post card distribution

Distribute then in the DR or the US?

Sounds like a great idea MaineGirl, best of luck to you.

Perhaps some postcards that depicted Dominican life and the people would be a nice addition to what you have so far.

MG they are beautiful, but I think the target market should be wider and classier than the AIs.

Maine Girl, you have a good idea there, and I think that you can target some but not all tourists with these images, so you need to think about the printing -- the images are a higher class, more "artsy" take on the usual icons here, so they might benefit from being given a higher class paper stock and perhaps a bit of border around each image. But you need to watch your printing costs. Plus you will need to adjust your jpgs for contrast and brightness, as the black and whites are looking a bit muddy on the screen and the tonal range is just not there. You need to have the digital files in just the right shape so that the printer can take them as is without having to fiddle them. Course you will have to test initially for proper reproduction.

I think distribution is going to be your biggest problem. I know that a couple of the postcard lines available here in the capital are distributed by the companies themselves and they do a lousy job of it. And I am not sure how much you can rely on others to do your distribution for you.

Prints are a possibility as well, but then you get into another series of problems. I would try the postcards out initially and see how demand goes, then consider expanding the biz.

I should be honest here and fess up: i am about to enter into a similar venture myself, but dont worry our concepts are very different and I am just going to test the waters here in the capital before doing anything too ambitious. Anyway, given the lousy selection of postcards here, there is plenty of room for competition. Good luck.

Well I will be happy to show you what we are going to do once I get round to shooting the stuff! You are way ahead of me here Maine Girl. The whole thing came about by accident really. Normally I do not do this kind of work, but I have been shooting for a Geographic style mag in Chile, a story about the Colonial Zone, and coincidentally a friend of mine whose family owns a retail store in the Conde mentioned that he wanted to enter into the postcard line, simply because he didnt like dealing with the current companies. I thought it over, given some of the imagery I was currently amassing, and we decided to try this thing out for ourselves. It is an ideal business in some ways, low overhead, low investment, and the market is ready for some new product. However, as I mentioned, I think distribution is the biggest obstacle. Once you have a good printer in hand, that seems to be the real hurdle.

Anyway, we are thinking of offering different series, keeping things thematically organized: a series that covers the colonial zone, a series that covers the beaches, a series that covers the Taino civilization, a series that covers typical dominicans doing typical dominican things (including voodoo). One neednt buy a whole series in one shot, but we are thinking about offering them in "book" form as well. I have friends in NYC who did this and had success with it. It may not work here, so I want to start small, try out a few new ideas, and if they sell, then we will work a little harder at it. We are not even thinking of distrbuting beyond the basic tourist areas in the capital for now, because that we can cover on our own two legs. The imagery would be a mix of the usual pretty tourist shots and some more adventurous stuff. But the key it seems to me is shooting with more attention to the quality of light and color, which the postcards currently available here simply fail to do. Most of the imagery is shot at midday, the colors are washed out, the light is harsh or just plain undramatic. The work you are doing is perfect it seems to me because it provides something interesting and new, so it can compete easily against this trash.

The cards would be almost all color. I am thinking of doing a series using my Holga camera, with a sort of Atget look, but I wouldnt dream of printing that up until I am sure that there is a demand for it. I do believe that the tourists here are looking for an alternative, I have casually been investigating their buying patterns and asking some questions. Plus I notice that some tourists buy lots of cards all at once, so the series idea may be marketable.

btw, is your black and white shot digitally in Black and white mode, or do you convert from color files? Or do you scan from negs? If the latter, you might consider simply scanning from well made prints, because if your scanner is not a top of the line model it wont look as good as a scan from a print. If you are shooting black and white digi, either convert from Color in Photoshop or shoot neg. It doesnt look to me like you are shooting digi black and white, but just thought i would mention it.

By all means let's stay in touch. I promise I will present my samples the moment I have some thing to show you, but I havent been able to work on this thing at all lately, other than make some preliminary plans.

Jon