What to put on an earring card

A display card has one job at a market table: make a pair of earrings look like a product someone can buy with confidence. It has about two seconds to do it, and roughly six square inches to do it in. That is the whole design brief, and it rules out most of what people try to fit on their first card.

Here is what actually earns its place, in the order it earns it.

Your name, big enough to read across a table

The single most valuable thing on the card is the name someone will search for later. If a shopper picks up your earrings, puts them down, and finds you on Instagram that evening, the card did its job. Everything else is secondary to that.

Set it as large as the layout will bear. On a 2 × 3 in card that is usually the widest element, and it should be the first thing legible from arm's length.

What the piece is made of

Metal type answers the question that stops sales: will these irritate my ears? If your posts are surgical steel, titanium, sterling or niobium, say so on the card. It is the difference between a shopper asking and a shopper buying.

• The ear-wire or post metal — the part that touches skin, which is what people are asking about
• The body material if it isn't obvious: polymer clay, resin, brass, wood, glass
• Hypoallergenic or nickel-free, but only if it is genuinely true of the wire you used

Keep it to one short line. A materials paragraph reads as packaging; a materials line reads as craftsmanship.

Care, only if it changes behaviour

"Keep dry" earns its place on polymer clay, resin and anything with a fabric or paper element, because a customer who wears them in the shower and is disappointed blames the maker. "Store flat", "avoid perfume", "wipe with a soft cloth" — one of these, not all three.

Price, and how you plan to sell

Printing the price on the card locks that price to the whole batch. That is fine at a fixed price point and painful the first time you want to run a sale or sell the same design wholesale. Most makers we print for leave price off the printed card and add it with a small sticker or a tag on the day, which keeps one card design working across markets, Etsy and wholesale.

Print what will still be true in a year. Sticker what changes.

What to leave off

• A long story about your brand — the card is not the About page, and small body text is the first thing to blur at print size
• A QR code smaller than about half an inch square, which phones struggle to read on a matte, textured stock
• A second logo, a tagline and a website URL all at once — pick the one that gets you found again
• Anything inside the outer 1/8 inch of the card, which is where our cutting tolerance lives

The sizes that survive printing

These are the thresholds our own designer enforces, on the equipment that cuts and prints your order:

• Type: 5 pt is the floor, and that is genuinely small — the designer will not let text go under it, and it flags fine type for a human check before printing.
• Artwork: 300 DPI at final printed size looks crisp; below 150 you will see it, and below 72 we stop the order rather than print a blur.
• Keep 1/8 inch clear of every edge and hole. Art can cross that line, but it may be trimmed or punched through.
• Kraft has no white ink. Anything white or very pale on kraft does not print light — it prints as bare kraft. Light artwork gets flagged before you order, not after.

A card that works, in one pass

1. Brand name, set large, top or bottom — not both.
2. One materials line naming the metal that touches skin.
3. One care line, only if wearing them wrong would ruin them.
4. One way to find you again: handle or domain, whichever you actually keep updated.
5. Nothing in the outer 1/8 inch, nothing under 5 pt, nothing white on kraft.

That is five decisions, and it fits comfortably on a 2 × 3 in card with room to breathe. If you want to see it before committing, the designer previews your artwork on the real card shape — holes, corners and all — and checks resolution and type size as you go, so anything that would print badly is flagged while you can still fix it.