I came across Karen Zack’s Antonia Rose Printing a few months ago when I was looking for custom printed post-it notes. I ended up not ordering from anybody (yet), but I saw a picture of Karen and her children on her Contact Us page, with the caption “This is me, Karen Zack, with my four children. They are my inspiration for success!” And I thought what a great touch that was. (I also noticed that, since then, she has started a business blog and added a link to her personal blog!) I knew her story would be perfect to tell here, so here it is…

Please give us a little background on your business.

Antonia Rose Printing is an online printing retailer. We specialize in custom Post-it notes (for businesses, personal use, wedding favors, coupons, etc.), but we also sell everything from wedding invitations to personal stationery and business cards. We provide free basic design help to our customers, which is a great boon to those individuals and small businesses that do not have graphic designers or advertising firms to layout their artwork for them. Other online printing retailers do not do this at all. I have incorporated more custom printing options into the basic items I sell, so we can print your artwork on our wedding invitation stock for example; most other online retailers will not do this for anyone.

We started up in November 2003, so we have been in business less than a year and a half. The business is now based in Bordentown, NJ, though I started it in Minnesota; we moved to New Jersey due to my husband’s promotion in June 2004. (He is now the Area Veterinarian in Charge for the state of New Jersey, working for the USDA APHIS VS in public health, monitoring things like mad cow disease, bird flu, etc.)

We are an online-only business, located at www.antoniaroseprinting.com and www.custompostits.com. I also have two wedding information sites which indirectly promote Antonia Rose Printing: www.IDoinMN.com and www.IDoinNJ.com. My office is in my home, in what used to be a dining room.

What kind of traditional 9 to 5 job(s) have you had in the past, if any?

In high school, I worked full time during the summers doing clerical work. In college, I worked full time during summers in a fish cannery in Alaska. After college, I worked for 12 years as a legal assistant, first for private firms, then for the county child support enforcement division.

I’m sure I won’t be the only one to wonder, how did you get a job at a fish cannery in Alaska?

I went to college in Fairbanks, AK, as I started out as a biology major and wanted to get away from home in Minnesota. Back then I could become a resident and pay resident tuition if I didn’t leave the state for more than 3 weeks my first year there so I had to find a summer job. Cannery jobs far from the mainland paid well and provided room and board, and flew us out from Anchorage. Of course, then we were stuck there and if we didn’t do what was expected of us, we faced a $600 plane ticket back to Anchorage. But it was good money at the time and people from all over the west coast and Alaska worked summers there. 16 hour days meant lots of overtime and I was young and strong, LOL.

What led you to start your own business?

I quit working full time in order to raise my four children. Along with my full-time jobs, I also did legal and technical writing on the side for the last 6 years of my 9 to 5 life; mainly summarizing depositions and other legal documents for attorneys. So I knew I enjoyed working at home and being my own boss.

When my youngest child was one and a half, I started this business because I wanted to contribute to our family income and I found this opportunity. With four children, and especially since my oldest is a high functioning autistic, there never seems to be enough money for everything. I couldn’t go back to the 9 to 5 world and still be with my kids. I want to make enough money for the extras my kids need and to help provide for their futures.

How did you decide to start an online printing retailer? Did you consider other businesses before choosing this particular one?

A friend of mine had started an online wedding accessories shop, www.littlebridalshop.com. She suggested I get into wedding invitations and become a Carlson Craft dealer; she wasn’t selling them and felt we could complement each other’s businesses. I looked into it and was interested, and the start-up costs were low. I got a Carlson Craft “clone” website; they are a printing wholesaler only and do not sell retail, but they have their most popular items on an online site that dealers can brand as their own and submit orders through, etc. However, those sites, called cceasy sites, don’t show up in search engine results much because they are identical except for the main category pages, where dealers can put in their own text.

I followed my customers’ lead away from primarily wedding stuff (which now makes up only 25% or so of my work) and into personalized and then customized Post-it notes. The personalized standard format Post-its were on the cceasy site and I got a lot of orders for them because I had a lot of text promoting them on my cceasy site. Long story short, when I got orders for them, I looked into what similar items I could sell and decided to focus on the whole custom Post-it notes area, as it was underserved by other online businesses.

I taught myself Front Page and then Dreamweaver, along with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, so I could build my own website (which still links to the cceasy site for wedding invitations), do my own graphics and, ultimately, assist my customers with their graphic set-up. (Many customers are graphic artists and advertising agencies who know what they are doing; many others are secretaries, real estate agents, teachers, etc., who know nothing about printing. Those are the ones I help with their artwork - setting it up and formatting it for them at no extra charge. To do this, I had to learn basic graphic design myself.) Building my own site also allowed me to learn search engine optimization techniques and maximize my placement on various engines. It is ongoing, but I am pretty good at teaching myself by doing. I think that is another quality that helps enormously if you want to be self-employed. You just can’t afford to pay an expert for everything that needs doing.

To be continued in Part II of this interview, where Karen shares what was hardest about starting her own business…