Swirly in the Sweet Life

Looking for some sweet holiday inspiration? Then be sure to visit Simply the Sweet Life and check out their FREE online 2011 Holiday magazine .
It's full of wonderful holiday ideas and delicious recipes and Swirly:)
Yes our new mini woodland winter set graces the pages (page 32_33) of this whimsical issue .


Image above is from Simply the Sweet Life Magazine Holiday issue



Image above is from Simply the Sweet Life Magazine Holiday issue

Check out the eZine and tell them Swirly said hi!
Below area few more close up shots we took of this
7 piece Woodland Winter set.

Mushroom, Little Owl and snowy pine cone


snowflake and candy cane

glittery star and starry night

There is still a few of these sets available so be sure to pick up yours today.
Have a Sweet and Swirly Holiday! SORRY SOLD OUT!

Creating our new Swirly business cards

This weekend we finally got around to designing our new business cards. YAY!

We have been in our new studio since September and we are really trying to check off our list of to do items but it has been slow going.

Our design continues the use of art on both sides like we have done in the past. We love how it works for us and most people are surprised by the design. We picked 2 new pictures to feature on both sides.

We printed them at a site called www.4colorprint.com. This company prints great quality cards with a silk matte finish and this time around we decided to try the rounded corners. We're very excited and can't wait to get them.

Getting little projects like this done and being able to cross these off our to do list and move on is extremely satisifying.

May this be your inspiration to get things done on your to do list...go on, get to it!!

lianne & paul

SOWA Holiday Market is coming!

We can't believe it's time for the SOWA Holiday Market again! This is our fifth year doing it and just love it. It has a great variety of crafters showcasing their unique creations. We love seeing old friends at the show and meeting new ones.

This year it happens on Dec 12-13 at the Cathedral High School in the South End.

Check out their website and mark your calendars and come visit us at the show, we'd love to see you!

Our New 2009 Halloween Ornaments

Our Wickedly Scary Spooky Swirly 2009 Halloween Collection is here.

Halloween is approaching and we have plenty of spine-chilling designs for you! Creep on over and pick up a few of our spooktacular handmade designs.







We are very proud of our new Halloween collection so take a peek and let us know what you think.
Happy Halloween!

Our New Ads for the Holidays

Here are two of our latest ad designs that will be hitting the newsstands in your favorite magazines this Holiday season. The Somerset Holiday & Celebrations volume 3 (bottom ad) and the winter issue of Where Woman Create (on the right).

These are both new magazines for us to advertise in and hopefully they will be as successful as our previous ads in the now defunct Mary Engelbreit Home Companion magazine. For all of you who miss MEHC magazine as much as we do we have good news! Mary Engelbreit has just relaunched her website/blog and is promoting a new wonderful Home Companion workshop, filled with your favorite artisans from her magazines. Be sure to stop by her blog and tell her that Swirly Designs sent you. :)

Our "Southern Lady" magazine ad

Here is a sneak peek at our new
Halloween ad that will be
in the upcoming Sept/Oct issue
of Southern Lady magazine.

Are you a subscriber to this magazine?
Have you seen it at your favorite
magazine/book store?

We will let you know how the ad
does for us this season.

New Ad For Where Woman Create Magazine

Hello all!
Well here is the final designed ad for the Autumn Where Woman Create magazine that we have been working on for the past few days. This ad size is only a 1/12 of a page which is a little bigger then 2 x 2.

Whenever we design an ad for our ornaments we want to tell the reader a whole lot in a minimum amount of words and pictures. Sometimes that is easier said than done. We try to use a big, bold image and minimal text. Emphasis on handmade is an important element and it's also a plus to show our picture so that readers can put a face to the name.

Hopefully we've done a good job. Check it out when it hits newsstands in August. We'll do a follow up to let you know if the ad was a success or not.

Time is flying by in the Swirly Designs studio

What a week... How quickly 2009 is flying by. So much is happening both personally and professionally. We are still adjusting to our work and life schedule with our 2 month old daughter. (It's shocking it will be 2 months on the 15th, yikes!) And our little guy will be celebrating his 4th birthday this week as well. It seems like just yesterday it was September and we were weepy sending him off to preschool and now he wrapped up his first year last week.

We have also started the process of searching for a new studio/home which we will be blogging about more in the coming months. We are hoping to be relocated before the fall so it doesn't conflict with our holiday production. Stay tuned!

Now on to what we have been working on this week. It's been Halloween all around the studio. Sketching and planning our new Halloween designs is in full swing. Here is a sneak peek of what we have been working on:










And on the marketing end: This week we have booked ad space in two fairly new publications. One is called Where Woman Create Magazine and Somerset Holidays & Celebrations vol 3. Over the last few months we have been busy researching magazines that we feel will be a nice fit for us to advertise in. We are cutting back on the craft shows this season, so advertising will be crucial to us getting our name out there. Look for us in Autumn 2009 issue, Winter & Spring 2010 issues on newsstands. Check out the magazines and let us know what you think and if there are any magazines out there that you think might be a nice fit for our ornaments.

Well back to work.... enjoy you week!

Challenging Times

We are in complete and utter shock to hear that Hallmark Magazine has ended it's publication with the Feb/Mar issue.

This is what was posted on their site:


We know the economy is bad.... but with all these magazines dropping like flies, we feel they must of had problems long before. What is really unsettling for us as a small business is that we rely on these creative magazines to market our product. (And don't get us wrong, we know with the ceasing of all these wonderful publications, hundreds of creative people are out of work and our hearts go out to them). Now we can see how this economy creates a chain reaction:

We are expecting our second baby in April, and we were discussing the idea that we would cut back on our show schedule and focus more on advertising. We had a lot of success with our past ads in MEHC magazine and it just seem to make more sense (we thought) if we can just advertise and stay in the studio working rather then spending every weekend during the busy holiday season at the craft shows.

What's making us a little worried is that with magazines, the ads need to be booked months in advance as do the craft shows. Say we booked a few ads for the upcoming holiday season and the magazine goes under, we'll have no ads AND all this merchandise... plus we missed out on the crafts show deadlines.

So far, two of our top magazines we decided to advertise with have ended without warning.
Just this week Hallmark magazine called the studio about advertising in the April/May issue and I told them we weren't able to make that ad deadline but we were definitely going to book the Sept/Oct and the Nov/Dec issue. I asked the sales rep how the magazine was doing and she was raving about the magazine and said because Hallmark is huge company with such a large following they weren't going anywhere. Well I guess we really need to rethink our marketing plans so we don't become the next casualty.

We hope that the coming year brings positive change for everyone in a tight spot, no matter what you do for work. Our hearts go out to all our fellow crafters especially, who I'm sure are finding this year to be one of the most challenging. Good luck!

A record high for Swirly

We hope everyone has recovered from the holidays and is back in full swing.

We sure are! What we like to do at the end of the year is reflect on our designs and go over all our collections that we launched in 2008 and see how everything went. We like to see which ornaments were well received and which ones need some tweeking.

We track the success of our advertising to see which ad drew the most attention. And this week we got a traffic report chart showing how many hits our website has been getting. In November, our website had 244, 783 requests, and for the year our monthly average is approx 80,000 requests. Now we are no website experts and we know there are websites that get a million hits a day, BUT for a small company like us that has had a web presents for only a few years, we were thrilled with the report.

Thanks for visiting and have a wonderful weekend!

2008 American Graphic Design Award...Yeah!!

We were to thrilled to find out this week that our Swirly site won an American Graphic Design Award from Graphic Design USA magazine.

When we originally launched our site back in the day, we took it upon ourselves to do our site on our own, since we both have design backgrounds. This worked great in the beginning, but as our business grew we needed to consistently update our site for every season. We knew that we need some help organizing our site and also adding an ecommerce feature. So in the summer of 2007 we worked closely with a company called Brunello Creative here in Boston to create a new website. It was launched last November and works great for our needs. It's user friendly and it's easy for us to update on our own. The hard work must have paid off -- thanks Brunello and GD USA Magazine.

Here are inspiration boards we showed them to understand the look and feel we wanted to convey with our site.

Bye for now... Mary Engelbriet's Home Companion Magazine

We got a call a few weeks ago from another magazine telling us she saw our ad in the Mary Engelbriet's Home Companion (MEHC) magazine and was wondering what we were going to do since MEHC magazine is ending there publication after 12 years with the Dec 08/Jan09 issue. (Shocker!!) They wanted us to advertise with them now. Well I was to a little confused since I hadn't heard anything and we just placed an ad in the Dec/Jan issue and was about to place one for the Valentine issue. We even just renewed our home subscription for two years! I thought this was a really tacky way to get someone to advertise in there magazine. So I informed them I would think about it and would let them know. After emailing our MEHC ad rep –who has yet to reply to our emails–and a made a comment on their website, we came across this media release.

It looks like MEHC ended there publication agreement and will be seeking a new publisher.

So, for now no more MEHC after this latest issue. We really enjoyed advertising in as well as a being a faithful reader for 12 years. Here at the studio, we keep all her issues to be inspired by and for wonderful ideas.



Above is the cover of the Premier issue of MEHC from 1996. Every issue featured one of Mary's fun and whimsical illustrations until....



Mar/Feb of 2002 when some would argue they jumped the shark when they switched to an all photographic cover.

Well lets hope we haven't seen the last of MEHC magazine.

A typical week here at the Swirly studio

This week has been really crazy here at the Swirly Designs studio. We are shipping our Halloween /Autumn ornaments daily. We are designing and creating our new line of Christmas and baby 2008 ornaments for our Nov 1st launch. We also created these two ads below. One for MEHC magazine and Romantic Homes magazine... and on top of all that, this weekend Paul will be attending a workshop by Carol Eldridge designs on Art Licensing. It looks like it will be a very interesting workshop and we are looking forward to learning how we could take our Swirly Designs to the next level.




This is the ad we put in the Dec/Jan issue of Mary Engelbriet's Home Companion which hits newsstands on Nov 4th



This will be our first time advertising in Romantic Homes magazine. We will have this ad in the Dec issue. That one hits newsstands Nov 4th.

Scary Spooky Swirly Collection is HERE!

Our 2008 Halloween/Autumn Collection is here. FINALLY!
We had scheduled the launch of the collection to happen on Sept 1st, forgetting that our Halloween ad in Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion was going to subscribers the last week of August. We were on vacation and just happen to check email and we were rather surprised (and a little embarrassed) that we had a lot of emails looking for the collection. Hopefully we didn't disappoint you. This year we have a nice mix of ornament designs to celebrate the coming months from fall ornaments to our spooky collection right up to Thanksgiving with our swirly turkey. Check out the collection and let us know what you think as we welcome in Autumn.

Keep an Eye out for...

...our new Fall & Halloween ornament collection. We are putting the final touches on them this week, and are planning a to have a Sept 1st launch. Once we have the collection up, we will post a fun little how-to craft, showing you how you can create your very own eyeball tree topper.

Our Halloween Ad for MEHC Magazine

Here is our new ad for the Artists' Gallery section of the Oct/Nov issue Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion magazine. It's always challenging to stay on top of these magazine deadlines.

We always seem to be rushing in order to get the final ad to them on time. But we got it done and now we can move on to the next thing. Be sure to pick up your copy when it comes out!

Where do you see Swirly?

It's that time a year again where we begin planning our Holiday Craft Schedule and figure out where we want to spend our advertising dollars.

With most of these crafts show you need to start planning the next years enrollment right after you finish a show. We never seem to get it together and do this. With the holiday shows so crazy it's really the last thing on our mind! We learned a hard lesson this year when one of our more successful shows' deadline came and went without us knowing. We never received any application from the organizers and now we might not be able to get in this year. We are still waiting for confirmation.

In that light, we'll keep you updated with all our shows in the coming months that we will be attending this holiday season. Which leads us to ask all of our readers, that live in or near the Boston area, if you know of any holiday craft shows you attend that you think we would be a good fit for Swirly Designs please let us know by emailing or posting a comment.

Advertising

During the months leading up to the holidays, all the major magazines put out a holiday issue or a special holiday issue. These are great for inspiration.

We buy lots of magazines all throughout the holiday season, but rarely get to peruse them until the spring. Not only are looking at new trends in colors and themes, but we're also scoping out which publication would be a great place for Swirly to advertise.

Our first taste of national exposure came in November of 2006 when we we're profiled in Yankee Magazine as one of New England's Finest. The response to that little blurb made us really think hard about print advertising.

After that success, we ran our first national ad in Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion Holiday issue. We were very pleased with the response (even though we weren't too happy with the placement of our ad in the magazine).

This year we are going to advertise in the MEHC Oct/Nov issue (to introduce our new Halloween Collection) and the Dec/Jan issue with our holiday collection. We are also considering Romantic Homes, which seems to be a publication our customers enjoy and read.

We would love to hear from you with any magazines or newspapers that you enjoy reading or use as a Christmas/Holdiay shopping guide.

Keep your eyes peeled, you never know where you'll find Swirly Designs!