Category: FinerWorks News

FinerWorks is moving. Well actually our San Antonio based production facility is just going to be moving into a new building around the corner before May 1. Our current facility has served us well the past few years, but as the demand for our printing has increased through sites like FinerWorks.com, some of our sister sites as well as the large orders by corporate customers we found it was necessary to make this move. Internally we will be working around the move but since production usually operates within a 1-3 business day window any impact this has will likely not be noticable to orders shipping out.

Thanks to a great suggestion from one of our artists who uses us on a regular basis to have prints dropshipped to her customers I am happy to announce a couple new shipping options. We wanted to help people like her who ship a lot of 16×20 prints avoid having to select UPS Ground. While I am overall happy with UPS Ground it costs $14.95 versus $9.95, won’t allow shipping to PO Boxes in most cases and in many cases has a longer transit time without Saturday delivery. Rather than raising the rates for Priority Mail and Express mail we setup offer an upgraded version to the two called “Priority Mail Large” and “Express Mail Large”. They are a few dollargs move but will these “Large” versions let you ship prints flat up to 16×20. In addition it can be a solution to those that want their paper prints shipped in a little more robust packaging than the normal flat mailers.

A few months back I had an artist tell me he was looking for a new site to setup a personal gallery. He said the site he had been using had been okay up until then but appeared to be going down hill or was not being actively moderated like it once was. He sounded disappointed when he said this so I asked him what had happened which had turned him off so much. He said the site was turning into a photo sharing site and was losing it’s art community feel. People were posting anything and everything from selfies (those are photos people take of themselves with their iPhones or other smartphone) to vacation snap shots.

Don’t wait until the last moment. We have not finalized our Christmas ordering deadlines just yet but it will probably fall around the 18th of this month which is only two weeks away. Right now we are getting close to running at full capacity so if you have to submit an order for order fulfillment to your customer and have been putting it off for whatever reason don’t wait much longer. Here are five useful tips for your holiday shipments that you should consider when order prints for your friends, family or even customers.

When ordering a gloss or matte stretched and mounted canvas print you now have the option to order a basic finishing at no charge or professional finishing for $15. Both are optional and either is recommended if you plan to hang your stretched & mounted canvas print unframed. Continue reading for more details on these options.

Over the past few months we have seen a big increase in the number of orders placed by artists using the drop shipping option. If you are not familiar with the order fulfillment service, it is a free feature we offer in which you can have your prints shipped to someone and have it look like it was shipped by you rather than us. No prices are used and your name and address shows up as the sender on the shipping label and packing slip. Up until now this would be the name and address used during checkout under your order’s billing section. This would include your name, company name, address and phone number. We realize this might not be ideal for everyone, especially when you don’t want to use your billing information. We now have a remedy so you can control what is displayed as the order’s sender.

Want to reorder a canvas or art paper print you have ordered in the past? Did you know there is a way you can do this quickly and easily? If you have been printing your work to fulfill orders or are simply giving your prints to people as gifts, you will find it is not unusual to be ordering the same prints over and over again. One little known secret is we have a way for you to reorder those particular prints without the need to reupload your images each time.

After some careful consideration and discussion we have decided to go back to implementing a gallery at FinerWorks. We transferred the Yakmonkey accounts to FinerWorks and created search engine friendly redirects to those Yakmonkey pages so as to not disrupt any links artists and photographers have on their personal websites, Facebook posts, and so on. Artists and photographers with Yakmonkey accounts will not need to make any changes or even do anything different on their part.

I am excited to announce several new mounting options coming up here in the month of January 2013. These include prints mounted on gator board and face mounted prints on clear acrylic panels.

If you have been following FinerWorks for a while you may know that Yakmonkey.com is now live and allowing people to start selling their work on their own, using Yakmonkey as their gallery and having PayPal host their shopping cart. What about if you want to just order some prints for yourself from the images you have uploaded and stored? With some of the minor changes to the interface we thought it worth mentioning how to do this so you don’t have to re-upload those same images again.