Black Friday Sale and the end of another Era

Folks I can’t believe that I’m doing this again, but I am having to close my Stamp company, again.

Some folks might already know the story, but if you don’t, here’s whats happening: I’ve been trying to get my photopolymer stamp company going for about a year now. I’ve had really solid support from a few folks who were with me first time round at WMS, and I’ve had a tiny but increasing number of folks who discovered us ‘as new’ just recently. It was a really slow start due to the fact that I live in an area of UK called Northern Ireland. We are geographically part of Ireland, but governmentally we belong to UK.

Back a while, the UK decided to distance itself from the EU trading block and mishandled the set-up for us here in NI, it feels like we are in a bit of a no-mans land. Something called the Windsor Framework was supposed to cover the gaps in procedure but in reality, unless you are operating a standard business, the folks in charge here really don’t know what to do with people such as myself who are trying to run businesses that are just a little out of the ordinary. It took me a third of a year to get the necessary documentation to export and import properly.

I live in Northern Ireland and the vast majority of stampers live in USA, so I was always going to be shipping something in or out of USA. I loved my USA stamp manufacturer, they really are the best, but Importing to NI is super expensive so my margins were never going to be that great – fine, I wasn’t looking to purchase a mansion, I just want to be able to pay my bills, eat in a restaurant for my birthday, that sort of thing.

The next largest block of stampers I could find are in EU. Due to the fact that NI is a sort of no-mans land, exporting to EU is a nightmare. Many EU countries imposed duty and tax on my customers, even though they were not supposed to have to pay it – and all because the official postal system here is UK run. The result of this is I that I either use a courier company, which is ridiculously expensive for small orders, or I drive across the border to the Republic of Ireland and post my orders from there. Seriously. I drive to the next country along. Those are my options. The alternative is shipping orders as though they are gifts, which is illegal.

I’ve spent over half of my first year in business wrangling with post offices, researching compliances, dealing with protocols and generally doing everything other than drawing stamps.

This has resulted in only a few stamp releases this year. The first one, I waited over two months for the stock as the UK and Irish postals services played a game of tennis with my boxes of stock trying to decide between them who would actually deliver. For subsequent releases I used another manufacturer, a great manufacturer but a manufacturer whose minimum quantities were simply too much for me.

If you’ve ever been in any type of business you will know that buying in small quantities is terrible value and that unit prices go down the more you can buy. That just has not been feasible for me, so all of my costs have been huge in relation to the size of my business.

Now, two huge things are on the horizon. The first is the GPSR safety regulations that will come into force on the 13th December. Immediately this affects my suppliers, the folks I get my mylar from, for stencils, will not longer ship to NI after this date. Ridiculously I am unable to source mylar in NI. This might mean no more stencil making. What it will mean to my stamps, I do not yet know, I am unable to locate specific information regarding that type of product. I have spent hours searching, but there’s probably another few weeks worth of research for me before I figure out how to be compliant with that set of regulations.

The other thing on the horizon is January. In January the new US administration will almost certainly apply tariffs to products from outside USA. Since most of my customers reside in US I’d need to be an idiot not to know that this will probably wipe out any chance I have of selling to folks in USA, after January.

Having been out of the stamping community for a number of years I came back into a totally different landscape. The larger design led stamp companies are being preyed on by mass producers from areas with no copyright laws. People are purchasing stolen designs cheaply, en masse. It’s that simple. I’ve operated on a limited budget all my life, I see the appeal of cheap products, but the market is being decimated by cheap off brand versions of legitimate designs. I can’t support that and I cannot compete with it.

Every stamp set I sell has cost me upwards of 70% of the retail price just to get it to exist and thats not even counting my time in hours researching, drawing and making samples and running a store, my time is factored in nowhere. I have counted myself lucky to have been able to do what I do from home so that I could still see to my home responsibilities, it was the price I was happy to pay, but I can’t absorb the sort of losses that are heading my way.

So here I am again. Im closing out my stamp business, just as I was getting going. I’m gutted. I’m beyond gutted.

To anyone who recently purchased this week from my new release, I will be in touch.

My Black Friday stamps sale will begin right away and once the stamps are gone, they are gone. The sale will see prices reduced for stamps only. Stencils are things I cut to order and are not reduced. Stickers and art prints are also not reduced.

What this means going forward? I don’t know. I might keep the store for a while as I look into shifting towards a digital offering, we will see. Thank for reading this far. If you have been a customer, thank you so much. If you have not been a customer, I’m sorry we never got the chance to connect, my customers are, and have always been, the very best bunch of people. Thank you so much.