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JEREMY’S JOURNAL Business blogging by publisher Jeremy Corner of Blue Eyed Sun.
Winning At Cards
Below: How do you make sure you hold all the Aces when it comes to greeting cards? Below: Widdop & Co is just one of the gift companies that has recently created their own card ranges. Bottom: Some of this year’s Ladder Club attendees and speakers.
Jeremy Corner, owner of greeting card publisher Blue Eyed Sun, considers best sellers. Great product is good for everyone: retailers, publishers, suppliers and, most importantly, card senders. If the product is good it’ll sell well. But if all the cards in the industry are good, how do you make sure yours are the best? We can’t all be winners and it’s a very competitive market.
Market challenges Competition among publishers is fierce, with new talent starting up businesses every week. The Ladder Club, which supports new and ‘climbing up the ladder’ publishers, had one of its busiest years ever this year and PG Live’s Springboard area continues to grow. In addition to the plethora of great start-ups, larger publishers have launched smaller brands in order to compete. Paperlink has Meraki, Five Dollar Shake with Counting Stars, Second Nature has Lime, Woodmansterne with The Proper Mail Company and Carte Blanche has Hotchpotch. We’ve also seen an influx of giftware companies joining the greeting card party with Widdop & Co, Katie Loxton and Transomnia all launching card ranges. On top of all the new players, the space available in the independent retail sector has been shrinking, as many independent retailers go under or decide to hang up their boots by not renewing expiring shop leases. This is further compounded by brokers sweeping up large chunks of the sector, effectively closing doors that were previously open to smaller outfits via sales agents, trade shows and direct marketing. 68
PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
As the market shrinks and consolidates, and as casualties are lost along the way, there is a rush by all card publishers to create best selling designs to win the race and become one of the top ten ‘must haves’ in any retailer’s store. The trouble is that many end up...
Playing it safe The card market has always swallowed up good ideas and innovative product. New looks and trends get absorbed by other companies and reincarnated in all sorts of interesting ways. I’m not talking about blatant copying here (a bugbear for all of us). I mean the very nature of creativity is that is constantly influenced and stimulated by the environment in which it is working. Following trends feels safer for everyone, but it has its costs. Trends come through like big waves and the result is that lots of product ends up looking the same. At the moment it’s foiled messages on stripes and flowers,
flamingos, unicorns, llamas and drinkrelated cards, such as gin and Prosecco. There’s a strong temptation to follow trends and keep adapting with (rather than to) the competition. The trouble is you end up looking like everyone else and have no discernible point of difference. This leads to a lack of loyalty with customers and price becomes the dominant deciding factor at the point of purchase. Worse still, you don’t take risks and your creativity becomes constrained and restricted by the urge to make money. In the end, vast quantities of unicorns, flamingos and llamas end up sitting in warehouses across the country as the party fizzles out and moves on to the next ‘big thing’.