What happened when we launched a greetings cards company
Making a business within a business
Around five months ago I went to a poetry evening. I had never been to one before and, to be honest, I felt a little out of place. This probably played a part in where I ended up in the conversational hierarchy of the pre-poetry mingling… I began speaking with someone who was on their own in a corner. He turned out to be one of the poets: presumably, everyone else knew that he was a poet and that he was probably trying to mentally prepare for the performance. As it began to get closer to the start time, the rest of the poets came and joined our conversation. Six poets and me :)
After the event, I walked back home. On my way, I bumped into one of the poets and we ended up having a chat. After a bit of chit-chat, and some compliments from me on his performance, it turns out that in a previous life he was a greetings card writer for a big greetings card maker.
Being as obsessed with 500 Days of Summer as I am, I had lots of questions. What was your best selling card? How many cards did you have to crank out a day? How did you come up with the phrases? He told me all about the day-to-day work and how his creativity was often quashed. For example, sloths were particularly “in” one season, so a least one card in every collection needed to have a sloth-related pun.
The idea
The next day in the office, I told my colleague Will about meeting a real life greetings card writer. We discussed how hard it must be to have to write greetings cards that are bland, sentimental and completely avoid saying how anyone really felt. “We’re a cool hip mental health company!” we thought. We could launch a greetings cards company that say how you really feel.
Tom, 500 Days of Summer
People buy cards ’cause they can’t say how they feel or they’re afraid too. We provide the service that lets them off the hook. You know what? I say to hell with it. Let’s level with America. At least let them speak for themselves! Right? I mean, look! What-What is this? What does it say? ‘Congratulations on your new baby.’ Right? How ‘bout, ‘Congratulations on your new baby. Guess that’s it for hanging out. Nice knowing you.’
The execution
Over the next week, Will came up with five card designs aiming to say the things people were really feeling, and wanted to say, but just weren’t saying. We hired an illustrator who knew one of our colleagues for £200 to draw the pictures.
We lay all of our cards out on a table and debated for hours about what they should look like. Coloured card or matt white? A card-y font or a not card-y font?
Our theory was that we should try to make the cards look similar to a greetings card, but the twist was in the content of the card.
And here are the cards that we came up with:
The result
We ended up being featured in a really cool article in Stylist and we were also featured on a website called Positive News. We also sold quite a few cards — supprisingly, even the one about death.
The sum-up
We really enjoyed creating Punchy Cards, and the premise is aligned nicely with what we do at Spill (talking about how you really feel). It didn’t take too much time to set up and is really cheap to run. We also made some money back in card sales (90% profit margin)!
We plan to spend a few days over the next week creating a new range of cards in time for valentines day.
I hope that this gives you an insight into the process. The whole thing took us about a week to launch. If you want to get in touch you can send me an email on calvin@spill.chat or if you’d like to read more writing from Spill you can take a look here.
Thanks for reading!
