Greeting card company opens Nob Hill store
There’s a lot that goes into making the humble greeting card. For a customer, a greeting card’s journey starts in a shop and ends with a stamp.
But at greeting card company Next Chapter Studio, which opened a storefront this month at 109 Hermosa SE, the process looks a little different.
And Lauren Harms and Brian Gilbreath, owners of Next Chapter Studio, want you to be able to see the whole process. In fact, the storefront, which is connected to their warehouse and production facility, is connected by glass windows so customers can peek in on the process.
“I wanted it to feel kind of like a candy shop, you know, where you can see them making the candy in the back,” Harms said.
A candy shop is apt — the storefront practically glows, lit by a neon sign and fluorescent candy-hued cards. Behind the shop, thousands of cards, neatly stuffed into green envelopes, line the shelves.
The couple uses risograph printing to make their cards in-house. Invented in Japan in the 1980s, risograph printers became popular in churches and schools for printing programs, tests and flyers due to their high efficiency and long lifespan. The printing technique is known for its characteristic vivid colors.
But the process is rarely used to make greeting cards.
“(It) seemed like a way to share riso printing with a lot of people,” Harms said. “It’s becoming more familiar in the past couple years, but when I was first starting out, like, a lot of people hadn’t heard about it. But everyone loves the colors and they’re just really attracted to it. So I thought cards would be an affordable and easy way to spread that.”
Rosie and Ruby, Next Chapter’s risograph machines, hum along in the warehouse.
The process starts with uploading a digital design in black and white into the printer, which is burned onto a sheet of rice paper using a series of tiny holes. The rice paper “master print” is wrapped around a cylinder, known as a “drum”, which is filled with soy- and vegetable-based ink. The cylinder rolls across each sheet of paper at high speed, reproducing the master on hundreds of pieces of paper per minute. Each color is printed on top of the others, layered to make a complete design.
From there, Harms and Gilbreath cut the printed paper into cards, score the cards to get a neat line down the middle, fold the cards and stuff them into their signature green envelopes.
Harms, who has a background in graphic design, used to work as a book cover designer in the publishing industry in New York. In 2017, she took a printing class and fell in love with art.
Harms said she and Gilbreath “fell into” the greeting card business in 2018, printing and selling cards out of their Brooklyn apartment. In 2020, the couple moved to Albuquerque, and brought their business with them.
Harms and Gilbreath’s work might seem familiar; that’s because their cards are sold at several Albuquerque businesses already, including Flyby Provisions and Luna & Luz — as well as more than 300 shops around the country. The pair have designed and produced cards for even larger companies like Google and TJ Maxx.
The couple makes all of their designs using just 12 colors. Each “drum” can only hold one ink color, and the drums are the most expensive part of the risograph process, costing about $1,000 each. But using different ink intensities, the colors can be blended together into a gradient.
“I get most excited about the color and the color combinations, and when other people respond to it,” Harms, who’s partial to the fluorescent pink ink, said. “That’s what makes it all worth it — my favorite designs are usually the more simple ones.”
When Gilbreath and Harms first started printing, they used just six colors. But they’ve doubled that number, and even expanded into making notebooks and calendars as well as cards and posters.
“I think Lauren’s pushing the boundaries of what riso can do,” Gilbreath said.
Sueños Coffee Co. opens second location
Alvaro “Al” Hernandez grew up drinking instant coffee.
But when a friend made him his first espresso, Al Hernandez was hooked. The day after that first drip, he bought his own espresso machine.
“I’ve always just been an instant coffee kind of guy,” Al Hernandez said. “That’s what we grew up with in our Mexican household … but he introduced me to espresso once and I fell in love with it.”
But it took an extra push for Al Hernandez and his wife, Norma Hernandez, to turn that love into a business; seeing their daughter open her own business in 2020 pushed the couple to
open Sueños Coffee Co. in 2022. A second brickand-mortar location opened last week within the Downtown Nusenda Credit Union campus at 101 Broadway NE.
Before opening Sueños, named for the street where the Hernandezes bought their first house, Al Hernandez worked in sales and Norma Hernandez worked in the medical field as an interpreter. But neither had run their own business until they started working with their oldest daughter, Genesis, to share her love of baking via food truck.
The word sueños “can have two meanings, you know,” Norma Hernandez said. “Our coffee hopefully gets rid of your sleepiness, your sueños, but then also, we’re just trying to follow our dreams — and we finally realized the dream of buying a home.”
Genesis Hernandez started selling baked goods out of their house during the pandemic. At the time, she was just 12. The home business soon turned into a food truck, Sugar N Glitz.
And what goes better with pastries than a cup of coffee?
“I started learning more about the coffee game, and I honestly just kind of tagged along with them,” Al Hernandez said. “... Who doesn’t love a good cup of coffee with their pastries?”
For a while, the Hernandez family sold coffee alongside Genesis’s pastries at the Sugar N Glitz trailer. But in early 2022, the couple decided to launch a separate coffee truck, and Sueños Coffee Co., which sets up shop at markets and events around the city, was born. In fall 2022, the family opened their first brick-and-mortar establishment, Sueños Coffee, Pastries and More, in Rio Rancho, primarily as a commercial kitchen for Genesis’s pastries, but with a small coffee storefront for customers. Genesis recently taught a kids cooking class at the Rio Rancho spot.
The business is family run: Genesis, now 14, is joined by her barista brother Elijah, 13 at the Downtown location. Al Hernandez said even 6-year-old Olivia sometimes likes to help at the register.
And more growth is on the horizon, Al Hernandez said. His goal is to start roasting coffee beans in-house, and ultimately to start franchising Sueños trailers and coffee shops around the state – and beyond.
“There’s no quit in us, I will say that,” Al Hernandez said.
The Downtown location is open Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
While the Hernandez family gets the Downtown location up and running, the Rio Rancho location will be open for reduced days and hours, open Monday through Wednesday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Mexican restaurant Los Pookies opens
Luis Dominguez is a lifelong entrepreneur.
At 15, he started his first business. By 20, he had opened his first food truck. And now, at 23, he’s opening a full service Mexican restaurant at 5614 Menaul NE, formerly home to beloved ramen restaurant Magokoro.
Dominguez was inspired to open his food truck, Los Pookies, during the pandemic. He’d been working as a manager at Walmart, and decided that, with many traditional restaurants shutting down, it was the perfect time to open a food truck — while simultaneously attending the University of New Mexico, graduating in 2022.
“I knew restaurants were closing,” Dominguez said. “And I’ve always loved cooking … A food truck, that’s not a restaurant so people can get take-out food.”
Over the past three years, Los Pookies has become known for its birria, an adobo-marinated meat, typically goat, that is cooked in the red sauce until it starts to fall apart.
“I love making birria because you can kind of play with it and the different spices and … put your own little touches to it,” Dominguez said.
The menu also includes items like fajitas, pizza and sopes. But birria is the star.
“I love feeding people,” Dominguez said. “I love seeing people love my food.”
The restaurant had its soft opening on Feb. 24, and will have its grand opening on Feb. 27. Los Pookies will be open seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
5.11 Tactical Gear opens new location
Albuquerque residents now have a new place to buy outdoor clothing, uniforms and tactical gear.
5.11 Tactical Gear, a California-founded retail shop geared toward members of the military and law enforcement, had the grand opening for its second Albuquerque location this weekend.
The new Cottonwood location, at 10260 Coors Bypass NW, joins the brand’s first location at 4900 Cutler NE.