For Rachel Hare, it all started with dental surgery and Bugsy Malone. When she was four years old, the greetings card designer had to go into hospital for an operation, and – because in those days parents weren’t allowed to stay overnight – sobbed as she watched her family walk away. “But they left this massive Bugsy Malone card on my bed – I’ve still got it in a box,” Hare says. “It gives me goosebumps remembering that.”
In 1994, Hare founded her luxury card company Belly Button and today her designs are sold in John Lewis and Selfridges, among other independent shops. In 25 years of card-designing, she has seen a lot of change. That “pink/blue boy/girl thing” for newborns? On its way out. Valentines are less popular than ever, although the rude variety are reportedly on the rise, while thanks to modern masculinity, Father’s Day has boomed. A couple of years ago prosecco was a common motif; now, it is all about gin.
“I look at fashion, but combine that with general greetings-card rules – so balloons and presents will always sell,” Hare explains. Every year, she “reinvents the balloons” with a new colour palette, but sometimes she thinks: “Oh my God, how am I gonna redesign another present?” A glance at her stock reveals a keen eye for trends – a figure on one card wears a jumpsuit similar to the one popularised by the hit comedy Fleabag; elsewhere, mason jars hang from trees and Scandi chairs are tucked under desks. In a brutal popularity contest, llamas and sausage dogs appear neck-and-neck.
Yet it is not just the design of greetings cards that has changed over the past 25 years. Last December, the 52-year-old card retailer Clintons had to be bought out of administration, with 334 stores saved. A month later, Card Factory shares plunged by a quarter after disappointing Christmas sales. In the US, business is no brighter – towards the end of January, the card shop Papyrus filed for bankruptcy. Experts theorise that sales are declining due to the death of the high street, the rise of social media and environmental concerns. Newer retailers also claim that offerings by giants such as Hallmark have become tired and stale. Is it time to send our Deepest Sympathies, or can cards Get Well Soon?
Now that younger people can text their mates and tend to live in temporary rented accommodation, it would make sense for them to send fewer cards. Except that they don’t, says Amanda Fergusson, the CEO of the 100-year-old Greeting Card Association. According to the GCA’s 2019 market report, the British public spent £1.7bn on cards in 2018, with generation Z (18- to 24-year-olds) buying more cards than any other age group.
While the total value of single-card sales declined by 1.6% between 2017 and 2018 (with both the price of cards and the volume sold decreasing), there were unexpected booms, such as an 11% rise in Easter sales. Len Smith, who has been in the industry for 35 years and sells religious cards to Canterbury Cathedral and York Minster, among others, says “overtly Christian imagery” and Bible verses have fallen out of favour, and Easter cards now feature “freshness, new life and vibrant bright colours” that appeal to everyone.
“The British send more cards per capita than any other nation,” says Fergusson (who has held on to her first ever Valentine’s card, featuring a Snoopy design, for decades). I meet her at Spring Fair, an industry trade show in Birmingham where business seems to be booming – row after row of sellers showcase cards to potential retailers and brokers. There is an almost impossible amount of variety, from black cards featuring rude stick men (“You hear stories of 80-year-old ladies buying them to impress their grandkids,” says their creator Dominique Miranda) to quaint illustrations with stuck-on miniature wooden plant pots (plastic embellishments are now unpopular because of environmental concerns, explains the designer Laura Sherratt). How can it be that as stores struggle with high-street footfall, and the fate of Clintons seems sealed, so many new designs flood the market? Why are young people buying so many cards, and how did we become a nation of envelope-lickers in the first place?
Malcolm Warrington holds some of the answers in his bookcase. Since the 1970s, the 72-year-old from Ruislip has collected nearly 8,000 Victorian greeting cards. He explains that the first commercial Christmas card was commissioned in 1843 by Sir Henry Cole, who sought an easier way to spread seasonal cheer than the letters that were customary at the time. Throughout the 19th century, chromolithography – the process of colour printing using stones – usurped hand-colouring and made mass-production easier. “The printing is fabulous, it’s a really rich colour, the illustrations are done expertly,” Warrington says.
Warrington’s collection paints a vivid picture of greetings history. Many of his Victorian Christmas cards aren’t religious, nor do they seem festive at first glance. Animals in suits are a popular motif – in one card, a frog and a stag beetle dance to an insect playing a tambourine; in another, a monkey in a fez holding a painter’s palette wishes “A Merry Christmas To You”. The less said about the card where four rats dine on the cooked carcass of a cat, the better.
There are also designs for occasions we no longer celebrate with cards, including New Year’s Day and April Fools’ Day. In one new year’s card from the 1880s, cherubs dressed as jockeys ride on the backs of bats and declare: “We come to wish you all a bright new year.” Although it hardly seems possible, some illustrations have even more obscure meanings – one card features a clown riding on the back of another clown, captioned: “Whoa Mare! You’ve earned your little bit of Corn!” Still, with a few stylistic changes, some wouldn’t seem out of place today – an 1890s card of a pug riding a bicycle is strikingly similar to a card available on Etsy for £4.80 today.
For its 100th anniversary, the GCA curated an exhibition that offers an insight into card history. A flick through its exhibition booklet shows dramatic changes throughout the decades – in the 1920s, embossed edges were still popular, while the 30s made way for cartoon humour. Embellishments such as feathers and ribbons became mainstream during the war, while rude cards emerged in the 60s. Still, cute animals and angelic children reigned supreme until the 80s and 90s paved the way for naughty poems (RIP Nutty Tart) and captioned cartoons. Today, puns, foiled lettering and swearwords seem to be popular.
At its simplest, the story seems to be one of a move from sentimentality to comedy. Aisling Crosland, the head of design at Scribbler, which has 40 stores across the UK, says a lot of the team’s ideas “come from someone saying something stupid and someone else saying: ‘Wait … is that a card?’” Crosland says supermarkets she has worked for in the past were more restrictive about cards having a specific sender and recipient in mind, whereas at Scribbler, random puns, innuendos and meme-like designs abound (Crosland’s most popular card is a riff on Theresa May’s “strong and stable” slogan).
Crosland both illustrates cards and writes captions – something that wasn’t always common practice. Barbara J Laing is a verse writer from the Wirral who, between 2000 and 2007, wrote poems for the company that became Card Factory. She would write 30 verses for Mother’s Day alone and was initially paid £150 a poem before being put on a retainer. “It’s the first four lines that sell the card,” she says.
Laing talks me through the rules of card writing – “No matter how beautiful the poem is, it has to apply to the man in the street.” She says she quickly learned to make her poems more “generic”, explaining that she once had to remove a line about beaches from a Mother’s Day poem “because not everybody’s been to the beach on holiday”. She also wrote a keepsake card – a modern rendition of the religious poem Footprints in the Sand, in which God carries man in times of suffering. “I said if you put this on a card and put it in the shops it will sell millions,” she says – it is still available in Card Factory today.
Yet despite Laing’s successful rhymes, poetry cards have undeniably fallen out of favour. Many, if not most, of the cards I see at Spring Fair are text-light and blank inside. Does this mean we are less sentimental, or has the way we express sentiment changed?
“The real growth we’re seeing is among people sending a message to cheer someone up,” says Fergusson, explaining that there has been a huge rise in “No occasion” cards. She believes millennials and gen Z are buying these cards because they are more powerful than social media messages. Hare calls her new range “contemporary sentiments” – one card says, “Just be your beautiful self”, while another reads: “Proud of you.” In 2019, the online retailer Moonpig launched a collection with the Samaritans – personalised cards were emblazoned with messages such as: “Matthew, I’m not sure how to help but if you need me, I’m here.” Fergusson says there has been a recent rise in “man-to-man” sending, but GCA research suggests 85% of cards are bought by women.
The industry has also been buoyed by something else that can cynically be called a trend – feminism. Artist Lucy Creed, the founder of Poet and Painter cards, says its bestseller is a striped card that simply says: “A woman’s place is where she says it is.” Cath Tate, who has been designing political cards since the 80s, says her most popular card reads: “Women don’t grow old. They just become more important.” Her daughter Rosie says: “Mum’s business started off really small and we’re now a successful commercial business because those subjects are now mainstream.” (Progress isn’t always linear – another designer hints at struggling to convince card company executives to update their cards with LGBT-friendly designs.)
Lest it seem that we are all organically becoming lovely people who pay £3 to cheer up our depressed mates, it is important not to underestimate the influence of the GCA. For the last six years, the organisation has run “Thinking of You” week every September – an initiative to get people to “generating positive feelings” by (surprise, surprise) sending more cards. The GCA may have a warm exterior, but they’re definitely not Blank Inside. The organisation has many hardline historical success stories: during the second world war, they overturned a ban on greeting cards that was implemented to conserve paper, forcing the government to declare that greeting cards were “essential to the war effort” on the grounds of morale. Later, the association prevented the Royal Mail from charging the public extra to send square cards that had previously caused trouble in sorting machines worldwide (many machines are designed to find the long edge of an envelope in order to scan the address).
Despite the internet, 94% of cards are still purchased in brick-and-mortar shops. “There are not as many cards being bought, so what you’ve got to try to do is raise the average spend,” says Paul Taylor, the managing director of Cardzone, which has 130 stores across the country. Glitter is on its way out for environmental reasons, but foil finishes can help put up the price (provided the foil doesn’t cover more than 30% of a card’s surface area, it can be recycled).
Yet things still aren’t easy for traditional retailers – at the start of the year, Taylor had to reprimand his own siblings for not sending his daughter a birthday card (they left messages on social media instead). “I sent a note out saying: ‘Do you not realise we make our living from selling cards?’… It’s a bit sad that I had to do that,” he says. “People will spend £3 on a coffee but they won’t spend £3 on a card for a loved one.” Fergusson adds that while traditional retailers might be struggling to pay their rent, more and more “destination” shops such as garden centres and spas are stocking cards as an extra. There, they sell for higher prices because of the luxury association.
Another way to get people spending is to tout the sustainability credentials of your cards – the envelopes for Hare’s new range are made from recycled coffee cups. Increasingly, greeting cards are sold “naked”, ie without a plastic film, to combat environmental concerns. For some companies, this is another opportunity for innovation – Paul Woodmansterne, the CEO of Woodmansterne cards, explains that last year the company developed a “smart seal” sticker to keep envelopes and cards together in lieu of plastic. Woodmansterne also makes money as a broker – it has a warehouse of cards from smaller publishers across the UK that it delivers to major national retailers. This means a greater variety of cards make it into shops without retailers having to deal with 30 or 40 publishers at a time.
Woodmansterne denies that the internet is killing cards. He says digital printing has allowed smaller publishers to break through (previously, lithographic printing meant new designers would have to commit to printing 1,000 of any one design). He also notes that there has been a distinct rise in hand-giving as millennials move from address to address. “We’ve been doing cards since 1987 and we’ve grown in our sales every year,” he says. He argues that the biggest companies – such as Hallmark and UK Greetings (a name you’ll often find on the back of cards in WH Smith) – are struggling because they’re not as innovative as the new, smaller publishers.
I leave Spring Fair with 21 cards, 10 of which are plastic-wrapped, but no two the same. There are Trump jokes, insects telling me to “bee kind”, glittery balloons, Mr Men characters, and yes, a couple of near-identical sausage dogs. Of course there is still room for the classics, too – Daniel Prince, the managing director of the UK’s biggest publisher of licensed cards, Danilo, says although people are paying on average 10p less a card, Thomas the Tank Engine, Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig cards are nowhere near falling out of favour. Bugsy Malone may be long gone, but Prince confidently says that Minions are “evergreen”. He hands me a Minion card addressed to “Grandson” – hopefully, by the time I have the opportunity to use it, cards won’t be relics of the past.
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