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State of the Nation
A Spoonful Of Cautious Optimism The future is bright, the future is greeting cards! Or is it? PG gives the UK greeting card industry an annual health check.
It was 17 December 2021 and Omicron cases in the UK looked to be spiralling out of control. There was speculation that there would be another lockdown, hospitals being unable to cope, another Christmas without social mixing and perhaps even retail restrictions. It was on that day that exhibition organiser Clarion announced the postponement of the January Top Drawer until late February. There was even a question mark over the Spring Fair happening. Was 2022 going to be a carbon copy repeat of 2021? It was obviously a difficult decision. At that time Clarion, organisers of Top Drawer, were probably damned if they did cancel and damned if they didn’t!
Over a month later, the whole scenario has completely been transformed. The success of the booster jabs and the apparent milder new variant has led to many thinking that Covid is coming to an end. Covid will still be with us, but will probably be endemic rather than a pandemic with restrictions out the window. There has been much written that the experience of the last two years has changed 34
PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
society for ever, but history tells us that it is human nature to move on and even forget mass illness. The 1918-1920 ‘Spanish’ flu killed tens of millions, but only led to subsequent modest changes. The many cases of fatal influenza in 1957 and 1968 tragically register as just footnotes in most history books. Ill health is always a very uncomfortable thing to dwell on. So, although some trends have been enhanced during Covid times, like working from home (WFH) and increasing online sales, what settles as the ‘new normal’ is still not apparent, but wherever this may end up (with ramifications on card retailers and publishers) certainly, the sense of gloom that enveloped our industry this time last year has largely evaporated. While the restrictions differed in Scotland and Wales, It is worth recalling that in England 2021 started with a four-month lockdown with all retail other than supermarkets and newsagents, forced to close. And that came on the back of a 2020 that
Inset: The pulse of the greeting card industry remains strong.
Left: Boris Johnson’s briefings will hopefully not happen again, for many reasons! Below left: The UK public’s love and appreciation of greeting cards has grown ever stronger, being the ‘hug’ even when people could not physically embrace. This image is from the Cards for the Nation initiative driven by Fedrigoni, Hallmark and Cardzone which saw giant cards installed in several Cardzone shops in which consumers wrote their messages of thanks when the last lockdown started easing. Bottom: Throughout it all Rosie Made a Thing has been among the many UK publishers to have reflected the feelings and needs of the card buying public.
had seen the Christmas sales period devastated by a month-long November lockdown and regional lockdowns in the week before Christmas. Spring Seasons greeting card sales were devastated for the second year in a row with supermarkets, newsagents, garden centres and online platforms being the only beneficiaries of greeting card sales from the public. If that was not bad enough for the greeting card industry, publishers were hit by another blow in late January with Paperchase, one of our major retail chains going into administration, only to be miraculously revived, debt free and shorn of poor performing stores, in a pre-pack deal by private equity company Permira, with most greeting card publishers receiving a pittance of what they were owed by Paperchase. One particular and sad demise was another multiple retailer, Cards Galore which had enjoyed 30+ years with shops in London’s City, West End and