London-based artist and papercutting master Rob Ryan has created some unique paper cut greeting cards. The intricate cards are sold here on Catbird for $3.95.
Greeting Cards Become Interactive With Printed Conductive Ink
New Scientistreports on some futuristic greeting cards created with the use of interactive paper. These cards can become interactive when they are touched by a person. The cards are printed using conductive ink. Take a look:
This technology and other technology like Augmented Reality are really going to make greeting cards a lot more interactive. Hallmark recently announced the launch of its first augmented reality greeting cards.
The Washington Post has an article that says less people are sending postal cards the old fashion way. Snail mail greeting cards are falling according to data from a couple sources. The U.S. Postal Service says first-class mail was down about 11% for the first two weeks of Decemeber.
For the first two weeks of December, said U.S. Postal Service spokesman Michael Woods, "we are seeing about an 11 percent decrease in first-class cancellations from last year, which is a good proxy for the number of cards and letters coming through the system."
A company named Datamonitor told the Post that they are seeing a 10% to 15% decrease in greeting cards delivered via snail mail.
"We see a 10 to 15 percent decline in the overall volume of mailed paper greeting cards this year," said Neil Hendry of Datamonitor, a New York-based retail analysis firm. "There are two principal reasons: technology and the economy."
As Datamonitor says this is partly because of the recession but it is also part of a trend. People that keep in touch with Facebook and email may see less of a need to mail greeting cards. Home printers can also reduce the need for maiing a greeting card. If you are going to be visiting someone you can hand deliver a greeting card made with your fancy home color laser printer. Companies are also embracing the printed method. Amazon.com recently starting offering printed gift cards that include a holiday greeting.
Recycled Paper Greetings Launching The Onion Greeting Cards
Recycled Paper Greetings (RPG) is introducing a new line of cards from The Onion, a online fake news website. The line includes 12 cards that have the look of an article torn from a newspaper, and include The Onion's funny headlines. One example reads, "Search For Self Called Off After 38 Years," and features a disheveled man lying on a couch in a robe and pajama bottoms as cereal and junk food form a protective barrier around him. Another card, shows a picture of a woman with the headline, "List Of Friends Revised After Birthday Party."
"We are thrilled to introduce these new cards with The Onion because we know that many of our consumers are big fans of the publication," said Jude Rake, CEO, Recycled Paper Greetings. "At RPG we always focus on offering topical humor that shoppers will stop and notice, and few, if any, do that better right now than The Onion."
A greeting card company called Quiplip carries a unique line of greeting cards called graphitudes. Graphitudes use charts and graphs to convey the meanings of birthdays, thank yous and other holidays and intentions. Quiplip was featured on CNN's Anderson Cooper's segment in 2006.
Hallmark has launched Hallmark Mobile Greetings, a new product for cell phones. Senders can also add their personal message to any of the greetings Hallmark has created.
"Millions of people rely on cell phones as part of their daily routine of connecting with others," said Mike Adams, Hallmark Mobile manager. "With Hallmark Mobile Greetings, consumers can creatively connect right away over everyday moments and occasions like a shared joke or words of encouragement. We are taking the skill Hallmark has of helping people connect and are bringing it to the mobile world."
Hallmark Mobile Greetings is available by downloading to a cell phone the free mobile phone application from mobile.hallmark.com. Users can then send greetings to other mobile phones. Consumers also can send greetings directly from mobile.hallmark.com for delivery to a mobile device. Each Hallmark Mobile Greeting costs 99 cents. Fees are billed as part of monthly service-provider charges and the sender is only charged if the recipient opens the mobile greeting.
Pigspigot is a user-generated greeting company. The site lets people upload the art for e-cards on its website. People can both create and send friends e-cards. Cards can also be sent as a $3.99 snail mail card.
Pigspigot is an online, user-generated greeting card company that will allow customers to send both e-cards and snail-mail cards to friends and family. We like to think of it as a sort of anti-Hallmark with a wiki twist.
Browse our collection, using our editor's picks or check out what's "popular" to see the cards people love the most. We offer free e-cards, but try sending a paper card for the insanely low price of 3.99 (including shipping). We're sure your loved ones would love you more if you send them the real deal (and we're pretty sure the converse is true, too; yikes!). Check out our FAQ section for more technical details or contact us with any questions.
Or, if you're feeling clever and art-tastic, submit some cards! You can upload designs that you've created on your computer or you can use our nifty card template. Please do it. Por favor. Because without you, we'd have no cards.
Pigspigot is not currently offering any payment for art submitted to its website although they do mention ways contributing artists may be rewarded in the Faq. The terms they take for using artwork are described here.
Ray Olson explains how to recycle greeting cards in this video from eHowgreen.
Some of the ideas including cutting off the front and using it as a gift tag. You can also use the front flap to create a new greeting card. Multiple greeting cards can also be put together to make wrapping paper. Take a look:
The AP has reported a few facts about holiday greeting cards.
They say that Holiday cards date to 1843 in Europe and 1875 in the United States. The Greeting Card Association says that holiday cards now account for about 27% of the 7 billion paper cards sold each year.
The U.S. Postal Service expect total holiday mail to fall for the first time in decades. The drop is expected to be from 20 billion last year to 19 billion pieces of holiday mail this year.
The AP also says that according to ettiquette experts at The Emily Post Institute it is acceptable to skip cards to save money.
You can skip cards but you can also send more meaningful cards to less people if you are trying to cut back. ShoppingBlog.com reports that American Greetings and Hallmark started noticing that people were looking for more traditional cards during the 2007 holidays. The big card companies have also come out with more traditional and heartfelt cards this year.
Last year we introduced our "holiday video card," and over a million of you sent fun and festive video cards to your friends and loved ones. This year we're bringing it back with even more themes and featured videos for you to choose from, like this one:
To create your card, visit the YouTube Greeting Cards site where you can choose from dozens of holiday videos uploaded by the YouTube community. Or if you prefer, send a greeting video of your own - either select a video that you've previously uploaded or record a brand new one. For your convenience, we've also added a link on every YouTube watch page under the "share options" section so you can send any embeddable video on YouTube as a greeting card.
After you've selected your video, pick a theme, type in your personal message, enter the recipients' email addresses, and voila - instant holiday cheer.
The YouTube Greeting Cards site lets you select a YouTube video to include in your greeting card. You can also record your own video message to use. The ecard can then be emailed to your friends. A bunch of YouTubers have created special Christmas messages for these YouTube greetings.
Write Hook Lets Users Mail Customizable Print Cards Online
BizTimes.com reports that two Milkwaukee women recently started a greeting card company called Write Hook. Write Hook lets people send customizable print cards from their computer. The cards cover typical occassions like holidays and birthdays as well as "less typical" moments like divorce, break-ups, menopause and pet loss.
Lori Palay and Seraya Amirthalingam created the company to allow people to create greeting cards for some of the "less typical" moments in life.
Readers can browse hundreds of images and sentiments, and choose elements that express their exact thoughts at the company website (www.writehook.com). The custom cards can then be mailed to recipients.
"I am a cancer survivor, and when I was sick, people were incredibly generous," Palay said. "I was too sick to write thank you notes, and I kept thinking there has to be a better way to do this. There has to be other people who are in my position."
The cards cost between $2.25 and $4. They are printed on 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper. Write Hook also donates five cents from every card sale to charity.
Clinton Griffiths Wins American Greetings Humor Contest
American Greetings says about 60,000 people thought they were funny and entered its Think You're Funny? Prove It! caption writing contest. Clinton Griffiths of Derby, KS was awarded the grand prize of $1,000.00. Two runners-up will have their concepts posted on AmericanGreetings.com and will also receive one-year memberships to the site. The contest ran in conjunction with the release of American Greetings' newest line of funny photo cards, Fun Pix. They now have a new contest up called Sounds Funny to Me.
Griffiths submitted copy for a picture of two young boys looking down into the kid's potties they are sitting on. The image resonated with Griffiths, who recently became a father. Inspired by the trials of new parenthood and caring for his seven-month old son, Colton, his caption read, "Sorry your card is late. Dooty called. Happy Belated Birthday."
"I was shocked and delighted to find out I was the winner. My wife Mary Beth didn't believe me at first," Griffiths said. "I've always enjoyed looking at funny photos and thinking of humorous captions to go with them. Those are my favorite types of cards to give family and friends."
The judging was completed by a team at American Greetings, who looked at many factors in deciding the ultimate winner.
"We received a lot of very funny ideas to choose from," said Mindy Johnston, assistant product manager at American Greetings, who was part of the team reviewing the entries. "When we judged the submissions we looked at many things, but mainly it came down to whether or not the joke that was submitted would translate to a final card, and then, who came up with the funniest idea."
The BBC reports that a greeting card sent by Anne Frank when she was just eight-year-old has been found in an antique shop near Amsterdam. Anne Frank's diary that she wrote while hiding from the Nazis has become widely read around the world.
The card was sent in 1937, when Frank was eight, and was addressed to one of her best friends, Samme Ledermann.
The Anne Frank museum has authenticated the card, which shows a clover-covered bell above a snowy field, and wishes "good luck for the New Year".
Frank, who wrote her diary while in hiding from the Nazis, died in Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
Paul van den Heuvel, a school teacher, was looking through items in his father's antique shop in Naarden, near Amsterdam, when he came across the card.
"I just found it in a box, which probably came from an Amsterdam flea market," he told Dutch television.
The Anne Frank museum would like to have the card but finder Paul van den Heuvel has not yet made a decision as to what he will do with the historic greeting card.
The cards will be available at select retailers starting in mid-summer, Burger King spokeswoman Heather Krasnow said Tuesday.
Financial terms of the agreement weren't disclosed.
Andrews McMeel Publishing, a division of Kansas City-based Andrews McMeel Universal, will design the cards. Recycled Paper Greetings Inc. of Chicago will produce and distribute the cards.
"We're always looking for clever ways for the King to surprise his fans," Russ Klein, Burger King's president of global marketing, strategy and innovation, said in a release. "Now special occasions will be even more memorable thanks to the King."
Will these cards have The King on them? That seems like the smartest move from Burger King. The King has even found his way into Xbox video games.
What's up with the greeting card websites? You would think they would have been ready for the big influx of traffic on a day like Valentine's Day. The Associated Press reports that a company named Keynote Systems Inc. that checks web traffic found that only 30 percent of their attempts to access several of the major greeting card sites were successful.
Keynote said sites that usually load in two or three seconds were taking an average of 12 seconds or longer.
Problems with Web sites not only frustrate customers but also deprive sites of advertising revenue, especially if a visitor doesn't come back to view or send a card.
The Web site for Hallmark Cards Inc. was inaccessible or slow starting about 6 a.m. EST, according to Keynote. It was back to normal by late morning but got slow again around noon - just as people on the West Coast got to work and opened cards that had arrived in their inboxes, said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations.
Keynote said it also spotted problems with 123Greetings.com, and The Associated Press found in a test Thursday afternoon that many pages took several seconds to load. But officials at 123Greetings insisted that less than 1 percent of its visitors experienced slowdowns.
"123Greetings.com experienced record traffic today, one of the highest in its history," the company said in a statement. "Problems at other greeting cards sites caused record volumes of users to come over to our site, and we were happy to welcome them all."
Not at all of the traffic was lost because some people who were unable to access a greeting card website probably tried again later. The greeting card companies will get a shot again a year from now.
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