Tracy Burtt, owner of The Treasure Box Club, sent me two of her recent kits and asked me to review them on Paperclipping.com. If you are a regular attendee of Paperclipping Live, then you’ve already seen me pull out and share all the items of the kits.
Here are the layouts I made with products from each of the kit. You can see them more detail by clicking here.
A Great Scrapbooking Kit Should Have Added Value Above Other Scrapbook Sources
What makes you decide to buy a kit when there are so many venues competing for your business? Added value.
Here are some examples of added value a kit could offer and how The Treasure Box Club Kit stacks up:
1. Unique items from outside of the scrapbooking industry. Gorgeous fabric. Vintage stuff. Foreign papers. Hand-made items.
The Treasure Box Club kits had some cool stuff, like game spinners from Tim Holtz and a great time-related transparency from Creative Imaginations. But there was nothing unusual in these kits. Everything was from within the scrapbooking industry, which may or may not be a big concern for many of us.
2. Financial savings. The items may be available in my local store, but if I can get it for less money by being in a club, then it might be worth it.
This is one of the biggest reasons to buy kits from The Treasure Box Club. The papers come in bulk from just one or two companies so you get a lot of stuff for a lower price than what most kits go for.
You’re also going to save money with this kit if you have Quickutz. The Treasure Box Club offers exclusive discounts on fonts and shapes each month that coordinate with the kits’ themes.
3. Unique combination of products. Sometimes a designer surprises me with their combination choices and I want to try that choice on myself. This is the highlight of many kit clubs.
I was really surprised to see that the patterned papers in the Treasure Box Club are all from just one or two companies–even from the same line. In the birthday-themed kit, there were five or so pieces of polka-dot papers. They were the exact same patterns, but in different colors. That part was disappointing for me. At least they were two-sided papers, though, so that helped with the variety.
I found out that it is because the kits use bulk packages from one or two lines that the kits are so much less expensive than others. It’s one of the rare kits that is priced at less than retail. So I guess there is some give-and-take. Which is more important to you? Variety of lines and patterns or the cost?
4. Scrapbooking support or inspiration. The support can be through challenges, an online community, or instruction.
The Treasure Club Kit offers samples and instructions for what you can do with your kit. In fact, with each kit, you will get 26 pages worth of directions on how to make either twenty 8×8 pages or three 2-page layouts. For this reason, and because the papers are from coordinated lines and are easy to match, I think this kit is perfect for scrapbookers who struggle to come up with their own designs.
If you don’t like to copy someone else’s designs, then it is really a matter of whether you like the types of products they carry–they pick good stuff, in my opinion–and whether you’re more interested in savings, unique items or combinations, and online community challenges, as opposed to instruction.
Flexibility
If you think this kit is what you’re looking for, there is one other benefit that I really like. It has a flexible system. If you don’t like one of the kits, you can opt out and skip that month. And, you don’t have to commit to buying a certain amount of kits to get the discounted price. You can cancel any time, rather than commit to a three-month or six-month deal.
While this probably isn’t the idea kit club for myself, I’ll say again that I think it is a no-brainer for people who like their patterns strongly coordinated and who like help with designs. If you’re interested in seeing more, you can click here to go to their website.
