Mother’s Day is less than two weeks away. Have you found the perfect card and a thoughtful gift for yer mum yet? And/or the mother of your children? The Lunalux studio store has plenty of cards and gifts to tickle her fancy and also say “thanks for giving birth to me, lady!” We have lovely letterpress-printed Mother’s Day greeting cards created here in our Minneapolis studio (including the new “You’re Pretty” card, pictured – click on the image for a larger view), plus beautiful offerings from from Egg Press, Snow & Graham, Wiley Valentine and Bella Muse.

Lots of great gift in stock now too – Kaweco and Xonex pens; stylish French notebooks; floral notecard sets, post-it notes and file folders to bring a bit of spring to the home office; hand-made sparkly glass pendants; and Lunalux exclusives like Notepad Triads and the cigar box notes. We’ll wrap your present for you, if you ask nicely (your good manners make your mom proud!). Not sure exactly what to get for her? Lunalux gift certificates are available in any denomination, and can be used to purchase stuff in the store, or custom-designed letterpress-printed personal stationery or calling cards.

We’ve added a few new cards to our wholesale line. The “There is only one loser in a bacon-eating contest” card, which we created in February, has been such a big hit in the Lunalux studio store that we’ve decided to offer it to our wholesale customers as well. And we’ve also created three new greeting cards, based on the postcard that we mailed out to our store mailing list last month. The same detailed antique flourish has been letterpress-printed on natural white wove-finish card stock, and paired with various greetings. My favorite: “You’re Pretty!” It’s printed in mango and magenta, and paired with a mango A2 envelope – perfect for Mother’s Day, right? There’s also an aqua and black congratulations card, and a lime and sepia thank you note. All of these cards are now available in our studio store, and wholesalers can download a sell sheet of these new products from our catalog page.

The business of letterpress printing is the topic of an in-depth story in the April 2008 issue of NAPL Business Review, a bi-monthly magazine distributed to members of the National Association for Printing Leadership. The five-page story includes extensive comments from “Jenni Undis, President of Lunalux, Inc., in Minneapolis, Minn.” As opposed to the soft-focus ooh-and-ahhh stories about letterpress that you’ll find in popular lifestyle magazines, this feature examines the resurgence of letterpress from a business standpoint – barriers of entry into the field, technical challenges of the process, how print shops can incorporate letterpress into their portfolio of services, etc. A very interesting read!

Lunalux will be participating in a Shopping Salon at The Commodore Hotel on Monday, April 7, 2008, and we hope you can join us! The Commodore is located at 79 Western Avenue North in St. Paul. From 4-8 p.m., fifteen-plus vendors will be showing their wares in the hotel’s art deco bar. This will be our first time participating in this monthly event, which is organized by a Lunalux shopper, so we don’t have first-hand knowledge of the awesomeness. But we hear it’s fun and fancy. Cocktails are available while you shop, and Willie Murphy will be tickling the ivories in the hotel lobby. Other vendors in the salon will include jewelry designer Pam Mondale, and artists Herb Grika, Heinz Brummel and Alex Boies.