How a print publisher in Berlin sells editions in 38 countries without a warehouse.

Papercut Editions is a one-person print publishing operation based in Berlin. Lena runs it from a studio apartment and a small storage unit. She works with twelve artists per year, publishing three to five editions per artist — typically editions of twenty to fifty, priced between €80 and €600. The prints ship directly from a print studio in Wedding to collectors in thirty-eight countries.

There is no storefront. There is no warehouse staff. There is no bookkeeper. There is Lena, her artists, her printer, and Galexivo.

The business model requires exact tracking

Edition publishing is unforgiving about inventory accuracy. An edition of twenty-five has exactly twenty-five units. When number seventeen ships to a collector in São Paulo, the remaining eight are units eighteen through twenty-five — not approximately eight more. Artists want to know which numbers have sold. Collectors want certificates that correctly state the edition number. Galexivo users who are not publishers can get away with approximate inventory. Lena cannot.

Before Galexivo, she tracked everything in a Google Sheet with a tab per edition. Every sale required updating three places: the master sheet, the artist's tab, and the sales log. She was sending certificates by hand, generating invoices in a separate tool, and manually updating her Shopify store to reduce the inventory count. It was fine when she had six artists. At twelve artists with five editions each, it was becoming unmanageable.

Tracking editions with art objects

Galexivo's distinction between Artworks and Art Objects turned out to be exactly the right model for edition publishing. An edition of twenty-five prints is one Artwork with twenty-five Art Objects. Each Art Object has a number — 1/25, 2/25, through 25/25. When Lena sells number 17, she records a sale transaction on Art Object 17/25. The remaining objects are available. She can see at a glance which numbers have sold and which remain.

"I used to get asked 'which numbers are still available?' about three times a week. Now I just send them the link to the artwork page on my site. The available edition numbers are listed right there."

Artists can log into their Galexivo artist portal and see the status of every edition in real time. When an edition is close to selling out, they know without having to email Lena.

The online shop as the primary sales channel

Papercut's public Galexivo site is the only shop. There is no Instagram link-in-bio to a third-party shop, no Etsy, no Shopify. When a collector visits papercut-editions.galexivo.com (Lena's plan is to move to a custom domain this year), they see the current editions, each with its available count, price, and artist biography.

Stripe processes every payment. Lena receives the funds directly. Galexivo takes no transaction fee beyond the monthly subscription. The shop is available in English and German — Lena activated the auto-translation for German in the first week.

International shipping is the one piece that Galexivo does not handle directly. Lena manages this manually — she emails the print studio with a shipping label after each sale. "That's the piece I would most like automated. But everything else around it — the sale recording, the inventory update, the invoice, the certificate — is completely automatic."

Certificates of authenticity

Every edition sale generates a certificate of authenticity PDF automatically. The certificate includes the artist's name, work title, medium and dimensions, edition number, year, and a statement of authenticity. Lena can add the artist's signature image (scanned and uploaded once per artist) and her own. The certificate is emailed to the collector with the sale confirmation.

"Certificates used to be the most time-consuming part of a sale. I had a template in InDesign, I would fill it in by hand, export to PDF, save to Dropbox, email it. Now I don't think about it. It just happens."

Two years in

Lena started Papercut Editions four years ago. She moved to Galexivo two years ago, at the beginning of her third year. The years before Galexivo: 180 editions sold, twelve artists. The two years after: 410 editions sold, twenty-four artists (she publishes new cohorts each year).

She attributes the growth mostly to being able to take on more artists without the administrative overhead growing proportionally. "The ceiling before Galexivo was twelve artists because of the admin. I don't think I've hit the ceiling yet."

She still does the work that requires human judgment — selecting artists, working with them on the editions, handling collector relationships, deciding which prints to pursue. Everything else runs.