Creative Shapes Etc.
The original die-cut notepad company — cut-outs, charts and notepads made in Rochester, New York
🇺🇸 Made in USA
Our assessment
Company details
Where Creative Shapes Etc. products are made
Creative Shapes Etc. has been in the die-cut business for over forty years. A die-cut shape is a tooling problem before it is a paper problem: the die has to be made, mounted and maintained, and that capital sits in Rochester rather than in a sourcing agent’s catalogue.
The company’s origin claim is not a banner. It is written into individual product descriptions — cut-outs made in the USA with quality you can count on, incentive charts made from heavy tag board and made in the USA — which is where a claim has to live before it means anything.
Cut-outs in three sizes, foam and paper, neon and single colour; sticky-shape notepads; progress pads; bookmarks; stamps. The catalogue is broad and shallow rather than narrow and deep, which is what short-run domestic tooling makes possible and long overseas lead times do not.
The Rochester, New York address and the 1984 date are published by Creative Shapes Etc. on its own site — the date in its site masthead, the address on its About and Contact pages. The origin claim was verified by reading the company’s own product descriptions across multiple product families rather than accepting a single site-wide banner.
The story
Creative Shapes Etc. calls itself the original die-cut notepad company, and has been cutting shapes out of paper and foam in Rochester, New York since 1984.
The products are the small things that cover a classroom wall: butterflies and frogs and trains and fish, incentive charts, progress pads, bookmarks, stamps for marking work. Individually they are inexpensive. Collectively they are the visual language of a primary school.
The company is the manufacturer of the SHAPES ETC. brand rather than a licensor or an importer of it, which is a distinction worth making in a category where a great deal of school supply is bought as a container-load and relabelled.
It is also a company that answers its own customers. Its published replies to reviews are signed by the company and describe it, in its own words, as a small, one hundred per cent made in the USA operation — the kind of sentence a business only writes when it can stand behind it.
Why they matter
School and craft supply is a category that went overseas almost completely and quietly. Nobody campaigned about die-cut paper shapes. That makes a forty-year-old domestic die-cutter unusual rather than ordinary.
Die-cutting is also genuinely capital-intensive work. The tooling, the presses and the people who set them are fixed in Rochester, and short domestic runs are what let a catalogue carry hundreds of designs in small quantities instead of a handful of designs in shipping containers.
For teachers, parents and church volunteers who buy this material by the armful every autumn, Creative Shapes Etc. is one of the few places in the category where the origin question has a plain answer.
Shop Creative Shapes Etc. products
Browse SHAPES ETC. cut-outs, notepads, charts and classroom supplies stocked on the Buy American Campaign store.
Shop all Creative Shapes Etc. products →Visit Creative Shapes Etc. website →
Frequently asked questions
Are Creative Shapes Etc. products made in the USA?
Yes. Made-in-USA wording appears on more than 130 items across the company’s catalogue, spanning cut-outs, incentive charts, designer paper, notepads, bookmarks and stamps, and the company describes itself as a one hundred per cent made in the USA operation.
Where is Creative Shapes Etc. located?
Creative Shapes Etc., 1322 Buffalo Rd, Rochester, New York 14624.
When was Creative Shapes Etc. founded?
1984. The company’s own site describes it as the original die-cut notepad company, since 1984, and says it has been in the die-cut business for over forty years.
What is the difference between Creative Shapes Etc. and SHAPES ETC.?
Creative Shapes Etc. is the company. SHAPES ETC. is its brand — the company describes itself as the manufacturer, distributor and producer of that brand.