Vintage Stamps, Reimagined

Something rather upsetting has happened to me over the past year. I've had the opportunity to go to two stamp shows, which is honestly one of my most favorite ways to spend a Sunday, and I had to refrain because I had--SOB!--too many stamps. It's a problem I didn't know I could arrive at, but here we are. A mountain of stamp sheets had taken over a corner of my office, contributing to a perpetual mess, which is making me feel like I live in... a perpetual mess. Ugh. The mountain settles and shifts and I have begun to fear the avalanche that will undoubtedly swallow me whole. 

It was time. And also, customers were waiting! Since I opened the shop, I've had vintage stamps available, always as packets that contained just enough postage for one first-class letter. The trouble with that formula, I'm sure you can guess, is that when the rate changes on you every year, it's hard to know how much inventory to make. And once they were outdated, I hemmed and hawed. Should we go to the delicate trouble of opening them back up and adding more? Or should we sell those at a discount while also making new sets? I mean, you can see that these began to feel like inane questions on a product that ultimately yielded very little margin. They were fussy and took excessive time and care, and once the rate went up last July, I just didn't have it in me to keep doing packets like that. So the stamp sheets sat and amassed and hung out in my peripheral vision, which felt a lot like they were throwing me side-eye, until at long last I took action. 

So here's what we offer now: bundles of 100 curated vintage stamps. Each bundle has five each of twenty unique designs. This will allow you to mix and match to create your own envelope stamp galleries or to add to artwork or style photos or whatever you desire. The bundles are each priced in relation to the face value of the postage inside, and the back of each label records the face value as well as the retail cost. Some are full of 3-centers; some have a smattering of values. If you need to see with better clarity what the bundles contain, they are fanned out in the online listings, and Liz has done her usual bang-up job of making them look SO PRETTY (seriously, Liz should win a contest for e-commerce site design; is there such a thing?).

And the best part? My office is that much cleaner.