One of our fabulous clients, Peggy Grever of Benitects, LLC, an employee benefits company in St. Louis, MO has a wonderful value platform for her business. She believes in designing and building better benefits for her clients, while simultaneously promoting environmental sustainability.  Her vision is not only demonstrated through her continued client efforts but, also through her internal and external branding initiatives. Peggy goes to great lengths to insure that all of the paper materials from pocket folders to envelopes are made from recycled paper stock, an effort that is actually harder than one would think. Given the fact that the “going green” has been a tag line of almost every big corporation for the last few years, you’d think finding recycled paper products would be a cinch. Well unfortunately, saving the planet comes complete with a steep price tag and quite a few stipulations. We found this out after designing new business cards for Peggy and her partner Nancy.

The business cards combined the look and feel of draft paper with the triangle logo we recently created to create a card that visually depicts Beneticts’ tagline of designing and building better benefits. Although the entire back of the card is covered in a blue graphical pattern, it was important that the actual cardstock was not only recycled paper but, natural in color as opposed to pure white.  Again with all the green speak out there, you would assume such cardstock requirements would be easy to meet. Unfortunately, finding recycled paper is one thing, but the right color, paper weight and price are a whole other story. Our favorite print production house in Atlanta provided us with stock books to review of which we scoured for just the right stock. Sadly when we thought we found just the right one, we ran into the problem of it A) costing an arm and a leg because it could only be purchased as a Mill product or B) the non mill version was too light weight to make an appropriate business card. Not ones to give up hope on the perfect recycled paper, we opted for adding a full wash of color to the design and printing on 120 pound recycled paper.

Even though we couldn’t find exactly what we were looking for, we still managed to find a solution that saves the planet and continues to promote Benetict’s positive vision. Now we’re on the lookout for the perfect paper for the note pads we designed to complement the business cards.  If you can help, send us a note, because we want to continue the push for more green efforts.