Editing The Pen Addict 54/transcript (section)

== Hallmark History ==


'''Ana Reinert:''' Yeah, strangely enough, I do. I went back and looked, because the Snow Angels blog is still there, and it actually started back in, I want to say, 1999 or 2000, when people just started blogging. You know, so it had originally been on Blogger and that kind of thing, and it had really been more of sort of a diary kind of a thing. And over the years, I got more involved in, I discovered Pencil Revolution back in, like, 2005. And I went back to check and see how long Johnny had been doing the Pencil Revolution. And so in about 2006, I started posting the occasional, like, pen review or pencil review or, you know, some other office tool thing. And didn't completely commit to it one way or the other.

'''Ana Reinert:''' And then about three years ago, I work at Hallmark. In case people don't know, I work at Hallmark Corporate Headquarters as a designer. We bring people in kind of on a regular basis to talk about business or design or anything like that. And we brought in a woman named Erin from a blog called House of Turquoise. It's probably not something that anybody who listens to this podcast would visit. And I kind of went because it was, you know, they have these lectures. If you don't go, they stop having them. So we kind of go whether it's something we're really genuinely interested in or not. But she's a home decor blogger. And her whole focus is places that are painted turquoise. Not kidding. Very, very niche. Very granular. That is extremely niche. It's freakishly so. But she talked about in order to be, like, and she's very successful. I mean, like, she does this blog full time. She gets paid from people. But she said if you want to develop a following for your blog, you need to kind of be very myopically focused to generate an audience. And so it was literally a kind of thing where it was like either I needed to commit myself to doing this or walk away from it and just, you know, read your blog, read John's blog, you know, and just enjoy it or do it and shut up about it. And so I walked back to my desk after seeing this woman. And I launched Tumblr. And I signed up for wellappointeddesk.tumblr.com. And I did it on Tumblr for about a year and a half before I moved over to running it on a WordPress blog. And that's sort of where I've lived ever since.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's awesome. And for those who don't know, it's wellappointeddesk.com. And we'll have all this in the show notes and everyone later. But if you're not familiar with Anna's work, that's where she's found most of the time right now.

'''Myke Hurley:''' As well as that, Brad, I also have in the show notes for this episode penaddiction.blogspot.co.uk, which I believe is your site. It's still up? It's still up.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't know why it's .co.uk, but it is. But it's there. I've got it. I found it. It didn't take very long to search. And there it is. Wow.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's scary. You know, not to totally hijack this, but that's what I'm good at. You know, I find sometimes in just random Google searches where, you know, people just like rip content like off of an old blog post. And they come up on these random blogger sites somewhere. I find some of my junk on there sometimes. You know, just these random posts out of nowhere from, you know, just these spammy blog sites. So anyway, I'm not surprised. It's at some other URL. Who knows what? I don't even know what that is. So, yeah. I'll look at the show notes myself and see what that is. But anyway, back on track. So, Ana, tell us, like, now, Well Appointed Desk, I think, is one of the best blogs in, you know, our genre. Kind of the pens, paper, stationery, everything that goes along with it. And you do a few more things other than that. So tell the readers who aren't really familiar with it kind of, you know, what you're doing there and, you know, kind of what type of posts to expect and things like that. So tell us a little bit about the blogs for anyone who's not familiar with it.

'''Ana Reinert:''' Well, I cover a lot of the same types of topics that you do in regards to pens, ink, paper, notebooks. But I've also tried to expand it a little bit to cover inspiring workspaces. I know there's a lot of people who work from home and might, you know, be looking for inspiration to plus up their office space. As well as, you know, I mean, I work in a beige cubicle. So looking at inspiring and on a floor with no windows. So I look forward to someday the opportunity of actually having a workspace that is more conducive to creativity. Strangely enough, I work at Hallmark and I say that my office space is very uninspiring.

'''Ana Reinert:''' But it's a very big building with lots of people doing lots of different kinds of work. I actually work around the corner from where they do brass tooling for printing presses. So my section of the building looks pretty industrial.

'''Ana Reinert:''' But, yeah. So I also try to include some, like, other things that people need for their day-to-day work. So things like apps, you know, desktop wallpapers, you know, things like that. I mean, like, if you can't, like me, if you live in a beige cubicle and you can't do anything about the environment, you can at least change the wallpaper on your desktop or you can add an app to your iPhone or, you know, other device that kind of helps you get your work done.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's awesome. And you started talking about this, and I didn't put this in my notes for the episode. But there was something very cool that you guys do at Hallmark, and you let me in on this a few years ago. I don't even know if this was pre-well-appointed desk or not, but, you know, I've done some posts in the past about index cards. And you told me this cool story of what Hallmark does with these index cards, and you sent me some from Hallmark. Yeah, and that just hit me. I totally forgot about that until just now you were talking about it. So I think share that story with everyone because I think this is really, really cool.

'''Ana Reinert:''' And this is one of the really cool things because at one point in time, a lot of the printing for Hallmark was done in the building or in the building around the corner. And so we had a lot of paper scraps, you know, when they would cut off the cards and stuff. They'd have these paper scraps. And one very clever man who was working for J.C. Hall, who was the founder of the company, had a pocket full. He had the guys in the print shop cut these cards down to 3x5s, and he kept them in his shirt pocket. And one day he was in a meeting with J.C., and J.C. said, oh, I need something to write on. And the guy pulled out this 3x5 and handed it to him, and he says, I need to get me some of those. And so they started just cutting the ends off and everything and just bringing these boxes over to the main building of these 3x5s. And so they sort of became this ubiquitous thing. There isn't a conference room or a desk at Hallmark that doesn't have a stack of 3x5s. And it was unusual for me when I came to Hallmark because I was sort of used to the culture of Post-it notes and, you know, those sticky notes. And I asked somebody, I'm like, where do I find some Post-it notes? And they said, I guess you can get them in our supply closet, you know, but most people just use 3x5s. You know, we recycle them. They're, you know, leftovers. It's just a good use of leftover stuff. And so I started using 3x5s and have used them ever since. I kind of have always used them.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, and you sent me, you sent me, you very kindly sent me, you know, a handful, probably 100 or 200 of them straight from the Hallmark offices. So I thought that was really cool. And I've definitely used those. And I think it's just great to have those laying around. And I mean, especially at a place like Hallmark where, you know, you need those ideas to just jot down and go for it. So that's pretty cool.

'''Ana Reinert:''' The funny thing is the writers, when they're writing copy for cards, will take a 3x5 and they'll fold it in half so that it looks like a little tiny greeting card so that they can write the editorial that they want on the cover on the front. And then they write it on the inside and then they give it to the designers. So there's like these little tiny cards all over the place of like the editorial that you should use on a card.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, that's hilarious.

'''Ana Reinert:''' It is pretty funny.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So cool. Now, on the desk, on the well-appointed desk, I'm sorry, I call it the desk. I'm just used to saying it. That's okay. I do too. So if anyone hears me say the desk, I'm talking about Anna's website. So you started to do something pretty cool on there and something that I'm interested in and something, you know, that I want to share with everyone. You've started selling some products on there just like in a small web store. So how did that come about? Tell me, tell us about like the products that are on there. And, you know, how that all came about and, you know, what made you start trying to do those types of things. Because that's something that I'm very interested in doing, you know, with the pen addict eventually. Cool.

'''Ana Reinert:''' It was something that I'd been thinking about doing for a while and just trying to figure out. Because really, for the most part, the well-appointed desk is financed entirely by me. I do have some lovely sponsors. But really, what they sponsor is what I can do for my readers in the form of product reviews and free product and things like that. So I really don't generate any money. And so I hit a point where it's like when the bill comes due for the hosting, I'm like, I'm just bleeding money here. So I thought, well, what can I do to sort of generate funds for the site in a way that seemed to fit? You know, I didn't, I don't know, I didn't want to sell t-shirts or something. It just didn't seem like the right thing. And I am notoriously bad about buying and collecting vintage office supplies. Every yard sale, I just scavenge for old staplers and tape dispensers and everything. And so I really had, like, exceeded quantities of stuff in my house. So I said, well, you know what, I'm going to start to sell some of these. You know, every time I find a stapler, I'm like, oh, this one's my favorite. And then the other ones go into a pile. So I'm like, okay, there's this whole pile of really awesome staplers, but each one, the newest one is always my favorite. So I started to put those up. And then I wanted to be able to have something that was sort of an item that I could replenish on a regular basis. So I'm very active with the Letter Writers Alliance, which is two girls up in Chicago organized this group. I'm a group of people who really like to exchange letters, and they do pen pal services. You know, they'll hook you up with somebody that wants to exchange letters and things like that. So I write a lot of letters, so I thought it would be fun to make stamps, rubber stamps to put on letters. So the first one that I did is one that just says good mail. And that seems to be the favorite, and everybody really likes it. But then I designed several other ones, and it took me a while to find a rubber stamp manufacturer that I could work with and be able to offer the stamps at a reasonable price where I wasn't having to buy them at retail and then try to mark them up because it just made me feel bad and nasty. And I'm not going to charge somebody $20 for a one-inch stamp. I just couldn't do it. So once I was able to find a vendor where I could get the prices to where it seemed pretty reasonable, I was very excited, and I was finally able to put the site up. So that's been up for a month because I just got my first bill from Big Cartel. Well, that's cool.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I think it looks fantastic, and y'all should all definitely check that out. I thought it was a great idea when I saw it, and actually I was jealous. I was like, I've got to get on the ball and do something because Myke and I have talked about it for years, me needing to step out and do something like that. So maybe this is my inspiration to finally get it done. So I will work on that in the future because I think your store is really neat. I think it's perfect for you.

'''Ana Reinert:''' Well, I look forward to seeing what you decide to carry in your shop.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, yeah. I've got some ideas. I've been taking some notes, and I've sent some emails and had some conversations with people. So we will definitely see what comes out of it. Cool. Awesome. Well, I want to get into a few specifics about pens, papers, some of the similarities that some of the similar products we use, some of the disagreements that we have on products. You should have a tag on your blog about calling Brad out on his post, and we're going to get into that.

'''Ana Reinert:''' I've only really done that once.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I know. I'm just playing with you. It was actually like the gentlest, nicest calling out ever. So we'll talk about that. But why don't we let Myke pay some bills real quick if you're ready for it, Mr. Hurley?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Always ready.