Stationery Scoop: the blog by paper company CEO Heidi Reimer-Epp

How many patterns could I find? Scenes from the Parliament

Have you ever had a chance to visit the Parliament Buildlings in Ottawa? Did you notice all of the different patterns? From parquet flooring to stained glass ceilings and curly ironwork, the Parliament is rich in colour and pattern.

Last week during my trip to Ottawa, we spent the morning at the Parliament Buildings touring around and learning some of the stories both past and present. After having spent the previous morning visiting Lee Valley Tools, the Parliament Buildings were an interesting contrast.

My little camera was perfect for snapping these shots, including the centre photo of me in front of the tower:

I was glad that we'd taken the time to tour, even if we were put into a small, enclosed room with 40 other people and made to wait in claustrophobic stillness at the start of the tour. It brought me back to my university days when I was a tour guide for the River Rouge Double Decker buses (anyone remember those?!).

What does a $100 million company look like

What does a $100 million company look like? On the outside, it looks like the very successful mail-order and store-front business of Lee Valley Tools. For Canadian readers, you know Lee Valley Tools to be the place to go when you're looking for the most ergonomic garden weeder or the best woodworking tools. Lee Valley Tools has thousands of SKUs that solve everyday problems for Canadian and US customers. And the place started with a do-it-yourself mail-order stove kit being peddled by a Canadian civil servant.

Today, Lee Valley Tools includes 15 stores, a dozen catalogs and Veritas Manufacturing, the production arm that designs and manufactures many of the items sold by Lee Valley. And last week, I was lucky enough to see the expansive operation as I toured with founder Mr. Leonard Lee. The tour started with Mr. Lee's story of selling wood stove kits via mail-order catalog in the late 70's. From there, he and his wife launched a catalog that soon added many more items to the product line. If you'd like to learn more about Mr. Lee, there is more in this Ask the Legends column from Profit Magazine.

Lee Valley is vertically integrated all the way from designing and manufacturing their own tools, to in-house photography and design for their dozens of catalogs and books. Touring the facility, we saw the design department with industrial designers creating new products for future catalogs. We also saw the manufacturing, assembly and distribution areas filled with best-in-class products like the ultimate drill bit and the perfect stitch-ripper. I loved their image center with articulating lights and a fantastic set-up for both catalog and web photography.

In the area where they grind and assemble planers, we had to wear safety glasses. Here's me in double glasses - my own and the special pair of safety glasses that went over top.

Our group had lunch in the company cafeteria where we had the chance to ask Mr. Lee more questions about start-up, growth and current operations. His son Jamie joined us and it was interesting to hear about the next generation stepping in to guide the company.

The tour concluded on the front lawn with a group photo and some swag to take home, including a super strong, hold anything magnet that will come in handy holding the stacks of kids' artwork currently falling off my fridge at home. 

Thank you to Mr. Lee, Jamie and everyone who we met on the tour. You were gracious and generous with your time and I am deeply grateful.

Taming the greeting card monster

UPDATE: All these years later, I'm still using this card organizer to store and sort my greeting cards. I'm happy to report that it's a system that really works. I'm even using the same categories. Now I'm keeping it filled with the latest card designs from my company like these Mother's Day seed cards and favorite card companies like Rifle Paper and Kate + Birdie.

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How to Organize Greeting Cards

In keeping with my resolution to send more birthday cards, I realized that I needed a better a way to keep the cards organized and at the ready. The cardboard shoe box with the hastily-written divider papers wasn't working. The cards kept flopping over and getting damaged and the box was too fussy to take in and out of the cupboard.

So I set out to set up a system for organizing and storing my greeting cards, and here's what I ended up today:

Step 1 - Choose a Card Organizer

I found this plastic card box at a local store called For Space Sake which unfortunately doesn't have the item on their website, but you can find it at the Container Store and it's called the Clear Card Keeper for $13.99.

The box has removable plastic dividers that fit into channels on the side of the box. I went to the store to check it out and liked it enough to buy it.

See? Cool removable dividers with a nice solid feel.

Step 2 - Decide on Categories & Make Labels

My next step was to decide on the card categories that I needed, and then make labels. I pulled out all of my cards from the shoebox and put them on the counter. I then sorted into as many categories as I needed - Birthday, Easter, Christmas, Baby, Love, and even Halloween.

Using my P-Touch, I made labels for the dividers.

I ended up with this set of categories, lumping all of the uncommon card-giving occasions like Halloween, Thanksgiving and Retirement into "Other" at the back.

Step 3 - Fill the Card Organizer

This is the step that I loved the most! It was time to put the cards into the appropriate slot. Here's a Birthday Card going into the Birthday category.

And here's a package of Valentine's Day Cards left over from this year. They're unpersonalized so I can use them again next year.

When I was done, the cards were neat and tidy in their new home. And then it was obvious that some slots were more bare than others, and I realized that I need to replenish some of my more popular card-giving occasions. So next on my list will be to stock up on Birthday cards to make sure that I'm ready when a birthday comes up.

Happy organizing!

Feeling the need to make sweeping last-minute changes

Tonight is Pecha Kucha Vol. 7 at the Park Theater in Winnipeg and I'm presenting. The format is simple - 20 slides x 20 seconds. The slides run on their own and I'll be talking and trying to stay at an even pace with the slides.

Last week, I wrote a blog post entitled How to write a speech and contrary to what I wrote as a best practice, I spent last night (the night before!) completely revising my speech. Then I gave the talk to a loved one and he gave me suggestions which caused a second round of revisions!

Here's what my paper copy looked like by the time we were done:

Disappointment arrived in a padded mailer

A special package arrived today in the mail:

It was a copy of the "New Encyclopedia of Origami and Papercraft":

A year ago, I was contacted by the publisher asking my Mom and me for permission to reprint some of our artwork from our book "The Encyclopedia of Papermaking and Bookbinding". We gladly gave them permission since we too had relied on artist submissions for each of the three books that we've written (for more about this, read Our First Book Contract).

But as I looked through the book, I realized that instead of reproducing the artwork on page 6 and page 7 like originally asked, they actually reprinted piles of images along with verbatim and paraphrased copy. Some images show my artwork and sheets of paper, and many of them show my Mom's and my hands in the step-by-steps. Here's an example of the artwork with a credit:

Here's a page with my Mom's hands from "The Encyclopedia of Papermaking and Bookbinding":

And here are a couple of pages with the paper samples that we made for "300 Papermaking Recipes":

Contractually, the publisher has the right to republish material from our past books. I'm not sure why they would have requested permission for pages 6 and 7 and not the full scope of the material they were planning on using. But I feel disappointed that my Mom and I don't have our name on the front of the book as we would have loved the opportunity to author "The New Encyclopedia of Origami and Papercraft".

My next step? To turn my disappointment into action and reach out to the publisher and inquire about future opportunities. I'll keep you posted.