You might ask, “What are they on about, everyone knows that!” And we might reply, “So why is it that in December of every year companies ask for bespoke pop up products to be produced within a couple of days even though they have no concept in mind and no artwork to hand?” All they know is that it’s coming close to Christmas and this year they want to send something different.

 For years shops on the High Street have urged us to shop early for Christmas. We realise that they would like to improve cash flow by encouraging shoppers to spread their Christmas spending. We like to encourage customers to plan early and place orders early in order to try to ease the stress and relative madness that is the Christmas rush.

 Even in quieter times such as the summer holiday period we ask for a two week lead time to produce an order of 2000 automatic pop up mailers. The likelihood is that your designer is not familiar with the layout of a pop up product and so the design might take longer than you anticipate. We supply templates and samples to help you with your artwork but even then there can be positional errors and so on which can hold up the job. We then have to produce proofs and a mock-up which are sent via ”snail mail” or via courier as we can’t send a mock-up via email.

 Once the mock up and proof are approved we go to print, followed any adding any finishes that you might specify such as laminating which is a very popular. The next process is die-cutting and trimming before each component part of the pop-up product is carefully stripped out of each printed sheet of board. Then it is the turn of hand finishing and hand assembly. Every single one of our pop up products is made by hand right here in Lancashire - hand folded, hand glued, rubber bands inserted by hand, the mailing outers are made by hand, the pop ups are compressed and inserted into the mailing outers by hand, address labels are affixed by hand, mailers put into postal sacks or carefully packed into packaging boxes by hand. We do not simply press a button and 1000 pop up cubes suddenly appear on a pallet.

 As you can appreciate a hand made product takes a lot of care, attention to detail and quite a bit of time.

 If that happens in August when orders can be taken comfortably in our stride, what do you imagine it’s like in October and November? Or, worse still, in mid December when someone comes on the phone with what they describe as a “screamer”. Pleas such as, “Come on, mate, you’ve got to help us out as we’re right in a mess with this one” are an everyday occurrence. Unfortunately, the fact that someone else has dug a hole for themselves by promising to meet crazy deadlines doesn’t alter the fact that the job still takes two weeks to complete. And being British, we don’t like queue jumping!