- Awesome is one word for our personalities, but like, terrible is another.

I always tell people, they're like, "Oh, you know, how do you come up with your cards?"

And I said, "Well, I'm terrible," and I figured that there must be other people like me, and it turns out I'm right.

(upbeat music) Hi, I'm Jess Bennett, I own Letterpress Jess in Canton, Ohio, where we make cute and crass letterpress greetings, one at a time, the old fashioned way.

I'm a graphic designer by trade, and I've always been a big proponent of the local art scene and of art in general.

So I've always sort of wanted to be part of the arts world versus sort of the commercial graphic design world that I'm in by day.

And so I started looking into printmaking as a way to take what I do on the computer and sort of translate it into more of a fine art practice.

And so it's a tale as old as time, just a girl falling in love with a 2,500 pound printing press.

We have Big Sal, which is our OG press and our main press, and the one that we use every single day.

We also have who we call, Little Die, who is our, you know, the second press that we acquired.

And then we have Long Limbs Lenore, who is a Challenge proof press.

Most of what we print we print with Sal because she's the biggest, she's motorized.

So Big Sal does all of the work and then I take all of the credit.

We offer greeting cards, number one.

We have a couple of different lines.

So we've got extremely snarky cards.

Our bestsellers are our crass calligraphy, some of which cannot be maybe repeated on the program.

And then we have Cutie Kawaii, which are my illustrations of food with faces in bright colors.

They are punny, but not inappropriate, you could give them to your 90-year-old grandmother and feel good about yourself afterwards.

We have a line of cards called the Gibson Girls.

The Gibson girls were illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson.

They're these awesome vintage illustrations of these sort of empowered-for-their-own-time women, and some of the quotes on the cards are irreverent but everywhere greetings, you know, like "Girl, same."

Every single card is fed into the press one at a time and one color at a time.

So anytime you see multiple colors on a card, it means it was handled through the press that many times.

So it's a painstaking process, and every time I pull a print I get a little bit better at that.

So someday I'll be perfect, but I'll be very old.

It's a lot of fun, but it's, you know, there's a reason it's the old fashioned way.

Right now we are in about 150 stores in 36 States and Canada.

The idea that more people in more places can laugh at my cards, you know, is the most a girl can hope for.

It never ceases to amaze me that people wanna buy my stuff.

And that I have something that they think is worth spending money on is maybe the best feeling in the world.