Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Schwartz.
Michael, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I got my start in letterpress in 2006. My wife had recently started a stationery business and the gal they had been using for letterpress picked up and moved to Canada to get married. It was a same sex marriage…so when I think back on it…weird to think that if same sex marriage had been legal at the time I might have never gotten into this. Anyways, my wife casually mentioned …maybe you should be our letterpress printer…and I said …I think I just might. I had zero experience, barely knew what letterpress was. I was a history major, so I like old things and the idea using things and machines that have been around for a century. I tracked down a woman in LA, Claudia Lab, who was a letterpress printer. I spent a weekend with her…and after we were done she said a couple of things that stuck with me. one…that she felt I had a talent for letterpress and I should buy a machine, two …not to let anyone tell me that I could not make a living doing letterpress. Turns out she was right. I found a machine through the curator of the letterpress museum in Carson. He leads me to a rusted out abandoned 1921 chandler and price letterpress machine sitting in the back of a paper store in Corona. I put the press in my garage, sold my car for a mini cooper so I could still fit a car in the garage and started playing around. I struggled through teaching myself on the weekends for a year or so until I was ready to take on some real jobs. About a year later I quit my day job and have been growing ever since.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Yes and no. I started out when the economy was in the toilet…which is actually a pretty good time to start a business in some ways. I learned to be lean and frugal and any knew growth starting when I did. It’s been smooth in the sense that I am extremely grateful to be able to do this for a living. Struggles…tons…learning to letterpress was not easy…filled with lots of days I wanted to throw the towel in. I’ve added a lot of other services from letterpress, like foil, screen printing, edge painting, etc… I’ve learned that nothing comes without a pretty good challenge and learning curve. Having employees, payroll, taxes…they were all new things to me…and all came with struggles.
Please tell us about czar press.
We are a full-service print boutique print shop. We offer letterpress, foil, digital, screen printing, edge painting, edge foiling, duplexing, plate making…and I am about to open a coffee shop in the front of czar press. Everything we print is custom…we try and stay out of the design business…and just handle the production end. basically…you design it, we print it. I would say we specialize in high end invitations, greeting cards, business cards, posters, hang tags, labels, boxes and other branding pieces. we honestly put care and love into every piece we print…from runs of 50 to 5000…we try and treat them all with the same level of care and detail. Customer service, honesty, good pricing, quick turnarounds and quality and what we strive for.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
everything that I have done right and wrong over the past decade has lead me to where we are today….so for the most part id takes the same road. Sure…I would buy a different press here and there, done some marketing a little different…but no real complaints.
Contact Info:
- Address: 17891 sky park circle ste A
irvine CA 92614 - Website: czarpress.com
- Phone: 9494391131
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @czarpress
- Facebook: czarpress
- Twitter: czarpress
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