I'm David Lewis, and I own Cherry Press and Chippin' Calendar. We are a creative letterpress studio specialising in wedding
stationery, business stationery, personal stationery, and everything else in between. So letterpress printing is the, you know, traditional print process where you're using your, your, your form, your, your artwork, your typography, and then bringing that together with the paper to make your
print and your impression. We at Cherry Press use photopolymer plates, which replace the type or your, your metal ornaments and so on and so forth. But it also means you can use the traditional machines and the process, but bringing the, the, you know, the modern design element. And you can print logos and people's brand and bits and pieces like that. So what we do is we create everything in illustrator on our max. We
then send the artwork off to be produced by the plate maker and then expose the plate material to UV light using the negative. Everything that's exposed is hardened. Everything that remains is washed away with a water solution. And you're left with your plate. Then in cut the press, your form rollers go down the roller riders in the plate. Your sheet is then passed through the press. They come together.
And the impression is, is that I love what I do because every day is different. We work very much to a client brief wedding station is so personal. Each, you know, each project is, is totally different. The mixture of what we do and what we create for people. That's what I love.
Our oldest press is 1892. And our youngest is 1952. And you just can't replicate. Let's press using a modern process. So that's what makes it different. It's just the tactile nature as well as printing it. It sinks into the sheet.
I think the individual and personal service for sure is, is, is the thing that clients appreciate the most and the fact that they're dealing with the design of the printer, the finisher, the chapries packing it, wrapping it, mixing the ink, doing everything from design to delivery.
Would I swap my job for anything else? No, no. It took me a long, long time to, you know, find my niche and find my passion. But now, well and truly found it. And you know, going to hold on to it. I love doing it.
I left school and joined the military because it didn't do very well at school. Unfortunately, I broke my back three years into my military career, so I had to leave. I then went to work for a commercial high street design and print studio.
Unfortunately, there was a session hit and I was made redundant. I then looked at setting up my own little print studio and initially I was going to focus on digital print, but rapidly realised that there was, you know, you didn't have any unique selling points.
We're based in the Cotswll town of Chippincamden, born and raised around here. It's a lovely part of the world, both for, you know, my business and me and my wife and my children.
The artisan background is so strong. We're, you know, traditional printers. We've got a milliner, silversmiths, jewellery designers, makers. I think it's important to, you know, to hold on to that and to hold on to these crafts and to keep them alive.
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