop assistant helps with tidying and keeping up with paper recycling. 

Fulfillment assistance as needed: This may include shelving finished products and filling orders. 

HOW TO APPLY
To apply for this position, please email a resume and cover letter to george@smudgeink.com. Use the subject line SHOP ASSISTANT.

Read more

Read more

This month our National Stationery Show (NSS) prep falls into all three categories! Read on for a look behind the scenes. 

THE GOOD. We bring our own hard walls to NSS. So far we've built or patched up all of the walls. We have also measured and cut our shelving and pre-drilled holes in the walls for easy hanging during setup. Eric and I truly love working together, and this kind of project is a fun change of pace. 

Pre-drilling shelving

We have to work in our garage because it's been pretty rainy here. When it's cold we set up space heaters and wear winter jackets. It's pretty glamorous, obviously.

Measuring and cutting shelves and display pieces

There are so many pieces to this big puzzle. We work from the 2-D booth layout using a scaled ruler to measure and place everything correctly. As we place shelves on the wall I label them and make notes everywhere—sometimes directly on the shelves! 

 My notes on the shelf that will hold our new jotter!

Wes, age 4, helps by handing us tools and by providing comic relief

The back wall is 20' long but we can only set up 12' at a time in the garage! 

Clayton's 3-D model has really helped us visualize the booth, which is awesome! If you haven't yet, go check out his great post about designing the booth layout! 

It's also been wonderful knowing that my team can hold down the fort at the office while I'm working on the booth. It makes this process so much easier. Go, team!  

THE BAD. There's still so much left to do. Every night Eric heads out the garage for an hour to work on the booth. We're currently preparing to paint everything—the walls, the shelves, the furniture (that we have yet to build!). Wish us so much luck. 

THE UGLY. The pile of tissues on my desk right now is pretty ugly! Season allergies are attacking with a vengeance right now.

Read more

Rome was not built in a day, and the same goes for a successful National Stationery Show (NSS)! Sending fun and beautiful mailers to stores and paper friends alike only hits the tip of the NSS iceberg. As you may or may not know, we must build a booth too! Building ours (Booth 1421!) comes with both its joys and challenges.

It all starts with a plan, and for us, that plan started months ago. Priority numero uno: our booth had to be fun! Priority 2: all of our products—and I mean ALL—must be displayed on the booth walls. Priority 3: the entire booth must be able to fit in the boss's mini van. With this in mind, we hit the illustrator art board (and the ground) running.

(image: select 2-D renderings of our NSS booth)

To start, I designed 2-D models of the wall display and fixtures to essentially serve as our building and assembly blueprint. When we actually go to set up the booth, everyone gets a printout (and scaled ruler to boot!) telling us exactly what goes where right down to the quarter-inch. Putting in the effort upfront to create a detailed to-scale model saves us loads of time and guess work when we're deep in the setup trenches.  

This year’s booth measures nearly twice the size of last year’s, so we more or less had to start from the ground up. But once we landed on a direction and liked what we were seeing on paper, the implementation of 3-D modeling began. Don’t flip out too much, no auto-cad software used here, just some humble paper cutouts (more fitting for a paper trade show I must say).

(image: 3-D model of our NSS booth)

The 3-D model really gave us a better understanding of the flow of space. The human figurines helped us visualize the experience our visitors might have in relation to our products and furniture when steeping into our booth. And though time-consuming, three scale models later we can be even more sure of the aesthetic and functional quality of our end result than we could have with solely a 2-D printout. Basically, the 2-D blueprint serves as our building guide and the 3-D model as our vision.

(image: close up of 3-D model of our NSS booth)

Priority 1 has been met with the creation of larger than life party animals while Priority 2 has been met via the laborious hours of puzzle-piecing products upon our blueprinted booth walls. Priority 3? Well, April and Eric have started building and seem to be making great headway. Let’s just say they’re basically Booth 1421 gladiators! Stay tuned for the next blog post to hear about their progress!

Read more

THE GOOD. At the beginning of the month, we had another photo shoot with Lara over at The Studio Nouveau in Waltham. She took some gorgeous photos for our 2017 Holiday Catalog and Spring Supplement. (Yep, you heard that right … we’re already gearing up for the holidays.) Lara is so easy to work with and she’s really great at helping us get the shots we imagine. We also had fun getting everyone’s headshots taken. I’ve been itching to update our About Us page, and it’s finally happening (soon-ish)!

Our spring release has been in the making since September when we started designing calendars and holiday cards and working through some packaging ideas. We’ve also added new everyday greetings, gifts wrap and tags, and fun origami notepads to the line (stay tuned!). As I put together the final touches on the catalogs, it felt so good to see everything come together. We even had all of our samples ready to go out to our sales rep this week as planned! We set a schedule and stuck to it—go, team!!

THE BAD. Oh boy. This month was not nice to our industrial paper cutter. It was malfunctioning and spent, over the course of the month, several days out of commission. As a result, our printing schedule got backed up because we couldn't trim paper down to size. And cards that were printed started piling up when they couldn't get their final trim. After some trial and error and talking with a few experts, we're up and running again. But it was pretty stressful (and expensive). So glad that's over. Phew!

THE UGLY. It is currently snowing. Sigh.

Read more