Order holiday greeting cards first, and order everything else after. Greeting cards are the only Q4 print job with a deadline you don't control — the card has to be in a mailbox before the holiday, or it's a January card. Everything else on the list (business cards for networking season, letterhead, promo pieces) can slip a week without anyone noticing. Greeting cards are $150 for 100, and the sooner they're in the queue, the more of the calendar you have left to work with.
Why holiday cards are the tightest job in Q4
A greeting card takes more production steps than anything else a small business orders, and every step is a place to wait. A flat 6x9 postcard is printed, cut, and done. A greeting card is printed on heavier stock, scored so the fold doesn't crack, folded, matched to envelopes, and then either addressed or shipped to you for hand-addressing. Each of those is a separate pass through a separate machine, and in December every one of those machines has a line in front of it.
The second squeeze is on the mail side, not the print side. Late December is the heaviest mail volume of the year, and a card dropped into that stream moves slower than the same card dropped in October. That's not a printing problem and no printer can fix it — it just means the print deadline sits earlier than people expect.
How to work backwards to your order date
Pick the day you want the card to land, then walk backwards through five stages, in this order:
- Landing date — before the holiday, or deliberately after it (more on that below).
- Mail date — the day it leaves. Add transit, and add extra transit for December.
- Addressing and signing — if you're hand-signing 100 cards, that is a real evening of someone's time. If we're addressing from your list, this is where a messy list costs you days.
- Print, score, fold — the shop's queue, which gets longer every week of Q4.
- Proof approval — the stage that most often blows the schedule, because it's the one waiting on you.
Ask us for a committed in-hands date when you order rather than guessing at one. We'll give you a real date against the actual press schedule for that week, and it will be a different date in October than it is in late November.
What holiday cards cost, and the cheaper alternative
Greeting cards are $150 for 100, which is the minimum order. That buys a card that stands up on a customer's desk and stays there through January — the whole reason to send a folded card instead of a flat one.
The cheaper piece is the 6x9 postcard at $50 for 100, and for some businesses it's the better piece regardless of price. A postcard has no envelope to open, no folding step, and mails at the postcard rate rather than the letter rate — so it costs less to print and less to send. It gets read by everyone who picks up the mail, because there's nothing to open. What it won't do is sit on a desk for a month.
If your goal is warmth and desk presence, send the greeting card. If your goal is that a Spokane customer list sees your name and an offer in December, send the postcard and put the saved money into sending it to more people.
The January thank-you nobody else sends
A thank-you card that lands in the second week of January arrives in an empty mailbox. December mail competes with every other card, catalog, and statement your customer gets; January mail competes with almost nothing. If you've already missed the December window — or you'd rather not compete — send a year-end thank-you in January instead and say so on the card. It reads as deliberate, not late.
This also solves the scheduling problem entirely. A January card can be printed in December, when the holiday rush is over.
Refresh business cards before networking season starts
January and February are when chamber events, association meetings, and the first round of the year's client lunches all land, and it's when everyone discovers their card box is empty or wrong. Business cards are $150 for a box of 250.
Before you reprint the same file, check it for the things that quietly went stale: a phone number that now forwards, a title that changed, a website that redirects, a QR code pointing at a dead landing page. Reprinting a wrong card costs exactly the same as reprinting a right one.
Year-end paperwork worth printing properly
Year-end is when your paperwork gets read by people who don't know you — accountants, new clients reviewing a proposal, anyone comparing your quote against two others. Letterhead is $60 for 100, and it's the cheapest thing on this list that changes how a document is received.
If you're sending anything that needs a response back — a renewal confirmation, an updated-details form, a seasonal reorder — a business reply card at $45 for 100 is the piece that makes replying take fifteen seconds instead of an email someone means to send later. It also gives you a countable response, which a phone number does not.
Seasonal promo pieces, by business type
Restaurants, bars, and event venues run holiday menus, party packages, and gift-card pushes on the table itself. Table tents are $150 for 100 and they're the only piece on this list that sells to a customer who is already sitting down.
Home-service businesses — snow removal, gutters, furnace tune-ups, holiday lighting — work routes, not lists. Door hangers are $100 for 100, and they skip postage entirely, which is why route-based businesses use them instead of mail.
For anything that needs explaining — a year-end package, a service comparison, a price list going into effect in the new year — 8.5x11 flyers and sell sheets are $80 for 100.
Volume pricing applies to all of these, and the configurator behind each link quotes a real price for whatever quantity you actually need.
Calendars: we don't have a shelf price for them
Wall and desk calendars aren't on our standard product list, so there's no published price to quote you. They're a bindery job — coil or wire binding, hole drilling, a cover on different stock than the pages — and they get quoted individually. They also have the earliest deadline of anything in Q4, because a calendar that arrives in the second week of January has lost most of its point. If you want one, ask early rather than adding it to a December order.
Send the whole Q4 list in one go
Deciding on all of it at once is worth more than optimizing any single piece. One order means one proof round instead of four, one place in the schedule instead of four separate ones drifting later each week, and one conversation about what your brand looks like across cards, letterhead, and mailers — which is the thing that actually gets noticed when a customer has three of your pieces on their desk in the same month.
The honest version: the price per piece isn't much different for ordering everything together. What you're buying is a spot in the queue before the December crunch, and that's worth more in Q4 than in any other quarter.