Clo Mor Press — Custom Letterpress & Design
Clo Mor Press is a boutique letterpress & design studio located in Northern California. We are family owned and operated, specializing in handcrafted custom letterpress invitations, announcements, holiday cards and stationery. We have long admired the simple beauty and elegance of letterpress and love what we do…attending to the details and focusing, above all, on fine letterpress printing fused with exquisite design.
Wedding Invitations | Baby Announcements | Holiday Cards
Custom Invitations & Announcements | Custom Letterpress Projects
Our Work
Here is a sampling of our letterpress and design work over the years …
“Working with Clo Mor Press on our wedding suite was one of my favorite parts of our wedding-planning process! They did a wonderful job helping us to clarify our ideas, refine what we needed (and also, importantly, what we didn’t necessarily need). Our beautiful paper items helped greatly to tie all of the elements of our wedding together. Their custom design perfectly conveyed the emotion we were hoping for, through pristine text and thoughtful imagery. They were quick and kind with their responses to my ideas and design changes. Our invitations arrived beautifully packaged and were elegant, warm, and clear without being too obvious. From the week we sent our invitations through to the wedding itself, we received a stream of compliments on Clo Mor’s work. We are very much looking forward to having Clo Mor Press be a part of all our future life events! Thank you so much!”
“Our wedding cordinator Sonya gave us Sid and Lisa names, and when met with them we quickly fell in love with the beauty, and detail of their work. After our second meeting their passion for what they do became the number one thing we will always remember, and after all that’s what weddings are all about. When we recieved our finished invitations, we couldn’t have been happier, and can’t think of any other way to go when it comes to wedding invitations.”
“Thank you for contributing to our special day. We were so glad to find Clo Mor Press. Thank you for creating beautiful invitations for us, for your ability to work with our vision and for your incredible artwork.”
“Since I’m getting married in Hawaii, I wanted an ocean feel without the typical beach wedding clichés. Kim took my thoughts and turned them into elegant display. Not only is she fun to work with, she has such a creative eye. I’m now receiving the reply cards with notes on them reading ‘Beautiful invitations!’ I couldn’t be happier!”
About Us
Perhaps it started like this … circa 1990 Sid Hillman and Lisa Garza meet in college at UCLA. Five years later they get married. At the time, Lisa works as a producer for FUEL, a motion design firm in Santa Monica but secretly wants to be a graphic designer for print projects. Enter, Sid’s hip older sister, Kim Hillman, who after several years as a Senior Graphic Designer for the Warren Group (Culver City, CA), works in Amsterdam as a Lead Designer for Michael Peters Group handling large-scale fashion and retail accounts. Kim designs Sid and Lisa’s wedding invitations on hand-made papers, which, of course, must be letterpressed. She finds a printer in England who expertly hand typesets and letterpresses the invitations. They are a hit … beautiful, simple, elegant, textured and thus begins our journey.
A year later Kim returns from Amsterdam and she and Lisa open a graphic design firm, inkfish in Santa Monica. Together they design and coordinate projects for fashion, entertainment, technology and corporate clients. Later on, Kim moves to Northern California and both Lisa and she branch out while still maintaining active inkfish clients together. Kim becomes a part time designer and press-person at Dauphine Press. Meanwhile, Lisa peruses Ebay and her husband, Sid, finds himself directing a forklift to place a 2000 lb. antique printing press in their Los Angeles garage. Lisa and Sid begin by pressing for Sugar Paper (Century City, CA) while developing their own custom letterpress clients. Sid, a musician and then working actor, adds a new trade to his repertoire, expert letterpress printing.
Finally, Sid and Lisa move to 3 acres just off the Mendocino coast, with plenty of room for the Clo Mor Press studio, 3 kids, various cats/dogs/guinea pigs/and horse. They are also close to Kim and her family making it easy for all 3 to design and print together as Clo Mor Press.
‘Clo Mor’ ~ In Gaelic Clo Mor means “great web” or “great cloth.” At 900 ft. above the sea, the Clo Mor cliffs are the highest in Britain, located at the northwest tip of Scotland. Bottom left is the view from the Clo Mor at Cape Wrath looking east. Lisa and Sid spent an afternoon here in summer 2002 and found their visit so inspiring that their new company was named after these cliffs.
Coffee & Letterpress
We like our printing the way we like our coffee … why have a pot of coffee in the morning when you can have a fresh draw from an espresso machine … made with care and attention, each one unique but still with perfect crema and rich taste. Clo Mor Press approaches printing in much the same way … hand-crafted letterpress with our highest attention to quality, each piece … luxurious, tactile and elegant.
~CLO MOR PRESS
Eco-friendly Letterpress
Printing is generally a non-friendly process for the environment but we, at Clo Mor Press, want to do our part personally and professionally to take care of it. We make a serious effort to reduce our impact. Below are some of our current environmental practices.
POWER
We are about 90% solar powered and are very conscientious about the power we do use … making sure to turn off lights, machines when not in use and by replacing our incandescent bulbs with low watt fluorescent bulbs throughout our business and household.
PAPER
All of our business papers are recycled papers that are processed chlorine free (at least 30% post-consumer waste but most are made with 100% post-consumer waste). Most of the papers that we print with are made with 100% cotton fibers or at least 30% post-consumer waste and are chlorine or elemental chlorine free. In addition to being tree-free, cotton papers are made from discarded cotton fibers from the textile industry. In other words, they are made from an agricultural by-product and do not increase the amount of land under cultivation for cotton. Additionally, many of the mills that manufacture our papers are environmentally certified (ISO 14001), use alternative energies and are FSC certified.
RECYCLE & REUSE
We reuse or recycle all packaging materials that we receive. And, we recycle or reuse all our paper scraps/waste. While we would love to send your orders in beautiful boxes with luxurious tissues, we can’t in good conscience justify the waste. Orders arrive either in the envelope boxes the paper arrived in or carefully wrapped with recycled kraft paper and tied with hemp string. These are then expertly packed into reused boxes with reused packing materials that we receive from our paper orders or in recycled corrugate boxes with recycled packing material.
SOLVENTS & INKS
We use low Volatile Organic Compound (low VOC) solutions to clean our presses and thereby reduce the emissions from our solvents. Additionally, our inks are plant/rubber-based and also have low Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). We use very little ink, no more than a few pounds a year. A typical wedding invitation order uses only about one teaspoon to one tablespoon of ink. Paper is also still recyclable when printed with our inks.
PLATES & PAPERLESS PRACTICES
The company that makes our plates is carbon neutral through their extensive environmental practices and by partnering with the Conservation Fund’s Go Zero plan. They also launched the first recycling program for photopolymer plates so we are able to recycle old plates. We also send our invoices electronically and our faxes come to us digitally. About 95% of all our business correspondence and proofing is done electronically via email.
PLANT-BASED OWNERS
The environment is something that we are highly conscious of both in our professional and personal lives. Clo Mor Press is vegan-owned and operated. Apart from the health benefits of a plant-based diet, the environmental benefits are significant given that animal agriculture generates more global warming greenhouse gases than transportation and is a major source of land and water degradation (see links to multiple studies at www.cowspiracy.com/facts/ for more information). We also make every effort to buy organic produce and to support local, sustainable farmers.
Contact Us
Our hours are 9am-5pm PST, Monday thru Friday. Call us at 707.964.8123 or send us a message below.