Minted

Minted is a global community of independent graphic designers and an online store that prints and sells the best of their designs in the form of paper goods.

We believe that great design lives and thrives in the hands of indie designers that people may not have access to through traditional retailers. Our goal is to use technology to allow our community to discover the work of great designers from all over the world. And at the same time, create a place where designers can get exposure and build their careers.
Minted holds monthly design challenges for stationery, invitations, calendars, and other categories and all graphic designers are invited to enter. The Minted community selects the best designs in a highly competitive process, which gives us a top selection of the freshest, finest cards in the world. Winning designers earn cash prizes, a place in the Minted collection, and commissions on all sales of their designs.

At Minted, we love the idea that our products will find their way into your most personal celebrations, and we don't take that honor lightly. That's why we only use fine paper stock, rich inks, and crisp printing methods. We guess you could say that quality is an obsession for us. We stand behind our products with a 100% satisfaction guarantee

the business.

Minted has been featured on The Today Show and The Early Show and in Martha Stewart Living, Fortune, GigaOm and other consumer and business media. InStyle magazine named us "Best of the Web" in stationery in 2010, and Real Simple magazine wrote in 2009 that we are their 'favorite resource for personalized holiday cards'. You can read more about what the press has to say here.

minted stats:

• Commissions paid to designers: over half a million dollars
• Designs submitted to competitions: over 20,000
• Comments designers have left to each other: over 50,000

how we got started.

I started Minted in 2007 when my daughter was a few months old, with the desire to offer the best in stationery design to consumers. This was prompted by an idea: I had seen over the years that many talented graphic designers, including those in my own family, had a hard time getting their designs to market. I thought it would be possible to hold open competitions where all designers could participate. Designers could express their vision, gain peer feedback and exposure, and have the chance to sell their designs; consumers would have the chance to tell us what they wanted to buy, and together we could use the Internet to create as pure a meritocracy as was possible. So I wrote a business plan, found someone really fantastic to work with (Melissa Kim), raised funding from angel investors, and launched a site.

Our first design challenge was held in April 2008 and was a 'save-the-date' card competition with 66 entries. Tens of thousands of design entries later, we have expanded our crowd-sourced assortment to birth announcements, wedding stationery, photo calendars, personal stationery, and much more. We are now receiving stunning, innovative designs from throughout the US and the world.

Our Minted Manifesto: Allow the best designs to surface based on community interaction and not based on where a designer was educated, what type of capital or connections they have, or anything besides the pure quality of a design as judged by the community. We think this is the future of retail.
If you're wondering who our community is, they are creative professionals and they live throughout the world. Some of them have design degrees, and some of them don't. Many are parents, some have full-time jobs in creative fields, and many are well-known quite apart from their success on Minted. The designs we've crowd-sourced have reached hundreds of thousands of homes and made families all over the US incredibly happy, allowing them to express their personal style and love when celebrating the start of a new life as a couple, the birth of a baby, or an important birthday. It has been a joy working with the nice, gracious, and massively talented designers in our community.




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