Show IH: PawSympathy — printable pet sympathy cards

I launched PawSympathy this month — printable pet sympathy cards designed for the quiet moment after a pet is gone.

The premise: nearly every sympathy card I could find for pet loss was either too cheerful ("they're in a better place 🌈") or too clinical ("with deepest condolences"). Nothing fit the strange weight of losing a pet. So I made cards that are tender without being sentimental. Never loud, never grim.

The build:

- Fully AI-driven illustration pipeline (every card is hand-laid-out but the artwork is AI-generated)

- Print-and-fold PDFs at true 300 DPI with a calibration grid for printer drift

- Both 5×7 and 4¼×5½ in every listing — fits any envelope

A few interesting bits if anyone's curious:

- The single hardest engineering problem was duplex printer drift: every home printer offsets the back side by 1–3 mm. Solved by shipping a calibration test sheet and a re-render flow that compensates for the customer-measured offset.

- ~$0 marketing budget — relying on Pinterest (still ramping), Etsy SEO (slow), and indie launches like this one.

Live at https://pawsympathy.com — also on Etsy.

Happy to answer anything about the stack, the print-and-fold problem, or the AI illustration pipeline.