Ok it’s official – your cookie baking passion is turning into a business.
Major steps in making that happen include choosing a name, creating a logo, and setting up an official business.
Once those significant tasks are complete, it’s time to showcase your new brand and start showing it off.
Create Business Cards
We consume so much information digitally these days, but your cookies are tangible products and you need to market them in ways other than through a screen.
Good old fashioned business cards have been around forever, and they are still a simple and extremely inexpensive way to display and share your business information. You might think business cards are somewhat irrelevant in today’s increasingly paperless world, but for a small business they are still a “must have”.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met someone and the first thing they asked upon learning of my cookie business is whether I have a card. I have chunks of them stashed everywhere – bags, coat pockets, car glove compartment, etc.
A card is also one of those little things that in that moment, legitimizes you as a real business to the person receiving it.
Marketing materials can be expensive.
Business cards are not expensive.
This is where I sound like a broken record ……
A consistent theme throughout all of my advice is to prioritize being as smart and conservative as possible with your money. Starting a cookie business is a grassroots effort, and you don’t want to be spending a lot of money to market yourself before you have much income. Walk before you try to run.
I’m happy to report that getting business cards printed is doable for a very low cost. Googling “inexpensive business cards” pulls up a lengthy list of options, plus articles that list their recommended 5-10 “best of” resources for business cards.
While it’s great to know that you have many options to achieve something, having too many similar options can be paralyzing, and can really slow you down.
I’m going to discuss just two great options here, both of which I use currently: Vistaprint and Canva.
Vistaprint is a very well known company that produces physical and digital products for small and very small businesses. It was one of the first companies to offer desktop publishing online, and it’s still a leader in this business category.
My experiences with Vistaprint have been nothing but positive. Very competitive pricing, a simple and organized process to get what you need, and the customer service is excellent.
I used Vistaprint back when I printed my first batch of business cards, and I continue to re-order from them whenever I need more.
Take a look at Vistaprint’s pricing for standard business cards:
Price breaks don’t go down much beyond the 1500 quantity, even if you go up to 10,000 (which you will not be doing!).
The key to keeping the price so low is to stick with the standard options when customizing your card order. The areas where you have the option to start raising the cost are:
Paper stock
Printing 2-sided
Special card shapes
Unique textures & finishes
If you stick with the most basic options for your card, which is what I use and it looks great, you’ll get this done in no time and for a really low price.
Creating the actual card with Vistaprint
There are a few ways to use Vistaprint for the printing of your business cards:
- Use one of their templates and personalize with your information
- Upload a completed card design you already have
- Work with a Vistaprint designer for a $10 fee
Let’s go through the method where you work with one of Vistaprint’s business card templates and create your own card.
After clicking through to “Browse our designs”, you’ll see the beginning of an endless scroll of template designs. At the left, you choose the paper & size of the card, and can narrow down the design choices by industry.
There is a choice for Food & Beverage, and then within that category you could narrow it down again by choosing Bakeries. Most of these use images of baked goods other than cookies, but it’s still helpful as a starting point.
If you already have a logo designed for your cookie business, you should definitely feature it on your business card. You should read more about creating a logo if you haven’t yet checked that task off your list.
If you don’t have a logo yet but you’d like to have some business cards right now, you can definitely find a template that captures your vibe and just display your contact information. After all, that’s the main point of a business card.
First is a template that had room for a logo, and second is the version of how I personalized it:
And now here is a template that displays contact information only, no logo:
Working with Vistaprint’s business card design tool is not difficult. It’s fairly intuitive, and once you start playing around, it can be a fun, creative project.
But if you just don’t want to spend the time working on this, hiring a helpful Vistaprint designer to help you for $10 is a fantastic value.
As mentioned earlier, you can also use Vistaprint solely for the printing of your cards, where you just upload a completed card design that you already have on hand. This brings us to the second business card creation option I want to discuss, which is Canva.
Canva is a graphic design platform that offers content and templates for creating all sorts of visual products. It can be used to create physically printed products (like business cards!) along with web-based visuals (social media graphics, blog banners, web page content, zoom backgrounds). Capabilities keep expanding as the company grows, which it continues to do at a rapid pace.
I’ve discussed Canva in an earlier post about creating a logo for your cookie business. Canva’s site has a logo maker that is easy to use, offers beautiful designs, and is free. The same functionality in their logo maker is used for Canva’s business card design tool.
If you’ve used Canva to design your logo, you may want to continue on and create your business card design within Canva as well. You can have Canva also print the cards, or just use Canva for the design part and another company to print…. more on that later.
The Canva business card design process is similar to Vistaprint’s tool. You first scan through templates that catch your eye, then you personalize them with your contact information and logo.
First is a template that had room for a logo, and second is the version of how I personalized it:
And now here is one that displays contact information only, no logo:
You can use Canva for free, but some of the premium content & capabilities require a fee or pro membership status. I don’t have a pro membership, so the sample business cards I made here would be accessible to anyone at no charge.
It is my opinion that Canva’s templates overall are much more stylish and creative than what Vistaprint offers. That makes sense since as a company, Canva’s main focus is on the creation of beautiful visual content, and much of it intended for online use. Production of printed materials is not a main focus of their business.
And because printing production is not Canva’s main business, their printing prices are much higher than a company like Vistaprint.
Now it’s important to look at the prices from each company side by side:
The cost to print 500 cards with Canva is $55 compared to $20 with Vistaprint. HUGE difference.
I love Canva for its design quality, and I love Vistaprint’s pricing. A smart plan is to design with Canva and then upload to Vistaprint for the card production.
I hope you have found this discussion of business cards helpful, and now you know you can have some cards made quickly and easily and for a low cost. And if you design some new cards and feel like sharing your design, I would love to see it! Good luck and enjoy this creative project!