September always seems to bring a return to routine. Maybe it’s an ingrained “back to school” feeling, but everyone seems to be getting back to work this week—and our presses are busy printing for a variety of businesses.

We’re letterpress printing new letterhead for a creative company, accompanied by custom wax seals; branded cards for a new beauty company’s product launch; and custom note cards for another small business to include with customers’ orders. We’ve also just printed business cards for a rare book dealer, an artist, and a lawyer.

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We love making this kind of work for other businesses. One of our core beliefs is that there’s a lot of beauty in careful craftsmanship and making things by hand. Details like heavyweight cotton paper and letterpress printing are subtle, but they say something about the company that chose them. I always notice when a package arrives with a note on a beautiful card tucked inside. It’s a small detail, but an appreciated one. It feels generous.

Correspondence, circa 1907

I recently came across this stereoscopic photograph in the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Taken around 1906–1908, it shows the General Correspondence Department at Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Chicago, where clerks handled thousands of customer letters each day.

The accompanying text explains how sincerely Sears regarded those letters:

“We have a lively appreciation of the fact that every customer’s idea of us is obtained almost entirely from the letters received from us…”

It goes on to describe the importance of employing people who would correspond with customers with fairness and care.

More than a century later, I love the idea that a company understood its correspondence as an expression of the business itself. The tools have certainly changed, but the idea of communicating with customers thoughtfully still feels relevant.

Business Cards, No Phone Required

We’ve noticed this year that more people are ordering letterpress printed business cards from us—including people who simply want a good-looking card they can hand someone instead of pulling out a phone to share contact information.

We have a collection of designs for personal and professional cards, with your choice of type style and ink color, and the option to add an image to make them your own: [View our business card collection]

Consider it the grown-up version of buying new school supplies each September.

In the studio

August is one of my favorite months in the studio, as we’re working on our 2027 calendar. We’re nearly finished, just deciding on colors for a couple of the last months to print. Should the month with the quilted slippers print in icy blue or dusty rose? Or, should June print in the dusty rose instead of grass green? To be determined…

August is also busy with custom note card orders. I think summer is always a nice time to catch up on sending letters and reconnecting with friends before fall arrives and things get busier. We love seeing the colors and images people select to create really personal stationery. Above are a few we’ve recently printed and love.

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On the presses

We’ve been printing a bit of everything this month: wedding invitations and wedding-day stationery, personal note cards, business cards, baby announcements and more.

A favorite ink color this year—for us, and particularly for our wedding clients—has been this pretty grass green. It’s crisp and summery, with just a touch of white mixed in to soften it. And one of our favorite things is when we get to print a party hat on a wedding response card, like the one above.

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In a garden

Earlier this month, I had the absolute delight of visiting Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex UK, the home of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and a gathering place for the Bloomsbury Group. I can’t begin to describe how charming and inspiring I found it, so I’m not going to try. But one detail that I loved—and makes sense to share here—has to do with its cottage garden and letter writing.

Much of what we know about the garden at Charleston comes from letters. In 1916, Virginia Woolf encouraged her sister Vanessa Bell to move there, describing “a charming garden, with a pond, and fruit trees, and vegetables, all now rather run wild, but you could make it lovely.” And she did. Bell and Duncan Grant gradually transformed it into the wonderfully informal garden of flowers, vegetables, paths and sculpture that became an extension of their creative life.

Vanessa Bell’s own letters recorded wonderfully specific details—the roses outside her bedroom window, the scent of pinks on a summer evening—while Virginia Woolf later described her sister emerging from “a great variegated quilt of asters and artichokes.” Years later, these written observations became part of the historical record used to understand and restore Charleston’s garden.

It’s a lovely reminder that an ordinary letter can preserve the details of a life and place long after it was written.

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We love making invitations for June weddings as many of these incorporate beautiful flower imagery. One of our favorite designs is the Modern Garden invitation suite. We had the pleasure of customizing this design for Nicole and Ross's June wedding at the Burr Mansion in Connecticut (happy first anniversary!).

We specialize in semi-custom wedding invitations. Our passion is letterpress printing beautiful paper goods using our antique presses and premium cotton paper. Our clients are drawn to the elegance of this historic printing method and the understated sophistication it brings to their wedding style.

The couples we collaborate with are creative and want to personalize their wedding invitations to reflect their style and the feel of their celebration. At the same time, they're busy juggling careers, wedding planning and other obligations. They may know what they like but aren't quite sure where to begin or have the vocabulary to describe it. Our semi-custom process offers the creative collaboration of custom wedding invitations without requiring couples to start from a blank page. They can begin the design process by selecting a design from our collection that resonates. It may be the typography—a traditional, modern, or somewhere-in-between style. Other times it's the imagery—something inspired by a garden celebration or a wedding by the sea. From there, we collaborate to select illustrations, recommend ink colors that complement the event aesthetic, and identify thoughtful details that make the wedding invitation suite feel personal and unique, like the disco ball on the timeline card in Nicole and Ross's suite pictured above.

Throughout the collaboration process, we're always thinking about how to make a couple's life easier so they can enjoy this special engagement season, how we can help their wedding planning process and how we can we help them express the genuine care they feel for the friends and family they're inviting to celebrate with them. Couples put an incredible amount of thought into every detail of their wedding day. That care reflects the gratitude they feel for the people sharing this special occasion. We prioritize listening carefully and working closely with each couple to ensure the finished suite reflects that sentiment. We want guests to open their mailbox, discover a beautifully handmade letterpress wedding invitation, and immediately feel that their presence is important and genuinely valued.

If you're looking for wedding invitations that feel personal without starting from scratch, we'd love to help you customize one of our semi-custom letterpress invitation designs! You can view our collection here: Sesame Letterpress Wedding Collection and then click on the link to submit details for a custom proposal!

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