Printplace Spotlight - Indiegenius

My name is Julie McCollough and I'm the owner of Make Shop and Studio in the Indie Genius in the Bishop Arts district of Dallas Texas. Indie Genuis is a micro-boutique marketplace housing over sixty independent and local designers. Everything is handmade, locally made or vintage. And Make Shop and Studio has workshops in sewing, screen printing, hand embroidery, all types of crafts. In Chicago, I worked in marketing and strategy for some big dotcoms, and enjoyed that life very much, and decided that I wanted to move Texas. So, after getting started and just sewing myself and trying to find place to go and do things. I realized that there was a void in the market for places that offer classes with modern projects in the traditional crafts such as sewing and screen printing. So the idea came to create such a place. In 2005, I found a location and Dallas' Uptown neighborhood and a historic great little house. I started creating workshops there and was well received. We did a lot of different things and listened to our customers and what they wanted. And it turns out there was a lot of people who wanted to do this. In 2007 the opportunity to move to Dallas's Bishop Arts district came to us. It's a very creative, community-driven neighborhood. A lot of things were starting to happen in Bishop Arts. At that time we began to develop Indie Genuis, which was a permanent marketplace for these vendors who were doing the street fairs and the runways shows. They want to have a place to sell their product on a larger scale, and so we found this great warehouse just down the street from Bishop Arts District in which we created a 5,000 square foot micro-boutique marketplace if you will where all of these vendors could have a space, and style it and create, you know, a great place to send their customers. Not just an online presence, but to have a place for them to come and shop. We'd been doing that about a year and a half, and then we decided we have so much great space down here, it's a warehouse, and we decided to move our workshops from Make into the same building. Back in 2006, we were doing the first urban street bazaar, we knew we needed tens of thousands of flyers, which we had never printed in that quantity before. And concerned about cost, of course and we did a lot of research and we were able to find PrintPlace and print in that quantity for a great price for us. And then I was able to talk to them on the phone and they walked me through setting my file up right and were just so friendly and so helpful, made it so easy for me to just do my own thing and be able to submit it on my own. So we just sent our flyers in two days ago and we're basically going to get them tomorrow. Our party's in five days, so we will go out this weekend and pass out our flyers, letting all the businesses know this new direction we're going, what we have to offer, and getting folks to come out and see what we've got going on here at this new space. We're going to invite everyone out to come out and sample what we've got going on, meet a lot of the vendors. We'll have workshops going on and just come out and enjoy and have a cocktail with us. And we're really excited to have PrintPlace be a part of our re-branding and our re-grand opening and help us get our name out there again.