'Like a candy shop': Albuquerque-based greeting card company opens Nob Hill store

Feb. 27—There's a lot that goes into making the humble greeting card.

For a customer, a greeting card's journey starts in a shop and ends with a stamp.

But at greeting card company Next Chapter Studio, which opened a storefront this month at 109 Hermosa SE, the process looks a little different.

And Lauren Harms and Brian Gilbreath, owners of Next Chapter Studio, want you to be able to see the whole process. In fact, the storefront, which is connected to their warehouse and production facility, is connected by glass windows so customers can peek in on the process.

"I wanted it to feel kind of like a candy shop, you know, where you can see them making the candy in the back," Harms said.

A candy shop is apt — the storefront practically glows, lit by a neon sign and fluorescent candy-hued cards. Behind the shop, thousands of cards, neatly stuffed into green envelopes, line the shelves.

The couple uses risograph printing to make their cards in-house. Invented in Japan in the 1980s, risograph printers became popular in churches and schools for printing programs, tests and flyers due to their high efficiency and long lifespan. The printing technique is known for its characteristic vivid colors.

But the process is rarely used to make greeting cards.

"(It) seemed like a way to share riso printing with a lot of people," Harms said. "It's becoming more familiar in the past couple years, but when I was first starting out, like, a lot of people hadn't heard about it. But everyone loves the colors and they're just really attracted to it. So I thought cards would be an affordable and easy way to spread that."

Rosie and Ruby, Next Chapter's risograph machines, hum along in the warehouse.

The process starts with uploading a digital design in black and white into the printer, which is burned onto a sheet of rice paper using a series of tiny holes. The rice paper "master print" is wrapped around a cylinder, known as a "drum", which is filled with soy- and vegetable-based ink. The cylinder rolls across each sheet of paper at high speed, reproducing the master on hundreds of pieces of paper per minute. Each color is printed on top of the others, layered to make a complete design.

From there, Harms and Gilbreath cut the printed paper into cards, score the cards to get a neat line down the middle, fold the cards and stuff them into their signature green envelopes.

Harms, who has a background in graphic design, used to work as a book cover designer in the publishing industry in New York. In 2017, she took a printing class and fell in love with art.

Harms said she and Gilbreath "fell into" the greeting card business in 2018, printing and selling cards out of their Brooklyn apartment. In 2020, the couple moved to Albuquerque, and brought their business with them.

Harms and Gilbreath's work might seem familiar; that's because their cards are sold at several Albuquerque businesses already, including Flyby Provisions and Luna & Luz — as well as more than 300 shops around the country. The pair have designed and produced cards for even larger companies like Google and TJ Maxx.

The couple makes all of their designs using just 12 colors. Each "drum" can only hold one ink color, and the drums are the most expensive part of the risograph process, costing about $1,000 each. But using different ink intensities, the colors can be blended together into a gradient.

"I get most excited about the color and the color combinations, and when other people respond to it," Harms, who's partial to the fluorescent pink ink, said. "That's what makes it all worth it — my favorite designs are usually the more simple ones."

When Gilbreath and Harms first started printing, they used just six colors. But they've doubled that number, and even expanded into making notebooks and calendars as well as cards and posters.

"I think Lauren's pushing the boundaries of what riso can do," Gilbreath said.