How everything began ....

Andrea worked in a cinema a long time ago and like those little admission tickets so much that she collected them. Christian started wondering if it would not be an interesting idea to print something different on it than „Theatre 1“. When we were invited to attend an outdoor art&handicraft festival in Bensheim, close to Frankfurt a.M. we decide to bring our Lucky Tickets to life. So the story of our "Wertmarken fürs Leben" (lit. "tokens for life") began.

„Ooh!“ and „Aah!“ in south Germany

So one weekend we stood in a little stall at the Bensheim art&handicraft festival, with us the first edition of our Lucky Tickets, decorated on old fruit crates and donned with handwritten price tags. The feedback came across clear: "Wow, you sell LUCK off the roll?" "What a sweet idea!" or "I never saw something like these before..." And those were just some of the reactions. Soon the stall was surrounded by giggling, grubbing, excited people. Our Lucky Tickets rolls of 100 – wound up by hand by that time – as well as the singles tickets were so well loved that after two days only a small rest of our first edition was left. This told us: We were on the right track with our idea.

Continue or not?

Buoyed by this first weekend appearing as FEINE BILLETTERIE we asked ourselves if we should remember it as a unique experience or if we should try to develop the idea. We launched the first small website and printed the second edition. In addition we sent some Lucky Tickets rolls out to magazines and bloggers within the DIY scene.

A blog post that changed a lot

In a blog post, read by a huge amount of followers, a friend, who received a roll of LUCK as a wedding present, wrote "This might be one of the cutest thing I ever saw!" and posted a picture of the pink LUCK roll. In that night we received about 50 e-mails, asking where to get those Lucky Tickets. Shortly after pictures of our Lucky Tickets were published in big women's magazines – among them BRIGITTE, FREUNDIN – and other blogs. Suddenly we were famous and "in" but at the same time had the dilemma to not have a real online shop, good packaging materials and never enough stamps ... In many night shifts we plugged on because the wave of sympathy reaching us was so overwhelming that there was just no alternative.








A lovely "family" producing together

Together with our printing shop, an amicable workshop for the handicapped and many friends that helped us, the FEINE BILLETTERIE arose to what it is now. The colored ribbons for the rolls came from a affiliated handicraft girl, we selected suiting little cartonages and wrapping paper and started to visit design and handicraft markets regularily. We also got to know people that helped us, bringing our Lucky Tickets into nice gift and papeterie shops. Then DaWanda knocked and asked if we'd be interested to open up a shop for the Wertmaken fürs Leben – we said yes, of course. By now we're a well-honed team, withstood the inquiry of a big gift distributor, though, who wanted to merchandise our Lucky Tickets on a grand scale.

Copycats beware

Of course it didn't take long until some people started to think "Well, when they can do it, we can do it!". From big scale wholesale dealers to small scale handicraft ladies a variety of copycats tried to print piratic editions of our motifs, sell edited photographs of them collage and reprint them on postcards, or in other ways tinker with our Lucky Tickets. All of our ticket though are proprietary protected and in some of those cases we had no choice but to bring our lawyer in to stop the most audacious attempts. On the other hand there were and are some wonderful and successful cooperations that we realized with nice people who liked our idea and had the decency to work together with us.

And so it goes ...

Starting our first edition with 10 different designs we offer more than 80 products today. By now beside our many german motifs, english, swedish and norwegian tickets are available, too. We also offer convenient sorted and hand-packed ticket sets, limited editions and special tickets like our blank edition. Our website and online shop are bilingual german and english by now and we ship abroad regularily. Still we design new tickets from time to time, stay in contact with commercial billett producers and realize new ideas when they come to mind. But like in old times in the evening – after work – we sit at home, packing orders and writing letters and mails to our Lucky Tickets' fans. We'll not get rich with this business BUT every now and then we use the earnings to contribute to our traveling (a thing we love even more than our Lucky Tickets). This and the fact that we found a small likeable niche with a positive product incite us to carry on. Our special thanks for this go out to our fans, friends and partners.