When we owned a business in the UK (and, ultimately, Ireland, France, Australia, and New Zealand), we printed a monthly newsletter and sent it out with our invoices. Our first newsletter was simply a one-sided, photocopied A4 piece of paper — but it ultimately grew to a four-page, full-color production written by our PR colleagues and designed by our graphic designer, all in-house. We printed and distributed 55,000 copies when we sent them to all retail outlets that used our Transax cheque guarantee services — a larger press run than some UK magazines at the time. We sold Transax to Equifax in 1996: our “retirement” gift from our colleagues at Transax was a complete collection of all the newsletters, leather-bound, with the Transax logo stamped in gold on the cover.
We didn’t think the much smaller Poi Company needed a newsletter (although we did produce a Poiboy parody of Playboy, complete with a real interview with the Governor). What we did instead was print a different poi-related cartoon at the top of every invoice — and we changed the cartoon each month. They were drawn for us by the talented Noel Ford in the United Kingdom: Noel did many of the cartoons in the Transax newsletter. Noel had an impressive career, and sadly passed away in 2019.
In his honor, and because we still think they are funny, here are the cartoons produced for each month’s Poi Company invoice:
