A159 | The Sample Book — What Goes Into It and Why We Still Make It by Hand

Twice a year, we produce a new edition of our ribbon sample book. It goes out to buyers, agents, and distributors in about a dozen countries, and it is one of the pieces of physical material we invest in most deliberately. The book has been part of how we communicate our range for as long as anyone on the current team can remember, and despite the fact that virtually all of our initial sales conversations now happen online, we have not replaced it with a digital catalogue or a link to a colour-picker on our website. This is a conscious choice, and the reasons behind it are practical rather than sentimental.

This post is about what goes into making the sample book and what we have learned, over many editions, about how buyers actually use it.

Why Physical Still Matters

The most fundamental reason we maintain a physical sample book is that ribbon is a tactile product. A colour on a screen — even a well-calibrated screen — does not tell you whether the surface has a subtle sheen or a flat matte finish, whether the hand is stiff or soft, whether the weave is tight or open. A buyer who is specifying ribbon for a premium cosmetics line and a buyer specifying ribbon for a children's party supply company both need colour accuracy, but they need very different things from the handle, drape, and weight of the ribbon. Neither of those qualities can be conveyed digitally.

We have had buyers tell us, more than once, that they ordered from us after years of ordering from a competitor specifically because our sample book let them feel the difference in quality before committing to a production order. The tactile impression of a well-made satin ribbon — the specific combination of weight, surface smoothness, and flexibility — is the closest thing we have to a sales argument that does not require explanation.

How the Book Is Assembled

The assembly process is more labour-intensive than it probably needs to be, and we have considered automating parts of it. We have not done so, for reasons we will come to. Each edition of the book contains between 180 and 220 swatch entries, depending on whether we are adding new seasonal colours or retiring any from the core range. Each swatch is a cut length of ribbon — between 12 and 15 centimetres — attached to a spiral-bound card card by hand. The attachment method is a small piece of double-sided tape under each end of the swatch, which holds the ribbon flat and allows the buyer to lift the edge and feel the hand from underneath.

The swatches are organised by construction type first — woven solids, printed, jacquard, metallic, organza — and then by colour family within each construction group. The colour sequencing within each group follows the visible spectrum loosely but prioritises the commercial colour families that our buyers order most frequently: the neutrals and champagnes come first, then the warm reds and pinks, then the cool blues and greens, then the metallics. The sequencing is not arbitrary — it reflects the order in which a buyer flipping through the book for the first time is most likely to be looking.

Why We Have Not Automated the Assembly

The assembly team for the sample book consists of three people who spend approximately three weeks twice a year on nothing else. It is slow and it is manual, and we have looked at machinery that could cut and attach swatches faster. The reason we have not moved to automated assembly is not cost — the machinery exists at a reasonable price — but quality control. The manual assembly process means that each swatch is handled individually by a person who is also making judgements: this swatch has a pulling thread at the edge and should be replaced; this cut is not straight; this colour is from a batch that is slightly off and the book should use the reference batch instead.

An automated process would produce more consistent attachment geometry and faster throughput, but it would remove the human judgement layer that currently catches a small but meaningful number of quality issues before they go out in a book that represents our standard. We consider this trade-off worth making. The sample book is a representation of what we can produce, and a book with a single flaw in it undermines the impression it is meant to create.

A Detail About the Cover

The cover of the sample book has gone through several iterations over the years. For a long time it was a simple card with our name and logo printed on it. A few editions ago we changed it to include a single ribbon swatch on the front — a piece of our best-selling ivory double-faced satin, attached in the same way as the internal swatches. The response from buyers was immediate and disproportionate. Several people mentioned the cover specifically in the first conversation after receiving the book. One agent in Singapore told us she had started using the cover of our sample book as a reference when explaining ribbon quality to new clients, because it was something they could touch before they had even opened to the first page.

We were not expecting this. The cover change was a small aesthetic decision, not a deliberate strategy. But it confirmed something we already suspected: the moment of first physical contact with the product matters more than we give it credit for. The person receiving the book forms an impression in the first few seconds of handling it, before they have read a single specification or looked at a single price. That impression is built from weight, texture, and the quality of what they are holding. We cannot control what happens after that, but we can control what we put in their hands at the start.

We know from conversations with buyers over the years that the sample book is used differently by different types of customers. Buyers at large gift companies often use it as a briefing document — they bring it to a design meeting, flag the swatches that are candidates for a new packaging specification, and the book travels around internally before a final decision is made. Buyers at smaller brands often use it as a reference library — it lives in a drawer and comes out when they need to specify a colour to a printer or a packaging supplier who is not us. Agents use it as a prospecting tool, bringing it to new client meetings as evidence of range and quality.

None of these uses work as well with a digital catalogue, and all of them depend on the physical object being present. The sample book does a job that a website cannot, and we intend to keep making it.