Hi friends! This isn't the fun kind of post. No new painting, no fox or raccoon. Just an update about geopolitics and how it affects us at The Ugly Cat Studio and our customers.
What happened
On September 8, Canada's new counter-tariffs kicked in. One of the items on the list is printed pictures coming from the United States, at 50 per cent. That's the category our art prints fall under.
Here's the problem: Our framed prints are printed and framed by our partner studio in the US. They do beautiful work and we love working with them. Unfortunately the trade war the US waged on Canada has made things more difficult. As of this week, every print crossing the border into Canada will get hit with a 50 per cent surtax. We ship with duties prepaid, which means we'd be the ones absorbing it, and on a framed print that's not a number a two-person studio can sustain.
So here's what's changing
Framed prints are paused for Canadian addresses. If you're in Canada and you try to order a framed print right now, you won't be able to. I'm sorry! I hate this.
Unframed prints for Canada are still available, at the same prices. We’ll be printing in-house, as well as working with our studio partner in the UK. So nothing will cross the US-Canadian border on the way to you. You might notice a slightly slower transit time, but the print itself is the same archival quality we've always shipped.
Greeting cards are made here in Montreal and nothing changes there at all for them.
If you're in the US or anywhere else
Nothing changes for you. If you're in the US, framed and unframed prints ship exactly as before. If you're anywhere else in the world, framing was only ever available in the US and Canada, so your options are the same as they were last week.
The part that's really annoying
We're a Canadian studio. I paint every one of these in Montreal. I would love nothing more than to print and frame everything here, and we've been actively looking for Canadian printers and framers for a while now. Unframed is getting close. We've several shops and we are making progress.
Framing is harder. A studio that can handle printing, framing, and packaging, at high quality, and at a price we can sustain, is harder than it looks, and we haven’t gotten there yet. The logistics of framing and shipping are a lot more complicated than I ever could have imagined before starting the studio!
(If you are a company in Canada that does high quality giclée printing and has frames, please reach out to us! We’d love to hear from you!)
And honestly, let's call it what it is. Canada didn't start this. Donald Trump and his government picked a fight with their closest neighbour and biggest trading partner, and Canada's tariffs are a justifiable response, not the cause of our problem. It’s just unfortunate that a painting of a squirrel with a bagel has to be caught in the middle of the fight. And it hurts our partner studio too, who had no hand in starting this unjustified trade war, and who we had (and continue to have) a good working relationship with.
The people paying for all this are small businesses on both sides of the border and the customers who just wanted a nice print for their wall.
What's next
We keep testing. The moment we have a Canadian framing option we're happy with, or the geopolitical climate changes, framed prints will be back for Canada.
I'm hoping this is temporary in every sense of the word.
And once again, if you run a print/framing shop in Canada and you think you help us out, please get in touch. Seriously.
You can also sign up for our emails if you’d like to find out when we have an update on this.
Thanks for reading and for sticking with a small studio through a very weird week. 🧡
- Catherine