Hot Card of the Day (Long Weekend Edition)

Today's hot card is from Stationery Station in Highland Park, Illinois. They came to us with a great design idea, and we made something that exceeded even our expectations. Have a great weekend, everybody! We'll be back on Tuesday.

The Contest

To spice things up here today, we're offering a one-time-only contest. We recently (don't ask how) came into the possession of a "Lord of the Rings" movie poster, and we're feeling generous. The first person to leave a response on this blog entry to the following question will receive the poster via the U.S. Postal Service, shipping included. (Current employees of Luscious Verde are barred from entering the contest. Get back to work.)

What university did Liz, our operations manager, attend?

Go, go, go!

The Name Game

Naming things is very important. For instance, at Luscious Verde, we name our personal printers to avoid confusing our high-tech computer network. But perhaps there are more important things to name – like children, for example. The time-tested method of not naming a child for the first few years of their life just doesn’t work in today’s fast-paced, name-centric society. (It would be embarrassing to name your child Frank when they actually turn out to look more like a Chuck.)

Say you have a stake in naming a future baby (like our co-owner Wendy, who is four months pregnant). We highly recommend a visit to the Social Security Administration’s list of popular baby names. It lists the most used American names (sorted a bunch of different ways), going back all the way to the 1880s. Want to know how many Jacobs were born in 1957? They have the info.

What turns out to be the most interesting is the information at the bottom of the list, that is, the least popular baby names. Did you know that 236 boys were named “Joy” in the 1930s? (They probably had a lot of joy in their lives, at least until they got beat up at school for being named Joy.) Or that one of the least popular female names of the new millennium is, in fact, “Unique.” There are a little over one thousand little Uniques running around out there. How, uh, unique.

-- Khalid Davian Maximo (a.k.a. Rob) @ L.V.

Hot Card of the Day (Daughtry Edition)

Today's card comes to us from our friends at Wilton Stationers in Wilton, Connecticut. This card proves that, even in our ultra-colorful (and, dare we say it, luscious) line, we can also pull off a great example of muted and traditional design. This card incorporates three different paper colors and our new custom die-cuts.

Hot Card of the Day (Blueberry Jerry Edition)

This hot card comes to us from Parchment on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. In addition to doing great holiday, Bar/Bat and wedding cards, we can also do charming party cards, like this one for a party in London. The customer chose one of our motif options, turned it into a pattern, and changed the colors to make this delicious invitation. Cheers!

Rumo(u)rs

We'd like to take this opportunity to address a few rumors going around on the "blogosphere" about Luscious Verde.

• We will not be performing on the Video Music Awards with Justin Timberlake. On the day of the VMAs, we will hopefully be in Miami mixing our new album with Timbaland.
• We are not romantically involved with Brad Pitt. We are simply close friends, and we wish Brad and Angelina all the best.
• We will not be featured in R. Kelly's new chapters of "Trapped in the Closet," parts 13 through 22. Even though we traveled all the way to Chicago and used all of our contacts via our operations manager Liz, Mr. Kelly declined to feature us. We respect his decision and hope he reconsiders in the future.
  

Hot Card of the Day (Movin' On Edition) Also, I Want To Know What Love Is

Today's hot card comes to us from two members of the Luscious Verde family: Lindsay, assistant operations manager, and Megan, who says she doesn't have a title, but we all know she works extremely hard. Being good friends, they recently moved in together in Cleveland Heights, and decided to celebrate by getting totally cool moving announcements. They may be monsters, but they're our monsters.




Also, a few weeks ago, our head designer Jason married his lovely wife Sarah in Portland, Oregon, and now we have photographic evidence that it occurred. All the Luscious Verde bigwigs were there, and a wonderful time was had by all in attendance. All together now: Awwwww!

How We Spent Our Summer Vacation

For custom stationery, August is always a pretty slow time of year. Most of us are in the Hamptons, in our summer home in Nantucket, or, in my case, drinking cheap beer in my apartment with the window A/C unit blasting. And as such, things are a little slower. Now, that doesn’t mean we aren’t working as hard as we usually do, getting those orders out lickety-split, but a bunch of us do use this month to take a few days off and reflect on our lives, and to mentally prepare for the holiday havoc coming down the road. In that spirit, Luscious Verde employees were asked what their favorite vacations of all time were. Here’s what they are.

Jason, head designer: Recent honeymoon to the San Juan islands off the coast of Washington

Jaclyn, materials manager: Riviera Maya, off the coast of Mexico

Mandy, graphic designer: San Diego

Beth, graphic designer: Rome, where she studied abroad for a semester in college

Stacey, print production: Sailing in the Chesapeake Bay

Kelly, print production: the Detroit Electronic Music Festival

Melissa, print production: Vienna, home to gothic cathedrals and “the world’s oldest coffee shop”

Mandy and Rachel, production artists: a forthcoming road trip to Asheville, North Carolina, where the plan is to get matching tattoos

Jesse, assistant to the plant manager: Legoland

Laura, production artist: Hawaii, where her brother got married

Nina: The Bahamas

Megan, “I don’t have a title”: Trip to Italy, and a “dead presidents” tour taken as a child, as her father is a history buff

Chris-Anna, co-owner: Backpacking through Europe after graduating college

Wendy, co-owner: Honeymoon in Florence, Italy, where her husband insisted that even sub-par Italian food is better than good American food

-- Rob @ L.V. (whose favorite trip is the drive to work every day)

The Roof, The Roof, The Roof...

...isn't on fire. If you tried to get in touch with us earlier this afternoon, we were briefly indisposed with a non-emergency that nonetheless required the presence of good souls of the Beachwood Fire Department (again). Long story short, we had a faulty fluorescent light that was giving off a weird, non-toxic smell.

We got to hang out in the parking lot for half an hour after we evacuated, and many L.V. employees participated in an impromptu game of Duck, Duck, Goose. We're back now, and no cards were harmed in the making of this blog posting. (Thanks to the recently-married Jason for the cell-phone pic.)

Keep On Truckin'

Earlier this year, we introduced (into an unsuspecting world) our correspondence update, which features a boatload of our new custom-cut capabilities. And with these capabilities come great responsibility, which our retailers took and ran with as only they can. One of the cards featured is a simple moving card with a custom-cut van -- cute enough. But the variations we've seen in the past few months, from paper color choice, font choice, to even where the van is headed, have always been surprising and charming. Luscious Verde -- don't be afraid to mess with us.

A Fond Farewell

Unfortunately, we have to announce the departure of one of our biggest butt-kickers, Toni. Tomorrow will be her last day. Long story short, she and her husband are moving back to the Pacific Northwest, where they were born and bred. We're sorry to see Toni go, but we were lucky in the first place to have her. (She now has the designated title of First-Ever Luscious Verde Blog Guest Writer.)

Hot Card of the Day (Little Feat Edition)

Today's hot card comes to us from the Party People in New City, New York. The reason that it's hot (other than "it just is") is that we made custom die-cuts for the little baby feet on the thank-you note. Pretty much everyone here who saw or worked on the card made some sort of "Aww, isn't it cute?" remark when they saw the finished product. Even so...aww, isn't it cute?

P.S., we'd like to give a shout-out to Jason, our head designer, who's currently on a plane heading towards Portland, Oregon, where he's going to get married on Sunday. It won't be the same this next week without Jason's unique insights on life, love and contemporary R&B.