Fridge Magnets in Los Angeles: Thickness, Shape and the Stainless Steel Problem

The refrigerator door is the last piece of advertising space in a house that nobody clears out. A flyer goes in the recycling the day it arrives, a business card goes in a drawer, an email gets archived in four seconds. A magnet with a phone number on it sits at eye level in the kitchen for years, and it gets read on exactly the day something breaks. That is why plumbers, HVAC contractors, locksmiths, pediatric dentists, pizza places and property managers keep ordering them, and why we print a steady stream of them at the shop on Lankershim. It is also a product with two or three ways to get it wrong that are not obvious until the box is already on your desk.

What a printed fridge magnet actually is

It is a sheet of flexible magnetic material — ferrite powder bound in a rubber or vinyl matrix — with a printable white face laminated to one side. The magnetism is not a coating; it runs through the whole sheet, which is why you can cut it to any shape and every piece still holds. The back is usually brown or grey and slightly matte, and it is magnetized in narrow parallel strips, which is the reason two magnets stick to each other hard in one orientation and slide apart in the other.

Our fridge magnets start at $115.63, and the default run is 100 pieces at $1.16 each. That per-piece number is the one worth holding onto, because it is the whole argument for the product. A postcard costs less to make and gets thrown away the same week. A magnet costs a bit more than a dollar and stays in the kitchen through a change of address.

Thickness, and the pull test

Magnetic sheet is sold by thickness in mils — thousandths of an inch. The common range for printed magnets is roughly 17 to 30 mil. Thin stock is cheaper and it will hold itself to a fridge and nothing else. Thicker stock has noticeably more pull, lies flatter, resists curling, and feels like an object rather than a printed sticker.

The practical test is whether the magnet still holds when something is under it. A magnet that grips bare steel but slides down the door the moment you put a school schedule, a receipt and a takeout menu underneath has failed at the one job it had. If the whole point of your magnet is that it pins the soccer calendar to the fridge for a season, tell us and we will put you on heavier stock. If it is a giveaway at a street fair and it only ever holds itself, thinner is fine and cheaper.

One more thing about thickness: magnetic sheet has memory. Shipped and stored flat it stays flat. Rolled, or left in a hot car in the Valley in August, it takes a curl that never fully comes out, and a curled magnet holds along a fraction of its surface. Keep the box flat and out of the sun.

The stainless steel problem

This is the failure we get calls about, and it has nothing to do with the printing. A large share of the refrigerators sold in the last fifteen years — the ones with the brushed stainless doors that every remodeled kitchen in Los Angeles has — are made from austenitic stainless, and austenitic stainless is not magnetic. Your magnet will slide straight off the door. It usually still sticks to the side panel, which is often plain painted steel, and to the freezer door on some models, but the front face is dead.

You cannot fix that with a stronger magnet, and there is no printing choice that changes it. What you can do is plan for it. Design the magnet so it also works on a filing cabinet, a metal door frame, a tool box, a whiteboard or an office server rack, which is where a lot of contractor magnets actually end up. Consider a smaller format that fits on a side panel. And if you are handing them out in person, expect to hear about it, so have an answer ready rather than being surprised.

Shape: rectangle, round, or cut to the outline

The default is a rectangle with rounded corners, and there is a reason rounded corners are standard rather than decorative — square corners on flexible sheet are the first thing to lift, catch and peel the laminate. A business-card-sized rectangle is the cheapest thing to produce and the easiest to slip into a mailer.

Round and oval read differently. They stand out on a door covered in rectangular paper, and they suit a logo that is already circular — a badge, a seal, a plate of food, a wheel. Circle and oval magnets start at $130.63, with a default run of 100 at $1.31 each. The cost difference over a rectangle is small; the difference in whether the thing gets noticed on a crowded fridge is not.

Full custom outlines — the shape of a house, a truck, a tooth, a taco — are the strongest version of this, and they are also the version with a rule attached. Keep the outline chunky. Narrow protrusions in flexible magnetic sheet are weak points: they bend, they lose contact with the door, and they tear. A cartoon house with a thin chimney is fine. A logo with a wire-thin antenna sticking out of the top is going to arrive damaged or break in a pocket.

Designing for arm's length

A fridge magnet is read from four to eight feet away by someone who is not looking for it. That changes the layout from a business card, even at the same size.

One message. Not your tagline and your services list and your three locations. What you do, in two or three words, and how to reach you. The phone number should be the largest text on the piece, larger than the logo, set in a face with open counters — a condensed geometric sans at small size turns 3, 8 and 6 into the same shape from across the room. Put the area code in. Nobody in Los Angeles assumes 818.

Leave one bit of usable white space if you can. A magnet with a blank strip where somebody can write an account number, an appointment date or the last service date in ballpoint gets kept for a reason beyond your logo. That works only on a matte or satin finish — ink beads and smears on high gloss. Gloss looks better under fluorescent kitchen light and photographs better; matte is more useful. Pick based on which one you actually need.

If you add a QR code, keep it at least three quarters of an inch square, put it somewhere with quiet space around it, and test the printed piece with an actual phone before ordering the full run. A code that is elegantly small and does not scan is worse than no code.

Getting them into people's kitchens

Handing magnets out at the counter, dropping one in every delivery bag, and leaving one with the invoice after a service call are the three distribution methods that cost nothing and work. Mailing them is where people get caught out.

A loose magnet in a standard envelope is a rigid, non-flat object, and mail rules treat rigid pieces differently from letters — different equipment, different rate, sometimes a piece that does not run through automation at all. The conventional way around this is a carrier card: the magnet is lightly attached to a printed card, the card carries the message and the address, and the recipient peels the magnet off. That is also better marketing, because you get a full panel of copy that the magnet itself has no room for.

Die cut postcards work well as that carrier — they start at $178.94 for a default run of 50 at $3.58 each, and a shaped card that matches the magnet makes the pairing look designed rather than improvised. For a longer pitch that goes in a folder or on a counter, a printed piece from our brochure printing work gives you room the magnet does not have. Whatever the format, take one finished, assembled sample to the post office and get the rate confirmed before you commit to a mailing quantity. Postal classification is not something to assume.

Artwork we can print without a conversation

Build the file at final size with an eighth of an inch of bleed on every edge, and keep all text and logos at least an eighth of an inch inside the trim. Rounded corners and die cuts are cut with a rule die, and dies move slightly across a run, so a border that sits two millimetres from the edge will look centred on some pieces and crooked on others. Do not design a thin frame around a magnet.

Raster art should be 300 dpi at final size — not a 72 dpi web logo scaled up. Vector art is better, with fonts converted to outlines. Build in CMYK, and expect that a saturated screen blue or a neon green will print duller than it looks on your monitor. Short runs go through our digital printing process, which means colour is consistent piece to piece within a run, but it is still ink on a white vinyl face, not backlit pixels.

When a magnet is the wrong product

Magnets are for information somebody will need later. They are not for recognition. Every so often someone asks us for a magnet to hand to a graduating student, a top salesperson or a volunteer, and a floppy piece of magnetic rubber undercuts the moment entirely — it reads as a giveaway, because that is what it is. That job wants a printed certificate on real stock, from $74 for 50 pieces at $1.48 each, which is something a person frames.

They are also the wrong answer for anything time-sensitive. A magnet with a promotion end date on it is a piece of trash with a two-week shelf life, and you paid a dollar a unit for it. Put the offer on a postcard and the phone number on the magnet.

Angels Print prints fridge magnets, circle and oval magnets, die cut postcards and certificates at our shop at 8511 Lankershim Blvd in Sun Valley, for contractors, restaurants, clinics, schools and shops across the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles. If your artwork is ready, pick your size and quantity and order online. If you are not sure how thick the stock needs to be for the way yours will be used, whether your die cut outline will survive a pocket, or how to pair a magnet with a mailer, call us at (818) 806-9006 or stop by the shop with your file and we will work it out before you print a hundred of them.