Way back in the summer of 94 we opened Clubcard in a one bedroom apartment in Vancouver's west end. Rent was $725 a month and that was a high price to pay to be in the heart of it all. We offered graphic design services for local businesses and artists. We attended any event possible, left flyers at door steps and on poster boards all around the city and met each client in person at their location. As we got busier, we would stake a claim on a table at Delany's on Denman and clients would meet us over a coffee.
Our cutting-edge technology of the day was a PC with 8mb of ram and 233 megahertz of processing speed, a cell phone, an HP laser printer and a fax machine that shared the landline with our phone. Jobs to be printed were saved to a floppy disk or tape drive and driven to a service bureau to make film to be exposed to metal plates for the printing press.
It may be hard to believe but in 1994 the internet was not widely available, was accessed by dial up on your phone line and was mostly used by researchers and the military. By the end of 94 the web had its first "website" and by the end of the year, 10,000 more popped up. HTML and URL were relatively new terms and email campaigns were a new concept. The term "spam" was coined almost instantly. Yahoo!, Excite, and Infoseek search engines entered service and google wasn't even a thing.
This dark humour meme made its rounds in the mid 90's soon after email campaigns became a marketing staple.
Clubcard began using email to communicate with our tech savvy clients in 1996, moved to a larger studio on Hamilton Street in Yaletown and launched our first website in June 2000. We opened our first storefront shop on Burrard street in 2001 and frequently had small art shows and even published our own newspaper called Vent Magazine with issues featuring art by Shepard Fairey and Dave Kinsey of Black Market Art.
In 2005 our shop in San Francisco's Castro Upper Market area opened to serve the unique and diverse characters of San Francisco before transitioning to an online only model in the USA.
Over three decades we've seized every opportunity to bring new printing methods and products to help our clients tell their story with quality printing at fair prices and friendly, helpful support. We started out with the mission to make printing fast, easy and affordable and with your support we look forward to continuing our mission for decades to come.
Thank you for supporting our small businesses!
The Clubcard Crew
Leave a comment