This is the news that fans of cardmaking, scrap booking, rubber stamping and decoupage have been waiting for - PopupCrafts. Whitney Woods has finally opened a retail site featuring brand new pop-up craft supplies. Now all of you scrapbookers, card makers and stampers worldwide can make automatic pop-up products in your own style. Our range has previously been available only as business-to-business marketing products but now we feel that it is time for all of you highly skilled card making and scrapbooking enthusiasts to be given a chance to show how much you can improve on the efforts of the ad agencies. These new craft supplies will be available only from Whitney Woods. You will not find them on any other website. We will be featuring a new product every month starting with an easy one first - the super funny “Wobbly Bits” card.

Here are three automatic pop-up products which can spark off some great ideas for direct marketing campaigns.

 The pop-up cuboid or pop-up box can be designed in a variety of shapes to match your B2B mailing idea and has been popular as a cornflakes box, a shoe box and also as a coin collection or money box when we have added a coin slot to one surface. Most sizes in our collection offer a large area for custom printing which makes it a good choice for translating your B2B ideas. With a little imagination and the addition of a couple of extras, the pop-up box can be transformed into a pop-up handbag for fashion store promotions.

 Pop-up Gems come in a variety of shapes and sized but ours have five, six or seven sides being made up of ten, twelve or fourteen triangular panels. This combination of shapes leads to many creative marketing ideas. Company logos are often replicated in these shapes which makes the pop-up gems an ideal choice as an advertising product.

The number of sides also leads to another marketing idea – to create a desktop calendar which guarantees a 12 month life for the advertising product. Pop-up gems are also extremely popular at Christmas when they are often reproduced as Christmas Decorations with an added loop of decorative string for hanging.

 The Pop-Up House is an unusual, versatile and innovative 3D shape with an automatic rubber band pop-up action. The Pop-Up House is a terrific idea for Business-to-Business advertising as is a very distinctive product that can be printed as very many different types of building. To illustrate the product’s versatility, over the years, the pop-up house has been successfully recreated as a shop, a bank, a cottage, a restaurant, a greenhouse, a garden shed, a beach hut and even as Santa’s Grotto!

The re-design of our Whitney Woods website has seen the addition of unusual, fun and interactive marketing products. This is a distinct move away from the old-style site which was basically a hub leading to our other promotional products websites. We have now decided to bring everything under one roof.

One particular marketing product features a movement that is not at all sophisticated but it is very amusing and highly interactive. We call the product “Wobbly Bits”. A die-cut shape is affixed to a picture using a small spring producing a really funny wobbly action. It’s a simple but very effective idea. The die-cut shapes that we have used have ranged from heads to bums!

The idea to use Wobbly Bums gave rise to our popular range of greeting cards as shown on our “A Nice Touch” website. Wobbly Heads have featured on mini-show cards, pop-up cubes and pop-up balls and will also be a focal point on a new product release called a Trigger Card. Wobbly Bits are an excellent marketing product drawing customer focus to your main selling point and then giving that focal point the added bonus of customer interaction.

Many of our interactive manually-operated direct marketing products owe their popularity to their size. This genre of marketing products is known generically as pocket media – promotional products that fit comfortably into your pocket, purse or handbag. The idea of pocket media is a terrific addition to any promotional products portfolio and we feature a healthy range of examples.

Our Starburst product can be made in a variety of sizes but the most popular is A6 which easily fits into a jacket pocket. The Foldilocks card is another example of pocket media being based on a simple idea – a concertina fold with a locking device. Our research shows that pocket sized products are particularly successful as hand-outs at exhibitions and events as they end up in the prospect’s pocket or bag rather than in the nearest waste bin.

The product that started the pocket media revolution was the Z Card as produced in Runcorn from the early 1990s. The product is well-known throughout the world and has been seen in many different guises since its introduction. Basically, it follows a very similar format to a traditional map – a folded paper sheet fastened inside a heavier cover. The broCard from Wakefield is a similar product which is also not unlike a traditional map – except that the Z Card and the broCard are usually only credit-card-sized.

Since the patent on Z Cards expired, lots of printers have jumped on the bandwagon and who are Whitney Woods to buck the trend? Just to be different and to give our product a unique identity, we call our version a Little Big Card.

As far as Whitney Woods is concerned, the Z Card is the original and definitive printed pocket media product. Developed on behalf of an international airline company as a way to distribute A4 literature without it ending up littering the floors of airport lounges, the Z card proved that this handy pocket media product would be retained by the recipient. Since the early 1990s, Z cards have been produced as advertising and marketing tools for a myriad of companies.

The outer cards are printed in 4 colour process on 350gsm card with a gloss laminate finish, whilst the folded inners are printed on 80gsm bond paper. The basic choice is between an 18-panel version and a slightly longer 24-panel version.

For the first time in its long existence, our http://www.whitneywoods.co.uk/index.html website is going to feature ideas and products. Previously designed as a hub to reach our other promotional products sites, the new-look Whitney Woods site will eventually become an all-encompassing destination for all things pop-up and interactive such as our mailers and marketing products.

We use the words “Pop-Up Mailers” to describe our range of advertising, marketing and promotions products, most of which are used in Business-to-Business direct marketing and advertising promotions. Each product has a high degree of user-interaction, which is designed to hold the attention of your customers. The interaction might be in the form of an automatic pop-up action or it could be manual interaction. The whole point is the capture the imagination of the user for sufficient time for your advertising or marketing promotion to make its point.

One of the biggest challenges faced by advertising and marketing professionals is how to present their product or service in a new and creative way. Creative professionals wrack their brains to come up with new ideas for advertising, marketing and promotions for their own companies or for their clients. Our range of Pop-up Mailers offers many advertising and marketing ideas as with products that grow, change pictures or turn. It could be the elements of fun and surprise offered by automatic pop-ups that generates the ideas for a promotion. There is bound to be something here that will be the answer to your direct marketing problems and our free sample pack is full of ideas for advertising, marketing and promotions for all creative professionals.

Many millions of items of Business-to-business advertising, marketing and promotional material go straight into the bin without ever being read and this is something that direct marketing professionals should try to avoid at all costs. Your direct mail pack or envelope should look interesting and be made to stand out in the stack of business mail that arrives on your customer’s desk each morning. The contents should capture and hold your customer’s attention for as long as possible and once your marketing promotion has made its point, wouldn’t it be great if your mailer was passed around your customer’s office and then be kept on his desk for months. All of this is possible with our pop-up mailers and you will find ideas and products to suit all of your advertising, marketing and promotions throughout this website.