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SPOTLIGHT… COMPANY ANNIVERSARIES
MARKING MILESTONES With birthdays being the beating heart of the greeting card industry, makes it all the more fitting to celebrate some of the publishers and suppliers who will be hitting their 10th, 20th, 25th, 30th and 50th anniversaries in 2025. PG enjoys some reflection as milestones are marked.
25 YEARS SILVER REMINISCING Looking back over the past 25 years has given the Jonny Javelin team a good laugh at how the publisher’s style has changed. The original range was the World’s Greatest… designed by Mandy Mega which included the Farter caption with her partner Jonny Spears providing the hilarious and slightly outrageous 36-line verse that could be personalised. Now known and loved for their classic and continually-expanding Velvet collection, with captions and relations covering the whole scope of occasions, anniversaries, and birthdays, alongside numerous other ranges, the JJ combination of traditional design and sentiment is a fixture in the greeting card world. Above right: Mandy’s drawing and Jonny’s poems got the business underway. Below: Naughty But Nice is a Jonny favourite.
Looking back, Jonny said: “The brand really took off in 2001 with two totally diverse ranges – Limericks was a cartoon style, designed again by Mandy, with shorter, cheeky verses and Treasured Moments, which featured sepia-toned nostalgic images with a 16line sentimental verse.” Moving on from doing everything themselves with help from Mandy’s parents at their shared home in Harrogate,
by 2002 they engaged Express Pack for warehousing and distribution, and they’d taken on eight sales agents too, with the team having expanded over the years. Jonny said: “Many are still with us and doing a great job promoting our product – in 2022 Ron Ritchie joined the company as our first sales rep, bringing with him a wealth of experience and enthusiasm.” Judy McEwan was their first employee giving support to customers and the sales team, joining in 2005 and still working for them – the others are all long-serving too, with Nicky Heward joining in 2010, then Liz Whitehead (2014), Cate Hartley (2015), and Angela Dawson (2016) while Donna Umpleby is the newbie, having only started in 2019! Having used freelance designers until 2008 to broaden their range of styles, Jonny and Mandy then persuaded Yvonne Howard to join the company permanently, followed by Lindsay
Right: Treasured Moments and Limericks cemented the brand’s position.
Wells in 2018: “Over the earlier years we developed many popular ranges with a wide variety of styles, including Melodies, Daisy Day, Twisters, Manhattan and my old favourite Naughty But Nice where I got to be a bit cheeky again. “The launch of the Winter Velvet Christmas range in 2012 has to be a major milestone – we still remember the exciting buzz around Spring Fair that year, and the subsequent development of this range across everyday as well as Christmas has carved Jonny Javelin’s place in the market.” Celebrations for this special silver anniversary will start at Spring Fair in February, with new products, gifts, discounts and a bit of reminiscing, while also focusing on the continuing popularity of greeting cards, particularly in the traditional and sentiment market. Left: Poppets is a good seller. Below: The Jonny Javelin team (from left) designer Lindsay Wells, MD Jonny, design director Mandy, sales agent Alistair Black, designer Yvonne Howard, office IT manager Cate Hartley, office manager Judy McEwan, credit controller Nicky Heward, admin staff Donna Umpleby and Liz Whitehead, and sales agent Ron Ritchie.
PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE 45