3 minute read
Profile Pink Pig
Making Customers Smile
Mabel Forsyth is the illustrator/designer behind the Pink Pig brand - greeting cards and art prints printed in the UK on the highest quality materials with bright happy illustrations that make customers smile, and designed to fly off the stockist shelves! We ask her what makes the company tick!
What’s the story behind Pink Pig? I created Pink Pig nearly 7 years ago – deciding that although I’d enjoyed working as an illustrator for other clients, it was time to do something for myself.
I dipped my toe in the water first – selling hand-printed cards at craft fairs all over the country, with the help of my hubby, Gordon.
My first proper trade fair was in 2014, and the greeting cards were a hit, so I immediately packed in craft markets and my ‘in-house’ job at the time, and set up the company. Gordon is now full time with Pink Pig and daughter Evie helps out on a freelance basis.
How has the company managed the last year and a half? Any new ranges? We were lucky that we still got a small amount of orders in, and our non-trade online card sales really soared in those first few months. It was great to know that greeting cards are one of the things that really hold up well in difficult times. It wasn’t anywhere like our normal income, but we kind of bumbled through.
I found more time to tidy up ranges and translating most of our collection into a Welsh range, plus developing new ranges, such as the new Botanink range. It’s a really stylish range with bold blooms contrasting with contemporary hand-lettered calligraphic script. The bold colour palette of deep corals, inky blues, and woodland greens really make these cards pop on the shelves. There are 40 cards in the range, including Birthday and Occasions. Have you adapted or added ranges in response to last year? We found that as more people were and still are staycationing, many retailers love the idea of having cards that are a bit more personalised and local to their area and our existing Babble dialect range has really taken off this year.
Lots of dialect cards from around the UK, and we and we encourage customers to add their own town/local area/local turn of phrase to the cards to really make it unique for them
We get loads of re-orders from two particular customers in the North West and North East via our fab agents.
How many ranges do you offer? We have 17 ranges including Spring ranges and of course Christmas ranges. There are three specially designed Scottish ranges and now we have nine ranges in Welsh too.
What are your best-selling ranges/cards? Cutie Crew is our top UK range. It features cheeky giraffes, adorable sloths, and the sweetest baby elephants, they are all completely irresistible! There are now 55 cards in the range including both Birthdays and Occasion cards. Our birthday sloth is the top seller in the range.
Hootenanny is by far our best-selling Scottish range - there are nearly 200 designs with open, birthday, occasion and relation.
Also, our Add Your Town Christmas cards are sell outs every year with nearly all of our stockists right across the UK.
Anything else to add? All of our cards are 150 x 150mm, sold in 6s most with a 100% recycled eko kraft envelope. They are printed in the UK on high-quality 350gms FSC board. The cards are available cello wrapped or naked without cello.
