Recently I purchased my daughter a play register, she loves collecting our change to put in her register. She started to go through some of my old purses to add to her collection (her purse and change collections) and in the process has shown me two things. She started churning up my old business cards which she puts in her register too and every time she hands me one she put it in my hand along with a quarter. One, I thought that was an interesting network tactic to consider for future networking. Two, she started handing me what soon became the evolution of my years of business card creation which I had totally forgotten about. Each one of them has a story behind it, something I thought would be fun to share.

Enjoy!

Sharon

Oh, and here is my first. This was made at a Kinkos on La Brea Blvd in Los Angeles the night before my first wedding in December of 2000. I didn’t fully launch the business till 2005 but I had been working under the name since 2000. The wedding went great and the evolution of cards took off.

This was the next card, made in 2003 after doing my friend’s wedding. This was the year that I realized that perhaps listing the address which I shared with my three roommates (with the one car garage I started the business out of) was, perhaps, a bad idea. Through trial and error I had figured out the right size for a business card as a file (I’m sure there were programs for that but recipes are not my thing) so I managed, with what now seems like all the time in the world, to create pages of these which I printed out and then hand cut. This card was the first, and last, of this home made version.

Number three, circa 2005 or so, the first one created online using an actual program. I hated that the corners weren’t rounded but it was such an improvement from the last ones that I quickly let that go. I finally matched the website, that alone kept me happy for years.

The current card, I finally got my rounded corners. I loved the matte finish and the subdued espresso, overall the card works. It’s come time for a changes, I’m in the process of figuring out what that is, but looking back at cards or years past, I think I’m doing alright.