By Liz Stevens, writer, PostPress
Marc Friedland Couture Communications, Los Angeles, California, recently was awarded Silver for Best Use of Refractive Foil (Micro-Etched) in the 2025 FSEA Gold Leaf Awards. The company was started 39 years ago and has designed and produced Hollywood’s Oscar® envelopes for seven years, as well as 2025’s Golden Globe invitations and winners’ envelopes.
The Gold Leaf Award entry, the Shining Star Collection (one of the company’s first entries into the FSEA competition), is a set of five luxurious oversized square note cards, envelopes and a square pillow box for packaging. The elegant cards each feature a sculpted, embossed, five-point star in gold foil, each with a different micro-etched refractive pattern.
The five different star designs and their embossing include concentric circle ribbing in two shades of gold plus fold marks on the star’s spine, a pebble-textured wavy design in four shades of gold with fold marks on the star’s spine, overlapping confetti circles in shades of gold, an emanating ray design in shades of gold, and a geometric-shape collage design in shades of gold. The white pillow box features text in a beautiful, fine gold script font and a black ribbon. PostPress talked with founder and creative director Marc Friedland about the ins and outs of this project.
Friedland explained the origin of the project and the inspiration for the collection. “The Shining Star collection originally was created as a gift set that I developed as part of my role with Forbes Travel Guide,” he said. “Forbes Travel Guide is the organization responsible for rating world-class hotels, resorts and spas around the globe. Their top rating is five stars! As their official luxury communications consultant, I wanted to gift the attendees of the Forbes Travel Guide Summit something unique and special that embodied the excellence and luxury, symbolic of the Forbes’ five-star properties.”
For this collection, Friedland chose Mohawk paper stock. “All of our products in this product range are bold, simple graphic symbols that are foiled and embossed,” said Friedland. “It’s part of a series. To capture the modern elegance of these designs, our stock paper is Mohawk 130# Superfine, smooth, ultra white. We created custom envelopes as well with Mohawk, 100# text, Superfine.”
The graphics for the series were designed in Illustrator by the company’s art department. “The graphics are rather uncomplicated,” said Friedland, “however, it is the various production techniques that transform the design into communication art. The specialty effects of the Shining Stars were the type of dies we created for the piece. They include a sculpted brass die. We consider the brass pocket dies and the micro-etched foil dies to be the ‘stars’ in this piece.” The engravings were supplied by Dreyer Kliché.
The cards, envelopes and pillow packs all were produced in-house on Kluge presses. “All hand labor used for the meticulous assembly of the pillow packs also was handled in-house with our dedicated production team,” said Friedland. No additional materials were utilized, except a velvet ribbon handle used on the pillow pack packaging.
Friedland noted that producing the cards with very precise registration was a key element of the project. “Since we created five different patterns for the stars,” he said, “the biggest challenge was registration. Through the innovative use of a brass pocket die, we were able to ensure perfect registration between the five different foil dies and the sculpted emboss, allowing us to do only one set-up.”
The luxurious gift sets were a smashing success. “We created several hundred sets, and attendees to the Forbes Travel Guide Summit loved the gift,” said Friedland. “Not only did this celebrate their hard-earned accomplishments of creating five-star properties, it also provided a way for general managers and staff to acknowledge and celebrate VIP clients as well as internal staff who merited their own ‘rock-star’ status.”
For more information, visit www.marcfriedland.com or www.marcshop.com.