About Us
Wild Ink Press is a little letterpress studio in Chico, up in northern California. We design and manufacture (made in our space from start to finish): witty and pretty greeting cards, stationery and other paper goods in our downtown shop renovated from an old soda bottling plant. We keep old printing machines and techniques alive, but liven them up with fresh artwork and zingy prose! Our paper goods are eco-produced from recycled stock and also 100% made in the USA (by us) for you.
Owner and designer Rebekah Tennis started Wild Ink Press in 2009, springing out of a desire to create a cherished, finished product. Rebekah has a BFA in Graphic Design, and after working both in a corporate design firm and as a freelance designer, while she loved her job, she found the nature of branding design to be a frustrating factor - Websites getting tweaked over and over, logos stretched out of proportion, with no finality to the work. She longed to create art that was both finished (forever!) and cherished. Hence, Wild Ink Press was born, to create beautiful paper goods that others would value and enjoy. Her husband Matt listened to her wild-haired ideas and they both took a series of letterpress classes at the San Francisco Center for the Book, then made the plunge and purchased a 1908 Chandler and Price Platen Press on eBay. That was what started it all!
When not designing and printing greeting cards, Rebekah and Matt can be found wrangling their three young boys, running a tractor on the family rice farm, or attempting to travel the world.
The company has grown and expanded over the years, and we now are a staff of seven, have a retail and printing space in downtown Chico where we still do just what we started at the beginning: design cards, print them on old presses, one ink at a time, and package them with care for you to give and receive.
We all know you came here to see the shiny letterpress beasts, right? Wild Ink Press uses six presses almost daily: our three Heidelberg Windmills - C3PO (the Shiny Guy), R2D2 (the one that fell over), and Alpha (our first), a Vandercook Universal III proof press (which could have been its own mortgage), and our original Chandler & Price and Golding Jobber 10 x 15 platen presses. The seventh is our Kelsey 5 x 8 hand press and we mostly use that for wee visitors to our shop.
We mix inks, by hand, one color at a time. On any given day, we can be found drawing, plating, printing, packaging and shipping cards. You can check out our Brick & Mortar store in Chico and pay us a visit to see our little shop in operation!