A few months ago I started doubling into the world of bookmaking. If you're a subscriber of mine, you'll know that I love planning and that I've been designing and printing my own planner inserts using Canva. Now it has blossomed into something completely new. Last year I started a small printing shop from home in my town with the printer I already owned. Printing things like business cards and photos, kind of as a side hustle. My primary income at the time was doing video editing. The print shop really started opening up my mind to the idea of creating my own printed products and selling them. One day I came across a video of a creator called Peter Millen, a book binder. Watching her tutorial on how to bind a sketchbook immediately inspired me and I started creating a little book with the materials I had available. With that first little book I made so many mistakes but I was so proud of the outcome. And then it happened. In June of last year, a client called my print shop asking me if I could make a planner book for her. Keep in mind I didn't advertise that I make books. She just happened to ask me at the right time. But I was still very inexperienced and my printer wasn't able to print the A3 size needed for the book, so I would need to outsource that printing. I was so up for the challenge. The footage you're seeing here is the book I designed and made for that client. It was the start of a new dream, my own stationary business. I decided to test out the waters and advertise on the town's Facebook page that I now make custom books. I received enough requests to be able to decide to go all in with this business idea. However, money wasn't really something that I had laying around. So I loaned some money from family to be able to buy an A3 printer and a guillotine so that I can make any size books without having to outsource anything. Outsourcing is a lot more expensive than doing everything yourself. To be able to afford the supplies needed to create the books, I would ask clients to pay half of the amount up front. And slowly but surely I was able to buy bigger and bigger amounts of supplies like paper each time. Comment down below if you'd like to see a video about how and where I found my supplies locally. Up to this point, I was only creating hard bound books and I really wanted to start making ring bound books. At the time, I joined a book binding WhatsApp group and one day someone advertised that they are selling their mini-singe binder. I couldn't believe my luck and jumped at the opportunity to buy it. It was as good as new and cost half of the price of what a new one would cost. In October of last year, I decided to design a planner specially for teachers in South Africa. This was the first fully designed planner that I made after I've been doing only custom books. I made it available in both hard bound and ring bound versions and sold quite a few at the end of last year. The business is still at its beginning stages and I still have a long way to go to make this a big success. It is a bit limiting being in South Africa because I can't really ship my products to other countries. It's way too expensive and it will only make sense if I ship them out in large quantities, which at this stage there isn't really a demand for that. But I'm hoping with the growth of this channel and people locally slowly getting to know me and my products that my business will start to do really well this year. I'm selling both my physical products and a few digital products on my ITS shop. And I'm trying to do a few markets locally on a regular basis to get my name and my products out there. As for this channel, I'm hoping to be a bit more present on this platform as well as on my Instagram. So if you're not subscribed yet, I would really appreciate it if you could click on the subscribe button and join me on this journey of creating stationary. For those interested, I do have a short course on how to design on Canva. It's on a platform called Creative Fabrica. I'll leave the link in the description. It's a subscription-based platform and it has loads of creative classes, digital stickers, fonts, graphics, etc. And of course, if you join using my link, you'll be helping me out as a small business owner. If you're still here, comment down below the word Apple so that I know who those of you are that watch the whole video. Thank you so much. I really appreciate each and every one of you. If you'd like to check out one of my Canva tutorial videos, I've picked out this one for you. See you again soon. Bye!