Mary Maturi markets a line of "Killer Whale" petroglyph tee-shirts, sweat shirts, and note cards both in Alaskan gift shops and in natural history museums in the lower forty-eight states.

It all started when Mary and her family spent a year living in Wrangell, a small town located on Wrangell Island in southeast Alaska. One day Mary ventured down to Petroglyph Beach on the island. Petroglyphs are ancient rock carvings left by an unknown people. Using rice paper and different colored ferns, Mary "rubbed" the petroglyphs to capture their images on paper. When other saw her rubbings, they offered to buy them.

"People interest really surprised me, so I thought of other ways to share the uniqueness of the petroglyphs with out having to deal with their awkward size (some were several feet in length). That's how the "Killer Whale" notecards were born," Mary says. Using her rubbings as a guide, she created smaller scale pen and ink drawings which she took to a printer to get price quotes for paper, printing and envelopes."

The major cost of printing is making the plates. Therefore, it's wise to get price quotes for different runs of 1,000," says Mary. For example, a run of 3,000 cards might cost around 10 cents per card while a run of 6,000 note cards could drop that per unit cost below 8 cents per card. That decreases your card cost by more than 20 percent - quite a savings. Mary also recommends getting bids from several suppliers or even splitting up the order.

While printers know how to price their printing competitively, they don't make their own envelopes. Mary uses the least costly printer that can deliver the quality of paper stock she desires, but buys her envelopes from a warehouse specialist at a savings of nearly 35 percent from prices quoted by printers and other envelope suppliers. It pays to let your fingers do the walking and get competitive quotes.

Once Mary obtained the cost estimates, she visited several gift stores and museums to gather pricing information on competing notecards. She also talked to store owners and museum managers to determine their interest in ordering. After all, it would make no sense to have the notecards printed unless buyers would purchase at prices that can generate a profit.