Tag Team of One

Among the more ordinary tasks in day-to-day business there exists the surprisingly elaborate task of sorting out packaging. There is literally no end to the way you can package your stuff- it's all down to two things. The Look and The Cost.


I try to keep both of mine as humble as possible- I like the brown paper and string simplicity of 19th century merchants, it suits the salvage nature of my worn out bits. The cost I like to keep low as well, being that I don't really believe my customers should have to pay an extra dollar amount just because I want to have fancy packaging. I don't factor in the cost of my time, materials or effort into my tags (which double as business cards) and wrapping. My shipping is the actual cost of the parcel transport and the envelope, that's it. Everything else is my generosity -and just wanting things to look nice. :)


Luckily the two philosophies go together quite well and incorporate my eco-policy. Today's tag experiment turned out well- 19th century sheet music, old book pages, 1970s wedding album tissue embossed with spider's webs, vintage system cards and regular old print outs on re-claimed paper from my museum days when the printer's shop was cleaned out.


Lovely! The back tags cost 15 cents each, the rest of the materials cost too little to count. I don't have infinite supplies of these papers (and as the back tags are made in Asia they're likely to be woodchip pulp from an old-growth source so I won't be buying more, even if they are nice and old-school) but the finiteness doesn't matter. I like to change things now and then, it keeps things alive and interesting, which is a nice touch for things so often made of the worn and dusty.

And the scraps can go back in the box to use in ATCs.