Fantastic Fine Stationery options

We've been having a great time putting together our new fine stationery collections. What's been great is our ability to find really great looking fine stationery papers with a lot of eco-friendly attributes.
This collection of fine stationery papers gives the user the ability to find exactly the type and style of stationery they are looking to use while supporting various eco initiatives. This line truly proves that you don't have to sacrifice quality to support eco-friendly papers. Its simply a matter of understanding your options and making an informed choice.

We've chosen papers from the leading eco-freindly paper mills including, Neenah Paper, Mohawk Fine Papers, Smart Papers, Wausau Paper and Monadnock Paper Mills. What also makes this collection different is that we offer the ability to buy a la carte depending on your needs. You can purchase 8.5 x 11 packs of stationery, matching envelopes and mathcing cover stock for business cards. As well, we offer the option to have the card stock perforated so that you can print your own business cards on a desktop printer in the numbers you need when you need them.

Royal Linen offers an extraordinary paper with great eco-benefits

We're happy to have a huge offering of Wausau Paper's Royal Linen line of paper and envelopes. I think this is one of the best values in paper. Royal Linen, as the name implies, has a really beautiful linen pattern on the surface. This is something you normally have to pay a lot for in other premium papers.



Royal Linen is a Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper. As if that's not enough the paper also uses 30% post consumer waste. I've written in past blogs about the benefits of recycled paper. Briefly, less land fill used, less energy used, less water used. As well I've talked about the importance of FSC paper. While FSC is important because it sets and monitors standards for FSC forests, ensuring the forests with the FSC certification are responsibily managed to best benefit the environment and the people living in the area of the forest. One of the unspoken benefits is the fact the FSC helps to keep well managed forest profitable. The importance of a profitable forest is that it remains forest and is less likely to fall victim to development. Nothing kills a forest faster than when it becomes a golf course or a huge housing development.

Its important to support manufacturers that make an honest effort to lessen their environmental impact. The offering of Royal Linen does exactly that and uses less natural resources and protects well managed forests through its use of FSC fiber. Not only that, but its a grea paper that looks fantastic and performs well on press and in desktop applications.

Square Envelopes Make a Statement

Due to overwhelming demand The Paper Mill Store envelope department has added a huge inventory of various square envelope sizes. We found that all envelope square sizes are in great demand from our customers. We've added squares from 5 x 5 square envelopes to 9 1/2 x 9 1/2 square envelopes and in all sizes in between by 1/2 increments.

We have economical white square envelopes using Wausau Paper's Exact Ice paper and premium translucent square envelopes using CTI Paper USA's Glama Natural. Glama Natural is an Forest Stewardship Council certified paper so you can know that the fiber used to make this envelope came from well managed forests.

Wausau Paper to Close Groveton Paper Mill

Just announced today, Wausau Paper will close its Groveton paper mill by years' end. Another sign of the chronic over capacity facing paper mills in North America. This reduces Wausau's production by 105,000 tons or 28% of its capacity within its Printing and Writing group. Along with the mill closure about 300 + jobs will be lost.

The Printing and Writing group has struggled with profitability for some time. Last year in the same period it made profits of $1.1 million and in contrast for this 3rd quarter lost $1.3 million. This fast move by the Wausau Paper Board of Directors is a part of a larger three part plan to return the Printing and Writing group to profitability by cutting costs and focusing on its core grades; Astrobrights, Exact and Royal lines.

Follow Up On Wausau Paper's Eco-Initiatives

Earlier I had posted news about Wausua Paper's impressive initiatives in using less water. The improved water management conducted by Wausau Paper has had significant, meaningful and measurable positive impact on the surrounding community of Brokaw, Wisconsin. During the last 2 years the company reduced the water its takes from the Wisconsin River by more than 3.5 million gallons per day and reduced the amount of well water usage by as much as 98%. This has been accomplished through a major commitment to improve its processes and to re-use water when possible. Not only is this a great win for the friends of the Wisconsin River but also for the town of Brokaw where the town has been able to idle several of its wells.

Once again, nice job!

Wausau Paper's effective water management

Every consumer should understand how much influence they have as a group. You can see all over the market how resource intensive companies are taking a very close look at how they operate their plants. My industry, the paper industry is no different.

I know the folks at Wausau Paper personally and I know as individuals that many of them genuinely care about the environment. However you need a company management that sees better business practices to be in its best interest to make real change. This is how Wausau Paper appears to view things.

Over the last two years Wausau Paper has reduced their consumption of water at their Brokaw, WI paper mill by, get this, 2 billion gallons of water per year. That's approximately 5.5 million less gallons of water consumed a day. This water consumption savings is equal to approximately 80 million loads in a dishwasher and 70 million loads of laundry.

That's impressive and I congratulate Wausau Paper for their efforts. I also congratulate the consumers who have voiced their desires for cleaner manufacturing. Keep up the good work.

HOW Design Conference 2007

We came back from the HOW Design Conference Wednesday. Travel was smooth except for the bomb scare in the Atlanta airport that caused the longest security line I've seen since getting back into the USA from Europe the days after September 11th. We found some great places in Atlanta. We stayed at the Glenn Hotel Friday and Saturday, the roof cocktail bar is outstanding. YUPO held a party there one night. Couches and views as far as you can see. As well the Atalanta Botanical garden is a must see. However all Northerners should be sure to get there early in the day as by 4:00 pm the heat was oppressive. One of the best orchid collections I've ever seen.

Last but not least as places to go is Rathbuns for great dinners, good wines and a great atmosphere. Its neighbor the Krog bar is a must for a pre or post dinner cocktail. This is a great place to meet friends or take your special someone. Great service. We went there 2 nights.

The HOW conference was great from our point of view as suppliers exhibiting. We met with a huge number of graphic designers in our booth, we gave away two sets of TINTBOOKS, winners to be announced, and we created 10 exclusive videos speaking with industry observers and paper mills, etc. We're going to post these videos Sunday night.

Specialty Paper Bonanza

I was looking through my collection of fine paper swatch books the other day and the huge availability of extraordinary specialty papers in North America shocked me. I've been intimately involved in distributing and designing specialty papers for 18 years. The number of specialty papers available today just crept up on me and took me by surprise in retrospect.

When I first started the CTI Paper Group back in 1989 specialty papers were relatively rare in the main stream commercial printing markets of North America. The really beautiful papers were almost all made in Europe. A few European companies, Zanders and Fedrigoni, had some small distribution here in the USA. The sheet sizes were weird (metric), the packaging was weird (package wrapped no cartons) and the prices were, well out of sight by the standards of the day. The fact was at that time that if you wanted a really unique printing paper you had to source it from a European paper mill. My theory has been that because of Europe's older paper mills, less efficient machines, together with their inherent understanding of design and fashion and the need to add as much value as possible to the fiber coming off of the older less efficient machines that this led European manufacturers to create the large variety of specialty papers they still offer today.

The Tide is Turning

Our company began creating specialty papers by designing papers in partnership with Euro paper mills in the mid 1990's. We developed, for commercial printing markets and broad distribution, the first and most widely recognized naturally translucent paper, Glama Natural and it's companion Glama-lope envelope in 1994-ish. We later decided to bring some of our efforts home when we designed and manufactured Aspire Petallics, the first ever mica coated colored paper to be manufactured in North America. We have subsequently redesigned our Currency metallic paper and we continue to manufacture Currency here in the state of Wisconsin. I assure you that other great papers are in the hopper.

In the last 4 to 5 years other leading North American paper mills, previously only uncoated text and cover mills, have begun to develop interesting value added specialty papers in the European tradition, probably for the same reasons I mentioned previously. Some examples of these more progressive mills are; Wausau Paper who now has some great metallics, Fox River Paper (now Neenah Paper) developed a very nice metallic line and Smart Papers has for years has manufactured Kromekote cast coated paper and now in more recent years has added some very nice additions to its flagship line with foils and patterns.

Land ho

The biggest advantage of North American made value added specialty papers to the consumer is availability. Early on in my sales career I was fond of saying, "You can have a great paper at great prices and if you can't get it when you need it, who cares." This statement remains true today. Lead times for papers made here are generally faster and inventories tend to be higher. The fact of the existence of the Atlantic ocean sitting between supplier and consumer can't be changed and vessels only sail so fast. Another factor favoring North American paper mills versus European paper mills is the dollar /euro conversion. As the euro goes up against the dollar European papers can tend to become more expensive. Domestic paper mills prices tend to move up only when the market as a whole moves keeping most domestic papers in line with each other.

Europeans will continue to create gorgeous papers and now they will have more competition from domestic paper companies which is always good for the consumers.