We are a small print shop located in Rochester, NY, catering to stationery designers, letterpress printers, and home-grown DIY-ers looking for top-notch service and print quality. Started by a stationery designer who was frustrated with the options out there for high-end, small-scale short-run printing, aper + pink is dedicated to providing awesome, high-quality printing on cool, eco-friendly papers (like 100% cotton, sugar cane, bamboo, and even 100% post-consumer).
We provide an array of services for designers and letterpress printers who will be reselling their orders. You can find some of that information here, but please feel free to ask for more info.
Oh, thanks so much for asking.
As it says at the top of our FAQ page, Aper + Pink was started by a graphic designer who had her own stationery biz, and who often considered outsourcing her printing but couldn’t find a print shop that could do her short-run projects justice. (Not even close, in fact.) So once she’d been in business awhile and had learned some tricks and saved some money, she decided to be the print shop she always dreamed of.
Here’s how she described it in the email she sent out shortly after the idea struck her to open her own shop:
Trouble is, most print houses charge a lot for giclee printing on cotton paper at stationery sizes, and I can’t figure out why. I think maybe because they tend to focus more on exhibition art prints they charge a premium for smaller items. But I plan to focus much more on the smaller stationery-sized items and as a result will be optimizing my pricing for those items.
The basic background is this: I’ve been running a design studio / print shop / online retail establishment for three years now, and every six months or so I go through the old “should I or shouldn’t I outsource” debate. Occasionally I’d go on a mad spree ordering paper samples and placing small initial orders with all of the major print houses and I just couldn’t find the combination of quality, materials (cotton please!), vibrance, and customer service that I was looking for.
See a need – fill the need, right? So I will be opening a fine-art | short-run | indie-powered | designer-loving | eco-friendly | in-house | kick-ass | anything-but-basic print shop equipped with everything you need to wow your clients and amaze your friends.
I’ll be featuring vibrant, water-resistant pigment inks and all the best cotton, recycled, and bamboo paper you can imagine. Oh, and want something a bit more exotic? How about sugar cane? Kenaf? Or perhaps some self-adhesive kraft paper? Done.
The thing is, for most people, printing is the un-fun part. It’s the tedious, error-ridden part. It’s the part that brings swear words to their lips and tears to their eyes. It incites arguments between otherwise happily engaged couples just trying to keep invitations personal, practical, and affordable. But I love it. I love learning the tricks and figuring out how to avoid the troubles. I like discovering new methods and new substrates.
I mean, I read blogs about printing.
I really do.
Have other questions? You can find those answers here.
