Canadian Souvenir Animals and a Greeting Card Factory Idea

Christmas is just about here (Merry Christmas!!) so I've begun switching gears and planning for warmer weather.  I've been obsessed with the thought of coming up with souvenirs for tourists that are actually Made in Canada.   To this end I've been googling pics of Canadian animals, in order to improve on the clay figurines I've been making since 2009.

Here are pics of a few, I'm excited about the new designs I've been coming up with.  

I'm working on others, including Blanding's turtles.  Blanding's turtles are protected under the Canadian Species at Risk Act, and are a target for habitat conservation in Southwest Nova Scotia.

As well as making more Christmas ornaments, in the coming year I hope to use sculpture and my biology background to help raise awareness about wildlife and conservation. Eventually I'd like to get my figurines into gift shops in other Canadian cities beyond Halifax.  First I need to finish some!

These figurines are at the 'greenware' stage (raw, unfired clay), and are all in cone 6 stoneware.

Bear and Piping Plover

Piping Plovers are endangered in Canada, and declining in Nova Scotia.  This is the bird featured on conservation license plates that are available in the province.

group shot, with a rabbit, fox, moose, beavers bear and squirrel, it's all the same clay body so the lighter animals are just dried out more.

Stoneware beaver I made  few months ago, glazed with cone 6 raw sienna, and underglazes

Carrying on from my last couple of posts, I did some looking around online and found this list on entrepeneur.com of Manufacturing Business Ideas.  I found it interesting that Christmas Ornaments and Pottery are both on the list, along with a bunch of value added wood products, so maybe I'm on to something.

Pottery aside, I've been trying to think of other products that could be made here.  Products at a smaller price point, that almost everyone ends up buying at least a few times during the year.  Something that can be made out of trees, or better yet made out of recycled paper...  Greeting Cards!

Thursday I had wanted to go to the Lunenburg Farmer's Market but the roads around here were lousy from the weather. Instead I just went to Bridgewater to mail a parcel to my mom for Christmas, and I needed to pick up a card.  It struck me that despite having a number of talented print makers and lots of artists making cards in Nova Scotia, my only choice of Christmas cards at the shop I visited (not a dollar store even) were all made in China.  and a lot of them were as much as $7!

Meanwhile in the Spring Garden Road area of downtown Halifax, there's this cool shop that I haven't visited yet.  Now that I live in the woods I rarely make it in to town, but I can see it is full of hand-printed items: Inkwell Modern Handmade & Letterpress Studio.  I've bought hand-made cards at markets and shops before, so I know the prices can be quite competitive with the $5 - $7/card seen in bigger "chain" stores.

In looking around on the internet I found out about how Tim Hortons has been recycling coffee cups into trays, at the CKF inc  plant in Hantsport, NS.  This makes me wonder if it's be possible to make greeting cards out of Tim Horton's cups, with designs by Nova Scotian artists, to be sold in shops throughout Nova Scotia.  Wouldn't that be cool!  Even just having more made-in-Nova Scotia cards made on Nova Scotian paper products would be nice.

I only rarely make 2-D art, but I know a bunch of painters, some of whom make cards of their art pieces which I think is great.  Typically these cards are blank, with just the painting on the front.  I've often thought that if some painters would take the time to suck their paintings into Photoshop, and add a bit of text in order to turn them into Greeting Cards there may be a market for such a thing.  I've noticed that people are drawn to fun, funny cards at gift shops.

Here's an example of an acrylic painting I did, and later thought it'd be fun to add captions to:

Encouraging Squirrels

 
Cards aren't really my thing to do though; however Helen Painter is an artist in Nova Scotia who makes fantastic cards.  Check out her birthday cards for example.

So here's an example of a bunch of "links" lying around waiting to be linked together: artists, printmakers, designers, retailers, consumers wanting nice cards, makers of paper products, people who need jobs.  It seems possible to me somebody could come up with a card manufacturing business in Nova Scotia that would have the potential to be not only profitable, but environmentally friendly and enjoyable for its workers. 

For the artists who are already making hand-made cards to sell at market, and who might read this post, and are sucking their teeth and thinking "nooo"; I think that consumers who buy foreign made cards from Big Box and chain stores are likely to keep doing so.  However, some press about the card-makers of the province, and availability of cards in bigger venues, might draw more attention and new customers to the markets and smaller venues.  Plus were cards to be mass produced it would make sense to figure out some sort of % that artists would receive per card; it could add up if the factory were to become a big deal!

Anyhow, just an idea!  Here's the history of Carlton Cards, which was founded in Toronto in 1920 but purchased by American Greetings in 1956.

And here's an interesting article I found on Why Greeting Cards are So Expensive.

I'll end this post with an interesting youtube video from 2009 I found that explains part of the reason why stuff from China  is so cheap... for now...