Legendary fashion designer Sabina Savage, whose silk scarf designs are built from dense pencil drawings of tigers, chrysanthemums and coiling dragons, had a new collection book finished and needed printed copies back "by next Friday at the absolute latest". Mike replied at 11:26: send the artwork over and we will deliver before then. By 13:45 the files were in, the proof was approved and the invoice paid, and Sabina had written the line we have quietly framed since: "Mike, I've said it before and I'll say it again, you are the best! Thank you."
Softest Song is the AW26 book, and it follows a formula Sabina has refined across a run of seasonal titles we have printed for her over the past decade from The Naturalist's Handbook to Escape Into Edo. It is A5, perfect bound, 48 inside pages, and it is an inspiration showcase as much as a catalogue: the studio moodboard photographed across a spread, a pencil tiger on the title page, chrysanthemums and a feathered wing drawn stroke by stroke, then the finished scarves, Chasing the Pearl in cinnabar and lacquer with its two twining dragons, and the ribbon scarves lined up in a row with their colourways. The cover is a pale sage green with a column of red seal stamps running down the spine edge, so on a shelf the spine reads as a strip of stamps. It is the winning style for a fashion collection book, and an A5 perfect-bound book of 40 to 100 pages is also one of the formats we print most.
Everything here is uncoated. The cover is 300gsm uncoated board with a matt lamination; the pages are 170gsm uncoated. An uncoated cover feels crisper in the hand than silk, with a dry, papery surface that the lamination protects without turning slick, and it suits pencil drawing in a way a coated board never quite does. The 170gsm text pages feel more substantial than the thinner silk in most lookbooks, which is what you want when the book is doing the job of a luxury object rather than a leaflet. The honest trade-off is that a heavier uncoated block springs shut: this is not a book that lies open on its own, and we would rather tell you that than pretend. For a book that will be handed across a showroom table, opened, admired and closed, it is the right call.
Look closely at the pages and you will notice they are not quite white. A subtle off-white tint has been printed as a bed behind every page, taking the edge off the sharpness of the bright white sheet so the pencil work sits on something closer to drawing paper. It is a designer's trick worth borrowing: you get the warmth of a cream stock without changing the paper, the tint can be tuned to the collection, and on a four-colour job it costs nothing extra because the page is going through the press anyway. The fine detail on the chrysanthemum spread shows how well 170gsm uncoated holds hairline pencil work; every petal edge and every feather barb survives.
Sabina asked on the Thursday whether a morning delivery was possible, and we had the parcel relabelled for a pre-12 drop while it was already packed and waiting for the courier. "Amazing news, thank you," she wrote. "Hopefully they'll help us sell lots of new designs!" If you want the back story, her earlier collection lookbooks follow the same spec.
If you have a collection to show and a showroom date to hit, get an instant price for lookbook printing at exwhyzed.com, or tell Harriet and Mike the deadline and let us work backwards from it.
