This shop announcement is long, but please read it. It should cover most of your questions.
Our most important things to know:
1. UPDATE: Orders placed 2/28/26 8:00 AM (EST) and after: Due to an influx of orders for our Etsy stores, it may take up to a full 10 *business days* for your order to be prepped, printed, trimmed, and ready to ship. This does *not* include weekends nor does this include the time it takes for USPS or UPS to deliver your order. We will do our best to get it out sooner than the last "ship by" date. We print to order and try to stick to the sequence of when an order is received. To be fair to all of our customers, as a rule we cannot honor requests to bump your order up ahead of other customers’ orders.
Even if you have upgraded the shipping to express at check out, that is only for the shipping method. It does NOT expedite the printing of your order. Nor do we guarantee your order will arrive before a certain date since we do not control USPS or UPS.
2. If your shipping address is a PO Box, Alaska, Hawaii, remote locations (e.g. Port Roberts, WA) or APO/FPO/DPO and you are looking to purchase a map reprint or any reprint/print that is —16x16 or larger, you *must* select the USPS Priority Mail shopping option at checkout. We CANNOT ship via UPS for those locations. Otherwise, we will choose one of two options: a) ship your via the post office office’s Ground advantage or b) cancel your order. We don’t like having to do that, but it is unaffordable for us to ship a $43.00 order to Alaska that will cost us $58.00 in shipping.
Many of our other orders will go via UPS *except* for dictionary prints and the smaller prints (e.g. 8x8", 10x10", 11x14) these are usually shipped via USPS Ground Advantage.
(Please note: USPS/Post Office is being notoriously slow and as much as we'd like to make them go faster, we can't control or guarantee that your order will be deliver before Christmas).
3. If you are choosing the express mail shipping upgrade, it is only for the express shipping. It does NOT cover the time for us to print your order. To reiterate the last sentence in item 1: To be fair to all of our customers, as a rule we cannot honor requests to bump your order up ahead of others. We ask for your patience, please.
4. If your order came in a shipping tube (anything over 11x14"), please remove your order from the shipping tube soon as possible. This helps aid the print in flattening itself before placing it into the frame(s). The longer your order stays in the tube, the longer it takes for your print to flatten. If needed, place a clean sheet of (kraft) paper above and below your print (covering all of it) and carefully place books on the corners and edges.
And this next sub-point is VERY, VERY important
Additionally, We wrap all prints in Kraft paper that are being sent in a tube. This is meant to protect the print and keep it clean. On the Kraft paper, there are removable white stickers to keep the kraft paper wrap and your print from unraveling/expanding during transit. You'll want to gently remove the stickers completely from the kraft paper before unwrapping the print.
5. Please, please, please check your shipping address before finalizing your order! This will help prevent mis-deliveries!
6. We absolutely do not sell digital downloads.
7. We no longer take custom order requests.
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Other policies and good to know info:
We do all of our own printing, and we do not print stuff ahead of time since we cannot anticipate what a customer will order. Very large/multi-piece map reprint (especially the inverted blue and inverted black versions which take longer to dry) take longer since we have dedicate a lot of space for the order to dry. While on the topic of inverted blue and inverted black versions of our reprints: inverted black/blue versions, which as the naming implies, inverts the lighter portions of the original version of the reprint and darkens them in shades of black/blue and turning darker areas to white. After receiving a map that is an inverted black (and some of the inverted blue versions of our reprints) before it is framed, one must handle it with care and touch it with very clean hands, or better yet with soft cotton gloves.
Also: care should be exercised when removing the print from the shipping tube. Besides wrapping the print in Kraft paper, we also include some small bubble wrap to both ends to protect the print as it settles in the tube during shipping. Buyers should slowly/carefully remove the bubble wrap *first* instead pulling the bubble wrap and the print at the same time.
Additionally, if there are problems with your order, please contact us here on Etsy within 7 days of your order being delivered. All orders are considered final after 14 days of your order being delivered.
Other notes:
Orders going via UPS, are shipped Monday through Friday only. Orders going via USPS, may include Saturday shipping. Whether your order ships via USPS Priority Mail or UPS depending on the size of item purchased and the delivery location. we provide the Tracking number when we mark an order shipped.
2a. To avoid any shipping delays or mis-deliveries, please, please, please check your shipping address prior to finalizing your order. Also, please check your sales receipt from Etsy. The shipping address Etsy gives us for your order is where we will ship it to. If you need to change the shipping address and were not able to change it prior to paying, please send us a convo/message here on Etsy as soon as you can. Sometimes, Etsy does provide us with an out-of-date shipping address. We will also contact you if we are pretty certain if an address seems incomplete.
2b. If your order has already been shipped and you find the shipping address on your sales receipt is incorrect:
Via USPS, you will need to file a mail intercept with the post office’s website: https://www.usps.com/manage/package-intercept.htm
We are not able to do this on your behalf since we are the sender, not the recipient.
Via UPS, you will need to update the delivery instructions here:
https://www.ups.com/us/en/track/change-delivery?.
We are not able to do this on your behalf since we are the sender, not the recipient.
Believe us, we found this out when we tried to intervene on the behalf of customers who did not alert us until after the order already shipped. Both outfits have told us to have the customer do the update, not us.
3. All of our prints are *made to order*. We try to print in the sequence of when we receive our orders from our two stores. We work as quickly as possible since we take pride in keeping our customers as happy as we humanly can. However, to be fair to all of our customers, we cannot honor any requests to "bump up" an order. We cannot repeat that enough.
4.A. Additionally, please double-check the size (and color version, if applicable) of the print you are buying. No trimming should be need for your frame. Please make sure you absolutely love the size and color/design of the print that you purchase prior to completing your order. Returns and exchanges are not accepted except for USPS/UPS delivery damage or lost/stolen items (see our shop policies for more details) or if we made an error in what we sent. Please contact us immediately, if your item arrived damaged. You'll also need to take several photos, showing the item, with the original bubble wrap (that we use to help protect the ends) still inside.
4B. Due to the nature of map reprints and all of our other printed items, we do not restock prints that have already been shipped to another customer. As a courtesy to all of our buyers and to ensure quality assurance, you will always receive a brand new print and never a previously returned item.
4C. Due to differences in monitor/phone brands it is possible that a customer's monitor/phone might display the prints differently, but generally the differences are minimal and we make sure our prints when printed match our Apple iMac's monitor. We can't accept returns or make exchanges due to this. (If it is because we sent the wrong color version, we obviously will correct our mistake)
4D. It should also be noted for our map reprints and other vintage reprints, we do not change/update any place names that may be misspelled, under a different name compared to today, or were not yet in existence when the original map was made. This would be beyond our control and as such, we will not honor any requests to issue refunds or returns due to this issue.
5. None of our prints are sold with frame(s). We do Etsy of our small house; so, we aren't able to offer framed/matted prints, but we do recommend checking your local art/craft supply store and/or the following websites: www.craigframes.com and arttoframe.com. Craig Frames also has an Etsy storefront! We are not affiliated with either website, but we list them here based on other customers’ feedback. Check them out.
6. If your order came in a shipping tube (anything over 11x14"), please remove your order from the shipping tube soon as possible. This helps aid the print in flattening itself before placing it into the frame(s). The longer your order stays in the tube, the longer it takes for your print to flatten. If needed, place a clean sheet of (kraft) paper above and below your print (covering all of it) and carefully place books on the corners and edges.
7. Also, while we fully appreciate shoppers choosing another Etsy store for an item that is similar, we do *not* do price-matching (pre-sale or retroactively). This is for a few reasons: 1. The paper they use may of a thinner/poor quality. 2. There are plenty of stores on Etsy that present themselves as small businesses; but in reality, they mass produce everything they sell because they are actually part of a much larger business entity. We're a mom-and-pop business based here in the Cleveland, Ohio area. Additionally, we do NOT retroactively apply sales discounts on orders purchased prior to any sales we hold.
8. CANCELLATIONS/Size or Color changes:
Cancellations (for a full refund) are accepted, as long as they are requested within *4 hours* of placing your order. The policy exists for you to change the size and/or color selected. We have this policy in effect because once we have started printing your order, it may be too late to change/modify and there cost/storage factors to consider if we have finished printing an order for a customer to come back 12-18 hours later to cancel or make a modification.
9. LATE ARRIVING ORDERS: Unfortunately, we are not able to give or promise you a delivery date since we can't control how quickly an order is delivered once it leaves our hands. We do not give refunds for an order arriving late because we cannot control UPS/USPS delivery delays.
10. If you have not received your order within 7-10 business days of us shipping your order, we strongly encourage you to call USPS/UPS (depending on how your order was shipped). If we shipped via USPS, please call your local post office's phone number rather than the 1-800 number is quite busy. (Please let us know as well in case you need our contact info, especially when opening a missing mail case..see below.)
To find the phone number for your local post office, conduct a search of the closet post office for your zip code on USPS.com:
https://tools.usps.com/locations/
The search results kind of hides the local post office's phone number below the street address and the 1-800 number when you expand the details. If you are not able to speak to a human on the local number, dropping by your local post office is *very* effective. Quite often, we have found when customers have gone into their local post office to complain, the order shows up shortly after that.
We also recommend opening a missing mail case with the Post Office at:
https://www.usps.com/help/missing-mail.htm
10. We reserve the right to contact you before printing to verify the size and color (if applicable) of the print(s) you have ordered as well as your shipping address. This is meant to help you receive exactly what you intended to order and to avoid delivery delays.
If you still have further questions, don't hesitate to send us a convo.
Thanks, Xiaojing & J
Many of our prints feature watercolors. I have about 300 abstract watercolor shapes that are digitized and modified...
and then used to make various city skyline watercolor prints.
We print to order. We let the prints dry overnight before trimming and preparing them for mail.
We've also scanned maps that we own. With our map reprints, we try to improve on the original while keeping its charm.
This 1915 Los Angeles map reprint is drying and waiting to be mailed. We use an Epson P8000 for our map reprints.
