Golly Gina Cards

Cleaning Up Our Act

2009-10-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

Cha-cha-cha-Changes. As summer turned into Fall, quite a bit changed in the universe of Damn Gina Cards. First of all, well, we're not called Damn Gina anymore. Don't cry -- the way we wanted to when we first heard from a kindly copyright lawyer that if we ever made any money as Damn Gina Cards, Martin Lawrence's people probably would come after us and even though we would think that was funny, it would actually be not funny. We were sad when we thought it meant our name was going to have to be Gina Cards or Hey Gina! Cards or, perhaps the worst, Blame Gina Cards, which was the one we got closest to using, even buying the domain name. Our heart was in the right place. We liked the idea that there was a little mischievous person named Gina out there and she was making trouble (and cards). But...it wasn't right.

And so, after much deliberation, we came up with...GOLLY GINA CARDS. That's our new name. We're cleaning up our act. Get it? We're using "golly" instead of "damn," like the nice denizens of The Music Man's old-timey Gary, Indiana that, on some level, we really are.

WASSAIC!

2009-08-05T17:07:00.000-07:00

Damn Gina is launching a new line at the Wassaic Project Summer Festival. Our friends Eve & Bowie started the Wassaic Project and we're very excited to be a part of it! The NYT even gave Wassaic a shout out a week ago.

Get on up there, mid-August. It's under two hours by train from NYC. You'll have to pay for a Damn Gina card, but entrance is free.

Wassaic info here.

ECHO PARK TIME TRAVEL MART

2009-04-23T15:53:00.001-07:00

What a great week this is for Damn Gina! We are now stocked in the Echo Park Time Travel Mart. Seriously, the Time Mart and Skylight books are two of my two favorite locations in the world, as well as on the eastside of LA, so this is very exciting.

The cards at the Time Mart are cards that we designed especially for the store, since Kelly and I are kind of obsessed with it (people should volunteer to tutor kids in the adjoining 826LA office. Miranda July does it).

You should go there and check them out yourselves, but let's just say the cards are from, respectively, the early 90's, 1982 and maybe the future but we're not telling. And Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan might have something to do with the 90's cards, but we're not telling. But we've heard that Tonya Harding googles herself and if that's true, hi Tonya, we're big fans.

Damn Gina is at Coachella!

2009-04-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

Right this second! On sale at the Cool Haus Ice Cream Truck in the campground area!
...If you're reading this chances are you are NOT at Coachella because there is no cell phone service there. But anyway.

Skylight Books

2009-04-17T15:46:00.000-07:00

Oh Skylight Books, how I love thee! How many hours have I spent perusing your aisles, looking for a book, or trying to make a friend?

And now, other aimless Skylight wanderers, or not so aimless wanderers, will be able to spend their existential angst, and a small amount of money, on a Damn Gina card.

Skylight Books is now stocking a bunch of Damn Gina Cards. It's actually the most complete collection of Damn Gina Cards for sale on earth. Check it out. And buy a book while you're at it.

Our First Custom Commission

2009-04-15T15:41:00.000-07:00

My friend Sarah's mom Kik is turning sixty. She's having a party and asked Damn Gina to do the invites. So we've entered another realm of card-making: customized commissions. Why didn't we think of this before?

Restocked!

2009-04-13T16:05:00.000-07:00

Update: You can all breathe again because we have restocked our Clover with our birthday card. And given them a new birthday card model to sell as well.

You'll be able to go to that party after all.

...unless you are behind on your taxes, in which case you should probably stay home and get that done.

Sold Out!

2009-04-12T21:03:00.000-07:00

Our birthday cards sold out at Clover! So if you were about to head over there to spice up a gift, better head over to one of our other locations until later this week when we will be re-stocking at Clover.

Come stalk us!

2009-04-10T13:32:00.000-07:00

Damn Gina is joining the ranks of Ashton & Demi, Diablo Cody, and William Shatner. We're twittering. If you're still living in the dark ages, then stalking us on facebook is fine too.

More Where That Came From

2009-04-06T13:31:00.000-07:00

we have big plans...stay tuned...

Meet Us In The Dance Tent, because...

2009-04-03T15:48:00.000-07:00

Damn Gina is going to Coachella!

Yes we are. Gina will be on sale at the Cool Haus ice cream truck. We'll be hawking our wares to all the hot kids dancing to Franz Ferdinand out in the Palm Springs sun.....Actually I think Franz Ferdinand is a psuedo-headliner this year and so they will probably be going on after the sun goes down, but I digress...The point is, we designed a Coachella-themed line of cards. Last night we burned the midnight oil printing them all out. They are in postcard form because it's really hot in Palm Springs and who wants to carry around a whole entire greeting card and envelope?

Coachella gets a cut of the profits and so does Cool Haus. So while we don't stand to make huge amounts of money, we do stand to promote the hell out of Damn Gina. We put our website on the back of every card.

This will be an experiment. Unlike ice cream, lemonade or beer, Damn Gina Cards offer no respite from the scorching Palm Springs sun. So we're not really sure how we'll sell, but we do have high hopes. We think that the metallic letters in the postcards would look totally great with gold American Apparel hot pants.

Big Sugar Bakeshop!

2009-03-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

Damn Gina is now being carried by the adorable Big Sugar Bakeshop in Studio City, right near Zen Volvo, a mechanic that I have frequented but about which I am pretty lukewarm.

It was the first stop on a long trek that Kelly and I took on Tuesday. We drove all over town with a shoebox of cards in the trunk. This was a very effective method, not least because it made us feel like girl scouts, carrying our cookies door to door.

Speaking of cookies, the Big Sugar Bakeshop has delicious cookies, cupcakes and brownies and any other kind of baked good you might desire.

Check it out, Chica. And buy a Gina.

Gina is not as Available as we thought.

2009-03-03T13:35:00.000-08:00

I dropped the cards off today at Ghettogloss with some young man "holding down the fort" on Ghettogloss' lunch break. Fiora (owner of Ghettogloss) just called me and said she wants us to come back with our cards in April because they just got renovated and Fiora is trying to sort through their inventory and clear stuff out. She was very nice about it.

Damn.

But I've worked out a strategy. More event-themed cards must be made (by us, and our own two hands for now, because those are the ones that the boutiques seem to want and we still can't afford to do large-scale orders of them). More consignment invoices must be printed. Many more stores must be approached with these things in hand. I think for now I'll just hand make some more of the event-themed cards, which means I need a new ink cartridge for my printer, which means I have to go to the Staples on Santa Monica and Vermont tomorrow, which means I might treat myself to a recession-friendly lunch at Yuca's, which is very exciting.

...As far as pounding the pavement round three, I think I might wait until Lucy gets here in a week or so. We're more marketable as a duo...hmmm....

Gina is Available.

2009-02-25T13:16:00.000-08:00

Today is a large day here at Damn Gina Cards. We are officially available in stores. I just dropped off card orders and invoices at Uncle Jer's and Clover. I had to hand make some of the cards using Adobe photo shop, staples pre-creased matte greeting card paper, and scissors, because we haven't done the mass orders for some of the models yet. I even used my typewriter for the first time in four years to type our copyright on the back in red ink.

Hopefully we won't have to make our friends go in and buy the cards so it looks like Damn Gina is marketable.

Tomorrow we will be available at Ghettogloss, and, Gina willing, I can do another pavement-pounding round and rustle up some more consignment deals from some stores in Hollywood. Details as they happen...

Zeitgeist

2009-02-25T10:54:00.000-08:00

Thanks to this Onion article, now we truly know that Damn Gina is part of the zeitgeist.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/plan_to_start_little_stationery

Also happening lately: Do-It-Yourself Printing, Press Release Editing, repeated utterances of the phrase "Damn Gina," fantasies of being sued by Martin Lawrence at some point in the future.

Pounding the Pavement, NYC style

2009-02-20T12:46:00.000-08:00

The plan was a double blitz on the ground. Kelly hitting back the spots we had been to in November and me hitting up some spots in New York. I live in Park Slope, the possible global ground zero for people who want to buy stylish knickknacks, but as often happens to me when trying to determine what to do in Brooklyn, I got on the F train and went to Manhattan. I needed to make copies of the fliers (flyers? Kelly, I'm with you sister) and I knew a branch of our old classic, Kinko's, was in Astor Place, which was also where I used to go when I was a young teenager on the hunt for cool stuff.

Ryan, a friend of mine and Kelly's, was accompanying me while I made the copies, but he took a break to get himself something to eat. While he was in the neighboring cafe, he noticed a cute girl and came back to conference with me (as I collated the fliers and cover letters in with the ten sets of three cards each I had already collated and put in my bag before getting n the subway). We agreed that I should

approach the cute girl in my official capacity of Damn Gina Card hawker and give her Ryan's number. This was just as awkward as it sounds. But I let him write his phone number in a Damn Gina Card and told her to check out the website, even if she didn't want to check out ("he's really cute!") Ryan, so with any luck, it was a bizarre enough event for her and her friends to check out our site and then buy some cards.

Next we headed to one of my very favorite places, and a place where I am determined to have Damn Gina Cards stocked: the Patricia Field store on Bowery just north of Houston. This is a place I love so much that I went into it a couple weeks ago when I had no income, spent over $150, and felt good for days as a result. No everyday store. So I readied my packet of Damn Gina paraphernalia, straightened my coat (which I had bought there as part of my aforementioned spree), and walked into the black and white and magenta and leopard wonderland. There were two girls behind the counter and I headed straight for them.

"Hi," I said confidently. "Do you sell greeting cards?"

"Only if they're smutty and fucked up," one of the girls said.

"Well," I said, "These cards are kind of on the borderline and I think they might do really well in your store...." and then I launched into the bit about how they should give the packet to whomever is in charge and in the meantime, put our cards out on the counter and see if they sell. They wanted me to leave my

phone number, which seemed like a good sign. So I thanked them and left and when I looked back over my shoulder, one of the two girls was flipping through the cards. I left, feeling like it was the first text message of a romantic courtship that would probably follow the rules of what a friend of mine

used to call "the long game."

Buoyed by the brief excursion into my favorite store, we proceeded to Elizabeth St. There I spoke to a very handsome and debonair man in a men's' clothing store who also asked for my number

and told me, when I pressed him, that there was a 40-50% chance that the owner of his store

would want to stock Damn Gina. I was feeling very popular, but when I wrote "Or Call Me! Thanks, Lucy" on his cover letter, he pointed out that I had neglected to write my phone number beneath it and I had the sinking feeling that I had not written my phone number on the cover letter at the Patricia Field store either. As Phillip Marlowe once said, I wondered

what I had been using for brains my whole life.

The next stop was probably the low-point: An underwear store staffed by a French man who couldn't understand English and apologized profusely. I had a feeling that maybe his sincere apologies would lead to him feeling some kind of obligation to sell Damn Gina to his boss, whom he insisted he was going to see that night, so I left the packet with him, but it was with a heavy heart that I left three Damn Gina cards there, and I made a silent oath (moments later translated into a spoken oath with Ryan) that that store would be the last store that didn't already sell greeting cards where I would leave a packet.

The final store where I ended up leaving a packet was a store that I think would be a very good fit for Damn Gina. In fact, it was because of just how perfect this store was that I decided I better make in that last stop, figuring that there were probably several other stores that good in Manhattan and even more in Brooklyn and that I was better off doing more research before going out and pounding the pavement again.

I gave my last card of the day away to a Venezuelan man I met at a bar later when we were both drinking scotch. "Drinking scotch always makes me feel straight," was his fairly effective pick-up line. He was

a jewelry designer who gave me his card and so I gave him a Damn Gina Card figuring: you never know. He twice said he was "flabbergasted" by the glory of the card and then apologized for his English. Later, on my way out of the bar, he said he would order some online for sure. It occurred to me that Damn Gina should go international soon.

ED NOTE

Today I called the Patricia Field store to make sure I had left my number. In fact, I had, "in pen," as the blonde girl at the front desk reassured me, and the buyer will look at them when he gets back in next week.

We've Gotta Get Out More: Pavement Pounding, Los Angeles, Round 2, Day 1

2009-02-19T14:42:00.000-08:00

Now that we’ve had a little more experience with the retail business, and we know really complicated things like what a buyer is, we have decided to start pounding the pavement again. This time it’s bicoastal; Lucy’s hawking cards in Brooklyn and I’m revisiting the stores we hit up in Silver Lake waaaaay back in December of ’08, back when we were just a couple of girls with a couple of cards from Kinko’s.

This time, we’ve put together an actual packet that requires a paper clip to hold it all together. It includes:

- A color-print cardstock flyer (flier? Oh my god do I really not know how to spell that word?) with card models and prices.
- A note to store owners/buyers
- Four free cards. It’s the recession after all, and people appreciate free stuff, right?

Today was round one for me of round two of pavement pounding. First I went to Clover on Rowena, and talked to store owner Nicole, who was incredibly nice and introduced me to the concept of consignment, which means that I drop off a bunch of cards (more than just four) and a retail invoice (which I am not yet sure how to write), and then Clover puts our cards in their racks and if they sell, Damn Gina (and Clover) gets paid. Though Nicole said that Clover is fairly ‘bought up’ (another term I learned) on cards, she really liked Damn Gina and told me to come back tomorrow with six more of each card model, and Clover would give us a try.

Next I went to American Vintage on Hillhurst. They only sell clothes and a few accessories, but I thought, hey, vintage, we’re that, why not put a few cards by the register? They didn’t take the cards, in fact, they gave me a card, with the number of the warehouse that buys for American Vintage. I’m supposed to contact the buyers there and see what they think.

Vermont avenue was next. We’ve learned that we’re really not supposed to do business with more than one store per street, but I figured that Y-Que Trading Post and Skylight Books weren’t really competing establishments, so I bent the rule and hit up two stores on Vermont:

Y-Que, once again loved Damn Gina (and we love Y-Que), but once again told Damn Gina mournfully that “oh my god we’re so broke right now, we can’t afford anything.” But they took the cards and said they’d try and sell them and for me to get back in touch in the next week or so.

The girl at the Skylight Books register was friendly, took our card samples, and told me to get in touch with the owner of the store when she got back from vacation in a week. The owner was out of town the first time we went there, so maybe this is their polite way of saying they don’t like us, but we’ll see. If I’ve learned anything this time around, it’s that following up with people is a good thing.

Una Mae’s on Kingswell was a little reserved and the girl there me that they were bought up through fall. I was about to leave with the packet I’d come in with, but she told me to “still leave your stuff here, that’s always a good thing.” Another thing she said was “oh you’re local, that’s great”. This seemed to be the consensus. Eventually I ended up just gesturing vaguely behind me and saying “oh, yeah, I live like, a minute away from here”. Which is pretty much true, more or less.

Onwards, to that crazy intersection where Sunset mashes into Hollywood and explodes into a Blockbuster, a Von’s, the Vista theater, and Uncle Jer’s. The first time, we’d gotten an order on the spot, though I’d totally flaked out on delivering the order (bewildered as I was by either starting a business, going back east, or procrastination). I thought that because of this, we’d be laughed right out of the store. But Rob, the guy who we’d originally done business with, not only didn’t laugh at me, but recognized me and told me he still wanted his original order. Once again, Uncle Jer’s turned out to be the most fruitful pavement pounding of the day.

The last stop for me today was Reform School, on Sunset near the Junction. The owner was in, and very nice, and asked some specifics about the cards, like what we printed them on, if we’d be interested in consignment, what our wholesale prices were…this time around, seasoned greeting card dealer that I am, I had answers for her. She said she recognized Damn Gina from a mailing to their submissions, which I’d done back in December. Apparently Reform School’s submissions page crashed, and deleted everything. She liked the cards, and told me to email about consignment, a term I only learned this morning.

The lesson Damn Gina learned today was that instead of scheming and dreaming with your computer and retail websites, you need to get out there and talk to folks. That’s a little bit of a duh, but in our defense, we didn’t have much to talk about before. Now we’ve got some lingo to sling around, a website, and an actual plan.

Everyone Else Is Doing It So Why Can't We?

2009-02-11T16:17:00.001-08:00

In this latter part of this post-Y2K decade, you are nobody unless somebody writes inane comments about you on a public internet message board, or lets you know they care with a ping. And Damn Gina is somebody, damn it, so we’ve decided to set up a facebook profile. Not much to say about it yet, no posts, no pings, no friends...no l'il green patch plant-a-tree-on-your-wall application requests or whatever the eff those are...the only thing to report thus far is that the facebook powers that be wouldn’t let us call ourselves “Damn Gina”, or “Damn Gina Cards” because they don’t sound like real names.

Which kind of makes you miss that crazy free-for-all myspace, doesn’t it?

Oh well. Times have changed. Myspace is all bands now. Everyone else is facebooking, so why can’t Damn Gina? Here is our virgin profile, before the masses start tagging…

It's All About Your Look, Babe

2009-02-10T14:18:00.000-08:00

So...we here at Damn Gina Cards know that surface matters...especially when your product is all about surface. So we recently had a conference (via gchat and then emails of gchats and then gchats about the emails about the gchats) about our site and whether it was Damn Gina enough for Damn Gina.
This all occurred because I was in a commercial where I met a really nice guy who worked at an ad agency and I sent him a link to our site. He said he loved the cards but that our site looked a little grungy and that the cards looked so much better once they were clicked on that maybe we should just make them big to begin with. He suggested that we go with something like this site: http://www.ulvelius.se/ob.html I looked at it, thought it was cool and sent it to Kelly, who also thought it was cool, and then we got Greg involved. Then things got a little more complicated...because Greg had some interesting opinions. Ever the scholar and gentleman, he had the following gchat conversation with Kelly (I removed what Kelly said because this is already probably more detailed than you wanted get about this anyway, unless you've got a really big crush on us):

Greg: ok, so i should say i'll do the site however you want. i do like it the way it is now (like i've said) but i don't have any sort of attachment to it. HOWEVER, i'm going to disagree with the ad guy you talked to. and no, i don't have any experience with this sort of thing

but i've been doing this marketing program at school as a suppliment to my degree

1:09 PM and they keep stressing brand identity and a person's perception of their experience with the brand

Greg: and i dont' think damn gina is slickster

1:11 PM Greg: i mean, there are two aspects to the site, the look, and the experience. right now the look is sloppy but the experience is smooth and quick

1:12 PM but i suggest keeping the image handler

where you click and it's enlarged immediately
1:13 PM Greg

hhmmmm
i guess i'm thinking from the standpoint of someone reading an article or finding a link online
so you click, you go to the page, and BAM! everything is there in your face. people don't schedule time to look at a website they've never seen1:13 PM Greg

so you want to show them as much as possible as fast as possible
but then when it comes to the buyer sitting down and placing an order, he'll go to the order page and everything will be laid out and easy to sift through

maybe i can straighten up the front page a little bit, make it less disorganized and we'll see how it looks

I was swayed by Greg's logic. I thought: Damn Gina is not slickster.
In fact, so long I am quoting new media extensively, I wrote back:

Hi all,

So...I think I've been swayed by Greg's point that even though it looks sloppy, the fact that it looks better when you click, and more importantly that it's so easy to click, makes it worthwhile. And I think it's also a really good point that the site as it is is more accessible to random clickers (who have hopefully heard about damngina from an article that will come out in the future) than retailers, and I think that is good. I think our goal should be to appeal to our actual demographic, since smart retailers will be able to see that we are doing that and like us more for it, not less. Damn Gina is not slicksters. The fact that professionals look at it and think, "great product, could be sold more professionally," is probably exactly what we WANT professionals to think. So in conclusion, before I thought we should change the site, but now I think the site has a DIY, damn gina charm that we should keep.

Thoughts? -- and thanks for all the thoughtful thoughts you both have already contributed to this. (and we should include this debate in the blog)

Lucy

Super meta? Too Meta? You've all stopped reading by now anyway. So much for us keeping any mystique about our look, right? That whole we-look-like-we-aren't-even-trying thing? Now you know how much thought really goes into that look. I mean, we're manipulating you. Now we've said it. (I heard that's what the internet is for)

Kelly agreed with me and then Greg offered to try another version of the site that he described as: "still a little crooked where it counts, but not so messy that it's hard to look at."

Pictured here:

But Both Kelly and I agreed that we liked the original site better. We thought the site was better being consistently crooked than only straight on half, cause then it looked like the bottom half was trying to be straight and it just wasn't working (that's what she said). Kelly summed it up best: "Greg we should never have doubted you!"

Then Greg linked this blog to our site, with the ingenious name "The Damn Blog"...and here we are!

Recession-Proof?

2009-01-21T15:08:00.000-08:00

I was at the huge Macy's Sale. By this point the sight of department stores ravaged by sales is a familiar one (I employed my mantra "I was to pay such low prices I feel guilty about it!" at Barney's and Saks), but there was something particularly pitiful about Macy's, with its creepy ceilings and cheap children's clothes. Going up the wooden escalators into the fluorescently-lit store, I had a sudden feeling that I was watching America turn into a Third World Country.

I was with Adriane, a friend from college. We were talking about the recession and how we're gonna make money in this world. She's a journalist who always has her finger on the cultural pulse, so I thought I'd tell her about Damn Gina Cards and see how she reacted.

"Greeting Cards???" she said. "That is the least recession-proof idea I have ever heard!" She then proceeded to tell me an anecdote she had heard about how the first stores to close on a particular block had been the greeting cards stores. Greeting cards are completely superfluous, she said. No one needs greeting cards.

This is true of course. With the advent of the internet and the Postal Service's threats to only deliver mail five days a week, the future of business if obviously not in greeting cards. Nor, when people are scaling back on things that aren't necessities, does it make sense that many people would want to include cards with presents that they could easily give without cards...

HOWEVER, let me offer an alternate reading (one that we gave, with some success, in the parking lot of Citibank when we were trying to convince people to buy our cards for their friends and family as Christmas presents): now that people use email for almost everything, getting something personal in the mail really feels special, and being able to make someone feel special with a stylish gift for only $3.92 (a Damn Gina Card plus a stamp) is pretty damn good. Considerably less than flowers, chocolates, comic books, regular books, cds, mittens, underwear, sex toys, etc. I mean, it's so rare to even know someone's address these days that sending someone a cute card in the mail feels downright intimate. Let's put it this way: I would fall for it.*

Not necessarily the same thing as a promise that I will fall for it.

Might As Well Get Knocked Up

2009-01-15T16:21:00.000-08:00

Last night we got an email from the LA Mart telling us that we need a sales rep in order to be considered for their showrooms. I found a couple of stationary reps on the LA Mart website, and I emailed them saying "Hi! Brand new Greeting Card company seeking representation!" and I've gotten a couple of responses saying "We love your cards, but we're full up on cards right now and it's the recession you idiot, why would we want to try and sell even more of what people aren't buying?" (....not in those words)

In a fit of self-doubt, I decided to do some internet research to see what everyone else is doing. What is their secret? How did they get distributors?

I googled “greeting cards”, which was stupid, and then added some qualifiers such as “hip” “funny”. I then spent a few hours wandering through an internet maze of greeting card companies. A lot of stories about Moms starting companies because they wanted to spend more time with their kids, or Moms wanting their kids to learn the value of thank you, or Moms letting loose with their artistic ambitions after they got empty nest syndrome (there were, incidentally, a lot of bird graphics on the greeting cards I researched).

Starting a greeting card company seems to be a real Mom thing to do. And these Moms know what they were doing! The cards are wrapped in cute plastic packaging and they all look so professional! And perfect! And successful! And eco-friendly!

....We're out of the loop. Rather, we just haven't figured out where the loop is, what it takes to get into the loop. Neither Lucy nor I have any intention of getting knocked up any time soon.

It's a Brand New Bright Obama Day

2009-01-02T18:34:00.000-08:00

(I got that post title from this, which I'm sure you've been forwarded at some point)

Well my family sure liked the cards. I saved some money on presents by giving some of them cards as a present. Yes. So. I am back in Los Angeles. Our business has gone bicostal. That is, our idea for starting a business has gone bicostal.

I know we need to pound more pavement on both coasts. My one concern is that we only have hard sellable copies of 3 card models. We need hard sellable copies of all 11 of our card models. And with the wholesale printers, you have to order a minimum of 250 cards. This is expensive. We need money to order the other cards. We need to sell orders before we can make more cards. We need press/representation to get orders. Right?

Come on, 2009. Let's try and squeeze some money out of this crappy economy.

A NOTE ON OUR GURU

2008-12-18T12:05:00.000-08:00

We have exchanged several emails with Leslie, the owner of decorativethings.com. She is a friend of my aunt's, and she has been so generous with her time and advice that she even took time out of a visit to her sick parents to talk to me on the phone about the retail business.

Lucy and I have sent her a few rapidfire emails basically asking her to please give us step by step instructions on how to obtain total and instant retail success:

Are we supposed to be selling door to door?
Are were supposed to be finding a sales representative?
How do local merchants like us reach a national audience and get buyers from, oh, say, Urban Outfitters to answer their emails?

Leslie has been incredibly helpful and encouraging with us. She's given us lots of suggestions and answered lots of our naive and manic questions. She has even ordered 80 of our cards. However, just like in the film industry, it appears that there are apparently no easy answers on how to become an overnight retail industry success. We are just going to have to be patient.

Dammit. Onwards.

We shipped a box of cards off to Leslie and rejoiced in our first wholesale order and online sales. And then, because it is that time of year again, we are taking a break from the greeting card industry, and taking off for the east coast. We are excited to tell our families that we aren't slated for futures as penniless writers after all because we are business people now...

(we aren't totally taking time off. we are taking some cards with us, to give to our families for the holidays, which is promotion, kind of....more after the holiday jump...)

TUESDAY: GETTING LEGITIMIZED

2008-12-16T19:45:00.000-08:00

A retail guru (more on that in the next post) suggested that we get our site hooked up directly to credit card companies, as some buyers are not going to want to deal with Pay Pal. I found a site that (for a flat fee) allows your site to do this. The registration asked me what kind of a business we were and I had no idea so I impulsively signed up for one of the only business categories I'd ever heard of: and LLC.

I'd done all the internet paperwork on it and was all set to go when I suddenly saw that if we were a registered LLC we would be paying $800 in taxes for the 2008 tax year, just for being a business. I called the LLC people, waited through the hold music, and once I got them, told them to cancel my application.

"Oh, you're very lucky you called right now," the guy said, "fifteen more minutes and this would have gone through and you would have had to pay those taxes."

He might have been lying. But I still felt heroic, like I'd saved Damn Gina from even more overhead costs that we had yet to recoup.

The cheapest way to legitimize a business is to register with the Better Business Bureau. So I called them, talked to Connie in Manhattan Beach, and signed Damn Gina Cards up on the BBB's list of legitimate businesses.

This somehow made us legitimate enough to get credit card links onto our site. Although Greg had to jump through a few more crazy internet hoops to get this feature fully working. I don't know what the hoops are. I just keep saying thank you. We are very grateful to have Greg as our web technician. It makes things a lot easier. One of these days we plan on paying him.

SUNDAY: WELL WE OBVIOUSLY NEED AN EFFING WEBSITE

2008-12-14T19:01:00.000-08:00

We have been putting off creating a (real, non-blog) website because neither Lucy nor I know how the eff to do it. Today I made a pathetic attempt to wrestle with GoDaddy.com, a creepy-sounding name for a supposed-to-be-easy web-hosting company. When I couldn't figure out how to make the domains and the urls and the other internet what-have-yous work, I called Greg Shear. He and I were in a rock band called Pet Stove a year ago and was always on top of our band's internet needs.

So I called Greg, whined about not being able to understand computers, and in what seemed like seconds flat, Greg uploaded scans of our cards, designed an amazing website for Damn Gina and got it up and running on the world wide web.

We spent an hour or so discussing what wholesale pricing should be. I looked at wholesale costs on other greeting card websites, I asked more numbers-savvy people (Lucy and Greg) what they thought, and came up with some numbers. Greg put those up on the website, along with a few other things that we think a business website should have, such as our bio, contact information...

...and a credit for Greg, because he's a genius.

SATURDAY. HAWKING OUR WARES IN THE CITIBANK PARKING LOT

2008-12-13T15:53:00.000-08:00

When I got up this morning I thought, well this is it. The big day has arrived. We were both psyched. We thought we'd really arrived. We'd transformed into local artisans. We'd become legit. We were gonna be seen. There are signs all over the neighborhood for the art fair, and this morning I had many fantasies about how my life was going to be changed by this event. I made a dress for it.

The fair was being held in the parking lot of a Citibank on a corner with a lot of car traffic, but not necessarily a lot of foot traffic. In fact, most of the people who came to the fair just came because they were on their way to the bank.

We paid a discounted $30/day to be there and we sold $42 worth of cards today. That means that we made $12, but then with our production costs, we made about $6. For two of us being there from 8-5.

We have, however, lost our inhibitions about sales pitching. We tried all sort of things like:

(whispered): "You , I think you will like our cards…"
(yelled): "Bro, come check out these awesome fricken cards!"
(chatty): "Omg, you will love these cards!"
(To each other): "We were geniuses for coming up with these amazing cards!"
(to kids): "Go get your parents right now and tell them to come over here and buy come damn cards!"

We watched the fair patrons circulate the fair and took note of the ones who were drawn to our table. This gave us a sense of who likes our cards and who doesn't. About 67% of the people who like our cards are females between the ages of twelve and eighteen. When any teenaged girl walked into the Citibank parking lot today, we would think: them!

Despite the fact that we spent more on lunch at Gingergrass than we actually made at the fair, it was sort of worth it, if only because the fair experience has taught us how to throw the term "demographic" around confidently. It has also garnered us some names and email addresses, for the website we realized that we do not have.

LATER ON THURSDAY: WHOLESALE ORDERING FROM SOMEWHERE IN MONTANA

2008-12-11T23:45:00.000-08:00

There is a small part of us that expects to make massive amounts of money at the Ghettogloss art fair this Saturday. Which means that waiting in line for the scissors at Kinko’s is not going to cut it. We need massive amounts of cards, and we only have a day and a half to acquire them. After googling things like “cheap quantities”, “greeting card printing deals,” and “wholesale selling greeting card sellers”, we have stumbled upon a company in Montana that manufactures cards in bulk.

Can they do it overnight though, can printingforless actually print and ship us 1500 Damn Gina Cards in time for our big art fair debut?

Crystal, the friendly printingforless employee who answered our phone call, says that yes, they can do this.

Our cards, in four large boxes, will arrive on Saturday morning….

MONDAY THROUGH THURSDAY: POUNDING THE PAVEMENT

2008-12-11T08:34:00.000-08:00

Luckily, we are both working L.A. hours for our other jobs (read: not nine-to-five. Read: we aren’t fully employed which is why we are trying to sell greeting cards). So we had ample time today to prostitute our greeting cards on Sunset Boulevard. We filled an awkward plastic folder with our first batch of Damn Gina Cards, and a few sample books, and set off walking around Silver Lake. We’ve had some experience with this sort of thing; a month or so prior to starting this card enterprise, Lucy and I pounded the pavement to get retail donations for our No On Prop 8 fundraiser party.

Trying to get people to buy greeting cards was a different experience than getting donations. Here was our approximate sales pitch, the first time we tried it out:

Us: (stepping into the store) Hi.
Retail clerk: Hello. We have a sale today, on all the stuff on the back racks.
Us: Um.
Retail clerk: Let me know if you need anything!
Us: Um (exchanging looks with each other). Actually, do you guys sell greeting cards?
Retail clerk: Yeah, right over there. We’ve also got wrapping paper.
Us: No, well, actually we’re selling greeting cards. We have a company? We’re Damn Gina Cards, and we wanted to know if you might be interested in selling some?
Retail clerk: Oh.
Us: (approaching the counter, pulling stuff out of our plastic folder)
Retail clerk: Do you guys have samples?
Us: (presenting the samples) Yeah, here, this is what they kind of look like, and we have this book you can see, or um, we could leave it here for a manager or something?
Retail clerk: (examining the book). Oh. Hmmm. Cute. These are cute.
Us: We’re a new company, brand new.
Retail clerk: I’m actually not the buyer, but you can come back when she’s here.
Us: (note to selves, we need to ask for a manager or buyer. Okay.)

This sales pitch worked on some retail clerks, but not on Lisa. She is the mid-fifties-ish owner of a knick-knack gift shop. We gave her our pitch and she told us we needed to work on our presentation. We thanked her for her advice and left. As we exited the store Lisa stared after us. Probably thinking: “God what pathetic saleswomen they are. I know all about female empowerment and that shitty sales pitch of theirs was not it. Come on, young women, did I burn my bra for that?” Lisa looked at us as though we were bumbling Generation X slackers, not the motivated Generation Y capitalists that we felt like inside. So we knew we had to smarten up our sales pitch.

Which we did. We took ourselves more seriously and in return, so did the stores! They liked the cards. Uncle Jer’s ordered 36 on the spot. Y Que said they fucking loved the cards, and to come back when they had money, in a few weeks. Not everyone wanted our cards though. The girls behind the register at the vintage store we went into were too stoned to know what they wanted, or what we wanted from them. But enough people like them, they really really like them!

We feel like actual business people. Not only like actual business people, but like geniuses. We said that to one another a few times as we carried our plastic folder across Lucile ave: we are geniuses.

Ghettogloss even asked us to participate in their Art, Craft and Vintage sale on Saturday!

Genius.

….Which is a problem because we don’t have any cards left to sell.

SUNDAY. THIRD TIME IS THE CHARM

2008-12-07T17:23:00.000-08:00

We initially avoided Kinko's, both because it is possibly the most poorly run big chain store in North America, and also because we wanted to patronize our (friendly?) local businesses. But when we began our quest again today, we knew we needed to go to a place where we could run the machines ourselves and didn't have to explain everything to a salesperson. Plus Kinko's has the best deals and we are realizing the import of realism in business.

There, it took us several hours to produce five pristine look books on heavy white printer paper and two good looking copies of each of our cards, which we printed on the 22 cents/ page card stock they sold there. It cost us $44 which was not a sustainable price, but now we have what we needed to pound the pavement and see if we can get some local businesses to buy our wares.

THE SECOND TIME IS USUALLY LESS DRAMATIC (ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU’RE NOT DEALING WITH SOME CRAZY WHO KICKS YOU OUT OF HIS STORE).

2008-12-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

Still high from the hilariousness of Copy Cat, we drove over to another Mom and Pop copy place called Extra Copy. It had a sign on the door that it would open up again in five minutes, so we dipped into a neighboring boutique and asked the salesgirl how greeting cards companies usually pitch their cards to her store. This proved to be fortuitous, since she told us about the necessity of making a "look book," which is basically just what is sounds like: a book that has images of each of your cards as well as descriptions of their size and what's inside of them. She also told us that her particular store would not be getting new cards until after the holidays in January.

Then we went back to the copy store, which was now open. The woman who worked there was very nice, but she made some awkwardly shaped copies for us on card stock. Our attempts to make a look book were equally unsatisfying. I lamented that the images had been a lot better at Copy Cat. Kelly said I was just being sentimental. In the end, it cost us eleven dollars and we now have one usable card, which is not good for business.

We might have to give up our support-local-business attitude and go to Kinko's after all.

SATURDAY. OUR FIRST FORAY INTO CARD PRODUCTION

2008-12-06T20:45:00.000-08:00

We have a name, and now we needed a product. Today we went to a copy store and figure out how to design our cards. We randomly selected what seemed to be a perfectly nice local independent copy store in our neighborhood. Below is the 100% factual account that Kelly and I just wrote about that outing on yelp.com:

Well. Where to begin. My friend and I went to Copycat for the first time today.

When we went into the store and got told to "you know what get out of this store" apropos of absolutely nothing, we figured that the man who lashed out at us was under some kind of unusual duress. Once we ran to our internet and googled "Copycat-Hillhurst-ave.-customer -reviews", we realized that the abuse we suffered at the hands of Copycat was exactly what we should have been expecting.

Its started out innocently enough. We wanted to make some greeting cards, and the man working in copycat seemed vaguely frustrated by us. We thought we were just dealing with your average, run-of-the-mill, bad attitude.

But then things escalated. At first he sighed with annoyance and had a clear disdain for our greeting-card endeavor. But when we asked him if we could make our copies vertical instead of horizontal, he said "You know what, no. This is not worth it, this is not worth 89 cents per page, this is turning into too much of a project! Get out of here, get out, go, leave, get out!!!!"

We stood there in shock. He asked us to pay and when we questioned what the protocol was on paying for the beginning of a copy job when it is left unfinished because the store is throwing you out for no reason, he got angrier and said "get out! See you later - or better yet NOT!" and then he stormed into the back office.

Keep in mind, we had previously been planning on paying him up to $85 for the copy job we wanted.

We went back to our car, regrouped and reassured one another that yes, that had actually just happened. When we drove out of the parking lot, we saw our angry Copycat man standing outside the store, furiously smoking what could have been mistaken for a post-coital cigarette.

In conclusion, we recommend that everyone go to Copycat if just to have the same mind-blowing experience that we had.

(...A week later, I told this story to another friend of mine, who responded incredulously: "You got involved in the feud???" Because apparently Copy Cat is involved in a full blown turf war with the neighboring Box Brothers. But that's another story).

LATER ON FRIDAY. BUSINESS LUNCH

2008-12-05T23:06:00.000-08:00

The first thing we did after coming up with this idea was have a business lunch, at a cheap Thai restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. While waiting for our chili cashew nut to arrive, it occurred to us that we would need a name for our business, we couldn't just call it 'Hey Do You Want To Give Us Money For These Cards'.

We needed it to be catchy. Cute but not too cute. We didn't want to call it Kelly & Lucy because we thought that sounded like every single other company that's been started by two girls.

"Damn Gina!" we said. Not because we were brilliant greeting-card-company namers, but because this is an expression from the Martin Lawrence show that we've been using ad nauseum for the past four days, for no reason at all.

And that was it.

FRIDAY. GETTING INTO BUSINESS: THINGS GET SO BAD THAT WE MUST ACT

2008-12-05T19:34:00.000-08:00

It's a fall day in Los Angeles. There are fires in the valley and the room where I am squatting in Kelly's soon-to-be-foreclosed-on house smells smoky, even though the windows have been closed all night. It was hard to sleep late today under the circumstances, so I didn't, but by the time I got up, the Dow had already fallen another 700 points. Again.

It would be dramatic to say we're totally broke, but man, we are totally broke. Kelly has been making daily calls to her grandma to remind her that it she'd had a birthday and I spent over an hour yesterday waiting on the corner of Ivar and Franklin for some guy from Craigslist to come by and buy some dvds from me for $5 each.

Today we ransacked Kelly's desk/room and my scattered belongings for more things to sell, and found some old film stills in a manila envelope in the back of the closet. We love the images, but somehow putting them up in a gallery and trying to sell them doesn't seem like a particularly lucrative option. First we thought - if only we had hundreds of these films stills to sell, then we’d be able to make at least a couple hundred dollars. Should we copy them?....But who would want photocopies of old pictures? What use does anyone have for that?

…And then it hit us. Greeting cards. We can make greeting cards and people will give us money for them!

But how? Where do greeting cards come from? As far as we know, greeting cards come from greeting card companies. So that's it then. We need to start a company, our own personal greeting card business.

(Our only problem was that we knew nothing about starting our own business...but we learned. Stay tuned...)