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International Perspectives
Around The
World As the BBC’s Around the World in 80 Days series of Phileas Fogg’s adventures draws to a close, PG headed off in its balloon to check in with some of the leading greeting card distributors and publishers in various part of the globe to find out how trade has been in their corner of the world.
The United States: Vanessa Harnik, managing director of Notes & Queries The year that was: “We found the US market for greeting cards to have been really strong in 2021 with retailers seemingly selling cards faster than before the pandemic hit.” Challenges and positives: “Ah…so many challenges. The costs of everything materials, labour, shipping - have gone through the roof. There is a worldwide massive paper shortage which has profoundly impacted all companies and has affected supply.
Shipping costs are triple or quadruple what they were before Covid. This has also meant that almost everything takes longer. It used to be that we could get inventory (generally) within 2-3 weeks. Nowadays, we average 4-6 weeks to get stock. In addition, finding additional staff has been extremely difficult. My father (Alan Harnik) and I were pulling and packing orders for six weeks in the Autumn. We were that desperate! Ha! On the positive side of things, the demand for greeting cards and related stationery products is great. The flip side of the supply and demand issue worldwide is that we have had new retailers contacting us for product, and new product categories Top: The BBC series Around the World in Eighty Days tracked the adventures. Above: A Bug Art design that featured in a missive Vanessa sent out to explain about the challenges faced of late, from supply chain issues to complexities of its moving premises. Left: Vanessa Harnik (centre front) with the rest of the N&Q team in their new premises.
last year, who we had never worked with before, and business with many existing retailers has increased because retailers have not been able to get inventory from other core suppliers. I also would like to think that our ability to fill many of these requests during in 2020 and 2021 has served us in good stead as retailers remember the vendors who supported them. Over 40% of our business comes from independent retailers who have bought our ranges for over 15 years. I have come to truly understand that my staff, our employees are N&Q's greatest asset. With that said, of course, we are nothing without superb design, notably from our UK publishing partners.” Card buying habits: “I think there is an understanding (generally) that there are massive supply issues so Christmas sales (and reorders) came much earlier and much higher in 2021 than in 2020. This might partially be as a result of the experience of massive USPS delays in December 2020 with consumers not wanting to go through that again. On the design front, we have seen consumers gravitate towards cards with more colour or brighter colours. It feels as though consumers are buying more greeting cards too. Get well and sympathy cards continue to do really well while we have also seen a total uptick in new home cards and wedding cards (people are planning for weddings this spring!) and we continue to PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
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