How to make anything. Part 2 - a deck of playing cards

At a high level, making any kind of product involves the same processes. From a deck of cards to an aeroplane, you need to figure out what your customers want and then break down the steps to make a product that fulfils those requirements.

That’s obviously over-simplifying things, but whatever the product the concept is always fundamentally the same.

A key thing to realise is that making anything is always a collaborative process. It can seem overwhelming if you think you have to do everything yourself. You don’t, and you can’t.

Even the purest of individualistic creative endeavours like drawing can’t be achieved without outside help. With drawing, you surely didn't make the pencil or paper yourself.

Maybe singing or dancing are things you can truly do on your own. But even then, if you want to turn them into a business you're going to need other things made by other people – a microphone or camera to record it, flyers or the internet to find an audience.

When you accept that you don't have to do everything yourself, you can be liberated by the realisation that you can in fact make anything.

Playing cards

Making a deck of cards obviously has fewer steps then making an aeroplane, but there’s a similar process in terms of design thinking and then finding partners to help with manufacturing.

Bigger, more complex products will require component parts and subassemblies, but for some things it’s as simple as finding a supplier who will deliver the finished product.

When I’ve made playing cards for my company Cartesian Cards, I’ve done exactly that — found a manufacturer whose core business is to print playing cards.

Manufacturing a deck of playing cards at scale isn’t simple. It requires a number of large and expensive machines to print, cut, fold, glue and wrap. But by treating that process as a black box, the complexity is abstracted away from me and it does in fact become simple. The challenge is in understanding how to specify the right inputs to get what you want from your manufacturing partners.

As a business it’s not impossible that I might get to a point where it becomes cost-effective to invest in my own machinery and reduce my unit costs, but I’m a very very long way off that. For now it makes sense to relinquish some control over the manufacturing and accept a higher unit cost in return for negligible up-front manufacturing costs.

For now, I work with the largest playing card printing company in the world, Cartamundi, and they certainly know what they’re doing.

Making my cards

Back to how I went about getting my cards made.

The cards I’ve designed and made are not really regular playing cards. They all have the usual markings - hearts, spades, etc, but I use the central area of the cards to add extra functionality.

Some of my Cartesian Cards playing cards

Every type of product has specific challenges and constraints. Playing cards are probably more constrained than most. You have 52 two-dimensional canvases measuring 63 x 89 mm and that’s it¹.

In design, constraints can set you free though.

MOQs

When it comes to making consumer products at scale, a critical factor is MOQs — minimum order quantities. The is the smallest number of products (or component parts) that a particular supplier is willing to produce for you.

As I mentioned earlier, by using a manufacturing partner to do much of the work, you do relinquish some control and MOQs can be a significant part of that.

Printing in particular comes with high MOQs and high price disincentives to discourage smaller orders. The printer has to do a fair bit of work to set their machines up to print a new product so it’s just not worth their time to make only a few hundred of something. Or if they’re willing to do it, the unit cost will be prohibitively expensive for you.

Unit cost vs order quantity for a printed product

The graph above is typical for how unit costs fall as the volume goes up. Here, the unit cost halves as you go from 1,000 to 6,000 units.

Obviously the total cost to produce a batch continues to go up and therefore cashflow is always a challenge.

For me, that’s where crowdfunding comes in. By launching my products on Kickstarter I can make sure my initial batch is big enough to be cost-effective, and I can raise enough money to pay for it in one go.

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Once I have the actual idea for a new deck of playing cards, I need to get to the point where I can pitch it on Kickstarter. As I mentioned, Kickstarter is great because it allows me to raise money up front before committing to getting something made.

The hardest part is making something that people actually want, then finding them and getting them to care about it. Crowdfunding massively reduces the risk in doing that and proves that people want your product.

Prototype, prototype, prototype

To develop your idea and be able to pitch it to potential crowdfunding customers it’s all about storytelling. And to do that you need prototypes.

Whatever you’re making, it’s critical to make things as real as possible, as soon as possible. You need to get the idea out of your head and into some tangible form. This is for your own benefit, and also so that you can show other people early on in the development process.

Early prototypes will likely be messy and ugly, and that’s OK. They could be anything from sketches to 3D-printed models.

For a simple 2D product like playing cards it’s easy. You can start with bits of paper, or cut up existing printed products, or you can print things out on a home printer. Unless you’ve got an amazing printer, the quality won’t be great, but you’ll get a feel for layout and the relative size of your design elements.

Various levels of playing card prototypes

With prototypes there are typically two things you’re trying to test — form and function. Sometimes these are referred to as looks-like prototypes and works-like prototypes.

To differing extents you’ll need to address both of these if you’re going to convince backers to give you money on Kickstarter before the product has even been made.

The functional testing of playing cards doesn’t need to be high resolution. If you’ve invented a new card game for example, getting people to have cards in their hands and actually play with them is critical. But these might initially only be home-printed prototypes cut up with scissors.

High resolution aesthetic prototypes for playing cards can be a bit more tricky, but also less critical to get made physically. You can safely assume that your 2D digital designs will translate well to the final printed product, and when pitching your idea potential backers will likely have faith in that too.

Here are some things I’ve done to prototype my playing cards.

I’ve printed card designs on A4 paper on my home printer. The details aren’t brilliant, but I can get an excellent feel for things like the size of fonts and the balance between different elements on the cards. This is normally how I make my first prototypes.

Business card company MOO offers a service where you can print 50 business cards all with different designs on one side. Photographers for example use this to print business cards that also act as a mini portfolio for their work. For me I can get 50 almost-playing-card-sized cards at a much higher print resolution than I can get at home, on a nice thick card stock, and with a relatively fast turnaround. Yes, the cards aren’t exactly the right size, and I can’t get a full deck of 52, but they serve a purpose and move my design process forward.

Another option for higher-resolution printed prototypes is my local photo printers. I did this for the playing card box on my latest project. I was able to then fold up the photo print into a box. I could see how the design worked with a good idea of how the colours might turn out. Most of these places have machines for instant prints and it costs pennies.

Prototype box made from a photo print (foreground) and the final production box

Finally, for all my Kickstarter projects I always make a ‘proper’ deck of cards to use in the photos and videos on my Kickstarter page. For these I use a company in China who print low-cost playing cards. I wouldn’t use these for my final product, and they’re expensive if you only by a few decks, but they’re plenty good enough for my Kickstarter pitch.

Idea - prototype - make

I hope I’ve convinced you that making things may not be as difficult as you think.

If you can come up with the right idea, and break down the steps to get it made, you can turn the idea into a real product.

The trick is knowing what you can do yourself and knowing where you need to get help.

Remember though, the hardest part is coming up with something people actually want.

Crowdfunding is valuable on several levels. Not only does it get you the money up front that will enable you to work with a manufacturing supplier, but at the same time it proves that you’re making something desirable.

Asking people if they think they might want a product is one thing, but if you can persuade people to put their money where their mouth is, then you’re definitely onto something.

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I’ve now launched five decks of cards via Kickstarter, as well as a few other different products, and helped with many more. None of them were things I’d made before - I just broke down the steps required to turn the idea into a finished product and worked with partners to make that happen.

If you think you have a product idea that you’d like to crowdfund and would like some help, please get in touch.

Footnotes

¹ That’s not entirely true. Rules are there to be broken.