How to Start a Greeting Card Business?

People need greeting cards for countless occasions – birthdays, anniversaries, deaths, graduation, valentine’s, and whatnot. Some people do not even give a gift unless there isn’t a greeting card attached with it. If you have an idea for a line of greeting cards and the artistic talent to keep it unique, you are surely going to earn big.

So, if you want to start your greeting card business, make an announcement already, or just simply say thanks. Because we’ve got you covered. We have put together this detailed guide that will answer all your questions from “How to start a Greeting Card Business?” to “How to frame the perfect greeting card business plan?”.

Create a full-proof, well-planned, legally compliant, customer friendly greeting card business plan. Let’s start. Here’s a quick roadmap of the entire guide:

• Decide your Target Audience
• Why are Personalized Cards more preferred?
• What does the Greeting Industry look like in 2020?
• Setup your Website and Ecommerce Store
• Designing Phase: Adapt a Product Customization Tool
• Select the Printing methods, setup infrastructure and manage supplies
• How to frame most effective Marketing Strategies
• How to take maximize the profits from your Greeting Card Business plan
• Delivery and Logistics Management
• Start a greeting card business: Work with experts

Decide your Target Audience

Deciding the target audience or the target market is the essential step zero. You cannot probably sell without knowing who you’re trying to sell to. Decide what audience you want to target. Deciding this at an early stage is essential so that you can create designs that appeal to those audiences. You must go through a series of steps to decide your target audience. Let’s look at it one by one.

1. Find your Niche

You need to think of a strategy that would mark your identity and would differentiate you from the pool of competitors. Defining a unique niche is a part of your larger brand strategy. A lot of things will depend on the niche of your business, like the name, specialization, marketing strategies and so on.

Once you specialize in a certain type of message, you may find it difficult to branch out because the name you chose for your business may or may not align with your new specialization. So, it is better to know it all before you begin.

2. Greeting Card Type

Decide what kind of cards you are going to design. Categorization could be based on size, material and so on. Ask yourself all sorts of questions and brainstorm. All these questions will help you decide your inventory and supplies and will eventually help you estimate the cost of your plan.

• Size

  Decide the size of your cards. What kind of size are you going to offer? Are you going to offer multiple sizes options? Are you going to offer custom-sizes?

• Material

  Choose the material that you’re going to offer. There can be a wide range of materials to choose from like paper, cardboard, reusable material and so on.

  

• Readymade Cards or Personalized Cards

  Either offer readymade cards or personalized cards, you can also offer both of them. Although custom-made cards produce more guaranteed money. You may lose some creative control, as you must produce what the client wants. Therefore, offering both types of cards can be a plus point too. You can also showcase your creativity through the readymade cards. By offering personalization you can let your customers design the cards as they want.

3. Personalized Cards

You must be wondering why there is a big difference between personalized cards and the readymade ones. Well, the answer is simple. Customers love things made specially just for them. A great way to make customers happier and keep them engaged.

Deloitte found that 1 out of every 5 customers is willing to pay 20% more for a personalized or an exclusive product that is designed just for them. Another study on creating customer loyalty through customization states that:

“customization increases perceived service quality, customer satisfaction, customer trust, and ultimately customer loyalty toward a service provider.”

You can offer your customers upload photographs, write personal messages, add designs of their choice and then send it to printing. Customer experience finds value through exclusivity in the form of customized products. It gives them the feeling of something unique and something specific that works in just the way they want.

We can help you enable offering custom greeting cards in your store. To know how, get in touch with our industry experts.

What does the Greeting Industry look like in 2020?

Keep track of new greeting card business by reviewing submission guidelines, requirement statistics, by visiting card stores, fairs etc. It is a good way to find out what is trending, what is not and what sorts of cards are people looking for.

These stats can also play a role in defining your niche. You can also get a good idea about what the conventional market is, which could help you try breaking the conventions to offer something unique. Let’s have a look at some of the latest trends in the industry.

• In its 2020 report, the Greeting Card Association observed that people in America purchase on and average 6.5 billion greeting cards every year. This gained up to $8 billion in total sales. Birthday cards making up the biggest segment, with more than half of all cards sold.
• Customized greeting cards are becoming more common. This trend is bolstered by the emergence of companies allowing their customers to quickly create cards as and when they want.
• Millennials and younger consumers are on the lookout for cards with relatable content containing cheeky or informal messages. These cards cater to the need for a more comedic, informal way of communicating. Many smaller businesses are creating these cards, and industry experts expect that it will continue to grow.

Ready with your Greeting Card Business Plan? Put your Plan to Execution Now.

So, you’re ready with your step Zero and you’ve thought it all through. You know your niche, type of cards, type of products and so on. We bring you a 5-step implementation plan, to start with the successful execution of your Business Idea.

Step 1: Visibility through Your Website and Ecommerce Store

The first and foremost step in your greeting card business plan is to build your online presence and improve your visibility. Online presence is important especially in the early days of your companies. A social media account can greatly boost your online presence.

You will also need an Ecommerce store to sell your products and showcase your offerings. You can easily build your online presence if you go through the following steps.

i) Website

You will need to register a domain name and build a website. You can create your own website and customize it to mark a benchmark of your brand. You can either build an ecommerce website directly or can build a separate website and then integrate your ecommerce store to it.

ii) E-commerce Platform

Selecting the right e-commerce platform is a crucial step. There’s a pool of options to choose from. Since we are looking for a specific use-case that is building it for our greeting card print shop or website. You can categorize your selection on the basis of licensing, cost of development, customization, support services and so on.

Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce are three popular ecommerce platforms with active communities for developers for support. Magento is the popular choice for larger enterprises and for someone who needs flexible customization. Shopify and WooCommerce on the other hand are hassle-free to start with. You can easily integrate the store to your website and get up and running within days. Each platform has its own pros and cons. To know more about these platforms, you can visit this detailed guide.

iii) Business App

You can also create and launch your own app. Having your own app can also work towards building brand recognition. There are multiple app-builder companies that offer a simple and hassle-free way and can get you up and running within hours.

iv) Social Media

You can build a social media page to publish your content and improve your reach. With most millennials and Young generations active on social media these days and with your unique product offering, you are surely going to get good business.

We can help you in setting up your ecommerce store and website within minimum time.

Step 2: Design Phase: Adapt a Product Design Tool

Now, you’ve set up your website, app, ecommerce store and social media account. Now, all you need to do is come up with eye-catching designs that lures the customers to your store. The more unique your designs the more likely customers are to click on your website. As we noticed earlier that product personalization is trending these days. And let your customers implement this on their own you will need a Product Customization tool.

A product personalization tool is a Web-to-Print software with diverse features to your customers to create customized designs. All you need to do after that is print those designs. An Intuitive W2P product design tool consists of everything that you would expect from an online product design tool, from diverse customization features to print-ready designs.

Ideally most tools provide a huge library of images, texts, clipart and ready templates. A fully-responsive designer tool is also perfect to create personalized designs on every printable material. It can have element-based pricing, design-based pricing and so on. Pick a tool that gives you full control over its offerings and flexibility.

Brush Your Ideas is one such tool. Understanding your business feasibility, it also provides a custom UI for you to control where your end-users can perform customizations. Plus, offers multiple integrations and can work with multiple platforms.

Explore Brush Your Ideas greeting Card Maker Design Software for Magento, WooCommerce, OpenCart, Shopify, PrestaShop, and PHP.

Step 3: The Printing Phase

After your customers design their products, the next step would be to print those designs. Planning the printing phase involves planning everything from the printing methods, supplies, to the printing infrastructure. Let’s have a detailed look at all these aspects.

Printing Methods

There are multiple types of printing methods. Choose your printing methods first so that you can make sure of your supplies and the infrastructure. It is necessary to select a printing method that gives a desired result. Some of the popular ones are engraving, thermography, foil stamping, embossing, digital printing, etc.

While choosing the printing method, think about the factors like quality of the output, required resolution, compatibility of the printing method with your product design tool and so on. Digital Printing is one of the most common methods that uses four colors of ink to create intricate designs and lettering, applied in small dots. Plus, digital painting requires an image resolution of 300dpi. It ensures better image quality and output.

You can opt for a Software to manage your print workflow. It is better to have a streamlined process that eases operation from the beginning itself. Check out Brush Your Ideas’ Print Job Manager solution.

Manage your Supplies

Note down all the supplies that you’ll need and look out for similar suppliers. You will need necessary supplies like cards, paper, ink and so on. Find wholesale suppliers through industry contacts, trade journals, internet and so on.

You can go according to your budget and choose the one that best suits your budget. But I would suggest not to go for low quality products solely because of the budget. It is about customer satisfaction in the end. To manage these supplies, you can opt for various Inventory management software too.

Infrastructure

Set up the infrastructure pertaining to the printing method you choose. Setup a professional workspace with required instruments. The printing instruments that you buy will depend on the printing methods that you choose. You can hire professionals to help you with everything. You can sign a third-party contract and give the printing consignments to well-equipped print professionals.

Step 4: Define Marketing Strategies

Your customer probably won’t discover your charming cards without you marketing them. Your greeting card business plan needs effective marketing strategies. The best marketing technique for new businesses is word-of-mouth. As you grow you can work out on a more formal approach to your marketing strategies. Marketing strategies must include social media marketing, email marketing. You can also create and launch ads and have your business review printed in the local newspapers.

Promote yourself through various retail outlets. Showcase some sample designs on your ecommerce stores and social media. Advertising through social media is a good, cheap way to get early business.

Choose the right kind of content to catch the attention of your potential customers. Offer samples and prototypes to customers so that they can see the card up close before committing to larger orders. You can also sell these cards directly to pre-existing popular stores. This can build brand recognition too. Providing additional sweeteners, such as free shipping, or discount can also prove to be helpful. The possibilities are limitless.

Cost vs. Benefit: Maximize the Profit

As a beginner every business owner is worried about the cost vs benefit ratio. But they forget to notice that the benefit ratio is not solely based on just the market but also their own business strategies. Here’s a brief on how to increase the benefit ratio using smart business tactics. Include these points in your greeting card business plan and you’re good to go.

• Most card shops – online as well as offline – sell specialized envelopes, pens, gifting accessories and so on. You can implement this too. Provide gifting options at the time of checkout. Ask your customers if they want envelopes and even suggest some based on the type of card they’ve chosen. This will bring you additional revenue.
• You can sell these cards in bulk at various retail centres too. This can help improve your brand recognition. Design unique and new ideas to get more attention.
• Decide a pricing system of your own. Especially for personalized products. You can include element-based pricing, size-based pricing, color-based pricing and so on. You can charge your customers for uploading custom photos too. You can charge them for every word they write or you can implement sentence-based pricing.
• Plan seasonal offers and provide lucrative discounts to your customers. Generally, the prices of greeting cards are about $2.50 each. However, you can sell a pack of six cards for approximately $7.50. This way customers will find it cost effective and are more likely to make the purchase.
• Small greeting card businesses can make about $45,000 a year. Larger companies, like Hallmark, make as much as $19.7 billion on particular days alone like Valentine’s Day.
• Your designs matter, just make sure the designs offerings are of high quality. You can collaborate with print-specialists too. Print-specialists offer more than simple printing services.
• The old saying goes: It takes money to make money. But nobody said that you have to spend all of your own money? Small business funding can help you cover the expenses required to get your greeting card business plan started. You can use these funding to help you with equipment, supplies, employees, legal fees etc. There is no one-size-fits-all type of business funding. So, consider your options mindfully.

Step 5: Delivery and Logistics Management

Last but not the least is logistics management. You will need an effective logistics infrastructure, to manage your supply chain as smoothly as possible. Again, you can do this on your own, by creating logistics workflows or you can outsource it to a third-party company. Decide on a commission to pay them either monthly or based on orders.

Start a greeting card business: Work with experts

Hopefully, this handy guide helped you create a clear plan for starting a greeting card business. Without a roadmap, things can get chaotic. There are hundreds of things to manage. But now you have the perfect plan and tools to frame the perfect business strategies for your greeting card business. However, the main decision to take is the choice of the Ecommerce platform and a custom design tool.

Brush Your Ideas is a full proof solution to the dilemma in making the right choice for a custom design tool. Our Web-to-print developers can help get you up and running within just a few days. We design web-to-print solutions for multiple platforms like Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, Prestashop, OpenCart, PHP and so on. We also provide multiple custom integrations like Print Inventory Management solution and Print Job Manager.

Our product comes with the top functionalities that you need to acquire, engage, and serve your potential end-customers in the best way possible. We guarantee that our team of expert developers will guide you every step and be by your side to embark on this journey ahead. If you do seek any customizations for your greeting card business idea – we would not be surprised.

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