Eight questions to ask a pop-up card supplier before the first order

Buyers usually open with price. Price is the easiest thing to find out and the least useful thing to know first, because a low unit cost from a supplier who cannot hold a date will cost more than a fair one from a supplier who can. Here is what we would ask, in the order we would ask it.

1. Are you the workshop or the middle?

This is the question that changes every other answer. A trading company quotes you a price it has been given, adds a margin, and passes your problems to a factory it does not control. When you ask for a change at week three, it has to ask someone else.

Ask directly: who owns the machines, and where are they. Then ask something only a maker could answer, like what weight of stock they run, or what they do with a layer that will not sit flat. The answer arrives immediately or it does not arrive.

2. What is the minimum, and what is the minimum for something new?

These are two different numbers and suppliers often quote only the first. A catalogue design has tooling that already exists. A design drawn for you needs new dies, and the cost of cutting those has to spread across the run, which is why the minimum for custom work is always higher.

If a supplier gives you the same minimum for both, they are either absorbing the tooling somewhere you cannot see, or they have not thought about it.

3. How long, counted from what?

Lead time is meaningless without a starting gun. Counted from the order, from the deposit clearing, or from your approval of the sample? Those can be three weeks apart.

Get the date you approve the sample and the date the goods leave the workshop, and make sure both are written down.

4. What happens in peak season?

For greeting cards the crunch runs from September to November, because everybody wants Christmas stock at once. A supplier who quotes you the same lead time in October as in April has not been doing this long.

Ask what their September looks like. A straight answer sounds like a constraint, not a promise.

5. Can I hold a sample before you make four thousand?

The answer should be yes without hesitation, and the sample should be made on the real stock by the people who will make the run. A sample cut by hand by the design lead, on paper the production line does not use, tells you very little.

Ask who makes the sample and on what. Ask what happens to the sample cost if you place the order.

6. What does the card actually ship in?

A pop-up card is a structure. It survives an international postbag or it does not, and the packing decides which. Ask whether the card is bagged with its envelope, whether there is a backing board, and what the master carton holds.

If you are selling in a shop, ask about the retail-facing side too: barcode placement, whether a price sticker will lift the print, whether the bag is resealable so browsing customers can open the card and put it back.

7. Who owns the design?

For anything drawn to your brief, get this in writing before work starts, not after you like the result. Two things to settle: whether the supplier can sell the same design to anyone else, and whether you have territory exclusivity if they can.

A supplier who will not put that in the order is telling you something.

8. What are the payment terms, and what protects each of us?

Deposit and balance against a copy of the bill of lading is the ordinary shape of it. What matters is that both sides carry some risk. If a supplier asks for the full amount up front on a first order, you are financing them. If they ask for nothing until arrival, they are financing you, and the price will show it.

The question underneath all eight

Every one of these is really asking the same thing: does this supplier control what they are promising. A workshop that cuts, folds and packs under one roof can answer all eight in a single email. A desk in the middle needs a week and three phone calls, and the answers arrive softened.

We answer these in writing, per order, before anyone commits to anything. If you want ours for a specific run, tell us what you are buying and the numbers come back with the design sheet.