Latest / Small Business Success with Fexingo: Local Companies, Main Street Stories, and Community Commerce / How a Local Print Shop Used Art Prints to Survive E-Books
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a print shop in Portland called The Paper Crane that lost about forty percent of its revenue between 2019 and 2022. The owner, Maya Chen, had built the business on binding booklets, printing flyers, making menus for local restaurants — the kind of work that just evaporated when people moved online. Luna: I remember hearing about shops like that. A lot of them just closed. What did she do? Lucas: She turned the shop into an art gallery. But not a gallery that sells other people's work — she started producing limited-edition art prints. Signed, numbered, printed on archival paper, priced at seventy-five dollars each. She partnered with local artists, paid them a royalty upfront, and kept the printing in-house. Luna: So she used the same equipment she already owned, just for a completely different product. That's clever. Lucas: Exactly. The commercial printing presses weren't running anyway. In the first year, art prints generated one hundred and forty thousand dollars in revenue. That didn't fully replace the lost commercial work, but it bought her time to figure out what the shop could become. Luna: What made people buy a seventy-five-dollar print from a print shop instead of from the artist directly, or from a site like Etsy? Lucas: That's the interesting part. Maya told me she deliberately limited each edition to fifty prints. So each print is scarce by design. She also made sure every print came with a handwritten note from the artist and a certificate of authenticity. That combination — scarcity plus a personal touch — created a sense of collectibility. Luna: And she's a printer, so the quality has to be better than what an artist can do at home. That's a real moat. Lucas: Right. She prints on a hundred percent cotton rag paper using pigment-based inks that are rated to last over a hundred years. That's not something a typical artist can offer. So she's selling a premium product that's really hard to replicate. Luna: And the artists benefit too — they get exposure and a royalty without having to manage production. It's a partnership, not just a transaction. Lucas: Exactly. Maya pays the artist fifty percent of the print price upfront, so they're never waiting for sales. That builds goodwill and attracts better artists. She now has a roster of fifteen local artists, and she rotates new editions every month. Luna: I want to ask about the marketing side. She's a print shop — how does she get the word out to art collectors? Lucas: She leaned hard into Instagram, but in a very specific way. Instead of just posting images of the prints, she started doing short video interviews with the artists, showing them at work, explaining their process. Each print release is an event. Luna: So she's selling the story, not just the image. That's classic content marketing, but applied to a physical product. Lucas: Yeah. And she also started hosting monthly artist talks at the shop — in person, with wine and cheese. Those events draw maybe thirty to fifty people, but the conversion rate is high. About a third of attendees buy a print that night. Luna: And those events also reinforce the community aspect. People feel like they're part of something, not just buying a poster. Lucas: Right. And here's a number that stuck with me: in 2025, her online sales — shipping prints to buyers in thirty different states — accounted for forty percent of total print revenue. She built a national customer base from a tiny shop in Portland, just by being consistent on Instagram and running those events. Luna: That's impressive. But I'm curious about the economics of the prints themselves. Seventy-five dollars for a signed limited edition — what's the margin? Lucas: Maya shared her numbers with me. The cost of goods — paper, ink, packaging, plus the artist royalty — comes to about twenty-two dollars per print. So gross margin is around seventy percent. That's much better than commercial printing, where margins are often in the thirty to forty percent range. Luna: So the pivot actually improved her profitability, even if total revenue is lower. That's a healthier business. Lucas: Exactly. And because each edition is limited, she doesn't have to hold inventory. She prints the fifty copies, sells most of them within a month, and then moves on to the next edition. Inventory risk is almost zero. Luna: It's a print-on-demand model, but with a twist — the demand is created by scarcity and curation. She's not waiting for orders; she's creating desire. Lucas: You know, we talk a lot on this show about small businesses that found a new revenue stream — and this episode is a good reminder that those pivots don't happen by accident. It takes experimentation and a willingness to let go of what used to work. Luna: And it takes people willing to support that kind of work. Speaking of which — if these conversations have moved your thinking forward in some small way, a handful of listeners chip in monthly at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's literally what funds making shows like this one, ad-free and independent. Lucas: Yeah, it's a small group that keeps the lights on here, and we're grateful. No pressure, just — if it's added value, you know where to find us. Luna: So back to The Paper Crane — she's now expanded the art print program into greeting cards and notebooks, all using the same limited-edition approach. The cards are five dollars each, and they sell in bundles of six. Lucas: That's a great way to lower the entry price and bring in customers who might not spend seventy-five dollars on a print. Once they buy a card bundle, they're on the email list, and they get notified about the next print release. Luna: So the cards are a loss leader, or at least a low-margin product that feeds the higher-margin print business. Smart funnel. Lucas: Exactly. And the cards also use the same artists, so it's a way to promote the full-size prints. Maya told me that about fifteen percent of card buyers eventually purchase a print within six months. Luna: That's a solid conversion rate. Especially for a product that costs five dollars. Lucas: Yeah. And she's now thinking about a subscription model — a monthly print club where subscribers get a new limited-edition print delivered every month for a flat fee. She's testing it with a pilot group of twenty subscribers right now. Luna: That would give her predictable recurring revenue, which is the holy grail for small businesses. If she can pull that off, she's essentially built a completely new business on top of the old one. Lucas: Right. And the old business — commercial printing — hasn't fully disappeared. It's about thirty percent of revenue now, mostly from repeat clients who still need menus and flyers. But the art print program is the growth engine. Luna: So the lesson here isn't just 'pivot to art prints.' It's more about using your existing assets — equipment, skills, space — to create a product that's genuinely different and that customers can't get anywhere else. Lucas: Exactly. Maya had a printing press and a deep knowledge of paper and ink. She didn't go learn a whole new trade. She just found a new application for what she already knew how to do. That's the kind of pivot that actually works. Luna: I love that. It's a reminder that sometimes the best new business is hiding inside your old one. Lucas: Yeah. And on that note — I'd love to know if any of you listening have seen a similar pivot in your own town. A hardware store that started doing classes, a florist that started doing subscription bouquets. Send us a note — we might feature it on a future episode. Luna: For now, thanks for listening. We'll be back soon with another story from Main Street.