Paper manufactures create swatch books for each of their unique product lines. You can get these free swatch books from any paper distributor like: Veritiv, Unisource, Xpedx, West Coast Paper, Kelly Paper, or any other paper distributor that serves your community, and they can be a helpful resource to have on hand… but there is a down-side.
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The Downside of Swatch Books
Peggy Dent • Dec 30, 2020
If you use these swatch books with your clients and assume that every color, weight, and finish shown in the swatch book is readily available through the distributor or even through the manufacturer, you’re making a big mistake.
The swatch books are designed to be very colorful and visually appealing. They usually display a wide array of colors and finishes, but in reality, not all the colors are stocked by the distributors, and in fact, not all the colors are even regularly produced by the manufacture. They have the ability to produce the colors and finishes, but they won’t, unless there is a mill order for that specific stock. The demand is so low for the specialty colors that both the mill and the distributors are in jeopardy of not selling the stock on hand, ever; so they only produce some of the colors or finishes for specific jobs.
Even if the mill does produce the stock, but the distributor don’t regularly stock that color, they will only bring it into their inventory as a mill order. Whether the mill has the color you seek in their inventory, or they have to make it from scratch, you will need to order at least a full case of the stock in order to obtain it.
And we’re not talking about a case of typing paper; we’re talking a case of parent sheets. Depending on the weight of the paper, the case could be 400 or 500 sheets of 23” x 35” or 26” x 40” stock. It could sell for as much as $1000 or more and it could take weeks to produce and more weeks to transport to your location.
If you’re showing your client a swatch book that displays a lovely ochre or cinnamon sheet in 120# cover stock, with a linen finish, and your client falls in love with that stock for her business card order, you and she may be disappointed to learn that she’ll needs to order 400 sheets of 26” x 40” paper to obtain that color, weight, and finish. To give you an idea of how much paper she would actually need for 1000 business cards (you can get approximately 120 business cards out of one 26 x 40 sheet) so approximately 8 sheets plus a couple of sheets for make readies, so 10 sheets max for the order of 1000 cards. If she only wanted 250 cards to get started in her new business, you could complete that order with only 3 parent sheets. What in the world would you/she do with the other 397 sheets?
I ran into this problem in my early brokering days. I had a jewelry store client what was going to do a “By Invitation Only Show”. They wanted the invitations to be unique, eye catching, and as upscale and sophisticated as their jewelry store. Like I said, I was new to brokering and I had no idea that the lovely colored papers shown in the swatch books were not readily available.
Over thirty years ago there were more colors available then there are today, but even back then, not all colors were available. I showed the client the swatch books and of course they picked the more obscure colors. To check pricing, I called the distributor and was told that the color selected was a mill order item only, and would take 6 weeks to manufacture and ship (which would have gotten the paper to me about a week after their sale was over) and it would cost $840 plus freight.
I had to explain all that to my client, and of course I looked like a fool when their second choice was also a mill order. At that point I asked the distributor to tell me which of the colors in the swatch book were available and I marked those for the client, but as you can probably imagine the ones that were available were all the shades of white, and a couple of other not very interesting or inspiring colors. We eventually used a black sheet, that was available, and we displayed the art and text on the black paper, using mother of pearly foil. It was a stunning invitation, and a great lesson for me to always find out what is available before I share the swatch books with my clients.
Today, you can go on-line and find some of the more obscure colors but be sure to check with the sellers because even on-line, I have been disappointed to learn that the stock was not “in stock” and would require several weeks to manufacture.
One last point about colors and finishes and availability. Don’t be surprised if you can’t buy matching envelopes even, if the paper is available. The mills don’t make matching A-2, A-6, A-7 announcement envelopes, and #10 business envelopes in all the paper colors. If having matching envelopes is important for your client, then you will need to have an envelope converter make the envelopes for you, and all these operations add cost and delays to your projects.
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