Papercraft is Growing (and it makes a good promotion too)

I've always loved building toys. I spent years building toys in my childhood and teen years. My brothers and I were very into papercraft - building paper toy models and objects with three dimensional designs. Our family did not have a lot of money, and we created most of our toys except for the ones we bought with our own money, and the few which we received at Christmas. My brothers and I thought we were unique in the creation of paper toys, but I've learned just in recent years that it is a fast growing worldwide hobby, which has in some ways exploded because of the advent of the internet and the color printer. Papercrafts can now be inexpensively downloaded and printed out, and some people seem to have created little side businesses actually selling the higher quality downloads. This is all very cool.

My favorite blog for monitoring the world of papercraft is Papercraft Paradise. It is a great aggregator of links from all over the world to new papercrafts, and a vibrant community of people who do this for a hobby. I've never used it, but there is a Japanese software called Pepakura which facilitates the conversion of a 3-D digital image to the parts of a papercraft model. From what I can tell, there is still quite a bit of skill which goes into producing a good design, but this tool is really helpful in creating good designs.

I've also learned that offering papercraft designs is growing in popularity as a business tool, and it is something free that a company can offer to generate website traffic and interest in their product. Canon, Yamaha and Nissan all seem to be getting in on this action.

American Promotions has not entered the business of offering 3-D papercraft printable models to it's promotional clients, and at this time, although it is a very interest field, I do not see us going there. However, there are other promotional building toys which we do offer, and hundreds more which we have access to.

I particularly like this Icon Stix and Stonz executive toy. You can logo the tin which goes with it. This Icon marble maze is also a neat promotion.