The beginning
When we first began Kpop Stationery’s holographic series, we also did begin with existing designs, like standard rainbow, stars, snowflakes, and etc. Holographic being mostly a ‘pattern’ of holograms, and given how many patterns the stationery world has created the past hundreds of years, we had so many to choose from.
Our focus on our initial holographics sleeves were the same as our clear sleeves.
- Optimizing for retail:
- Making it easy to view and test our sleeves
- Making it easy for retail stores to sell our sleeves
- Quality: Ensuring quality production and also discarding disqualified products.
- Packaging: Creating beautiful packaging that you do not want to throw out after taking the sleeves out.
- Pricing: Making the price right for consumers and also for our retail partners.
- Repeatability: Ensuring we can do this production and shipping multiple iterations, instead of one-off
The needs for customization
We had no issues delivering such focus and value with existing holographic patterns. However, there was one problem. Stock pattern meant that it always had to be generic, so that it can be applicable anywhere and in any circumstance. Now, that, we had an issue with. Because we created Kpop Stationery specifically so that we can specifically cater to the collectors of Kpop. We wanted to go deeper. What if we wanted to create a Christmas theme, a cat theme, a bunny theme, a Halloween theme, let alone a collaboration with artists and their labels?
There weren’t any, and we realized we had to begin to learn how to 1) design 2) produce 3) and package custom designs. As someone who grew up in the United States, to me it was obvious how important it was to me to be able to have such thematic and custom designs reflected to our sleeves, and the more we researched about it, we realized that there really aren’t any and that we had to kick start this journey, instead of wait until someone created such stock patterns.
The challenge
Then we began to realize how difficult the design and production phase of a custom holographic sleeve was as we had to find a different factory willing to take the risk of a small producer, willing to pay attention to a lot of detail on the production of patterns and also sleeves!
The first thing we learned was that most stock holographics were designed with simplicity for a reason, because it was simple to print and produce. Holographic pattern of a ‘bat’ or a ‘vampire’ was not at all something all factories have done in such a small size and also in combination, ensuring holograms are highly visible from any angle.
Next, most factories also did not have the experience of creating the base of such a customized sleeve that we had to go through multiple batches to understand how best to fold the three sides and how much cooling time was required to produce a working holographic sleeve. We almost lost our factory in the process because they were close to giving it up due to the trial and error and our rigorous QA requirements.
Had we not surveyed our customers to understand that there was such high demand for customized holographic sleeves, we probably would have given up after having to dispose of lots of initial production and precious moulds!
Jump to today and what’s coming?
Fast forward today, we now have completed a Christmas theme, a cat theme, a bunny theme, a Halloween theme served in 10+ retail store locations and are preparing our next sets! We have puppy, night sky, cherry, teddy bear (and bear) series upcoming! Hope you are excited for them and if you have any custom ideas, please contact us at support@kpopstationery.com!
Happy sleeving!
YK and Woo
