You would think that Lynn Felter, army wife and a mother of 3, would be the last person you would imagine creating a line of cards that are filled with “sexual innuendo and crass jokes”, notes the San Jose Mercury News.
But talk with Felter for a few minutes, and the snarky sense of humor behind her new company Across the Line Cards begins to emerge.
“People don’t expect it from me because I look like a chubby sort of Cindy McCain,” Felter said in an interview at her Moreno Avenue home office Friday (for the record, Felter isn’t even slightly chubby).
“I’ll think of the most inappropriate thing I shouldn’t say and then I’ll say it,” she added with a laugh. “It’s nice to make money off it.”
Less than a year ago, Felter started sending out handmade cards with funny inscriptions to friends. The cards got rave reviews, so she mailed samples to retail stores and set up a Web site where they now sell for $2.95 each.
Felter said she and her husband, U.S. Army Col. Joe Felter, would often stay up with a glass of wine writing new slogans for the cards after their three young sons went to bed.
In January, Joe Felter set out for a 12- to 15-month deployment in Afghanistan, and Felter threw herself into the business. At the same time, Lynn Felter landed a sales rep who brought her samples to the Seattle Gift Show, resulting in orders for about 1,700 cards.
Felter, who was still printing and cutting out images by herself at home with a pair of scissors, hired four friends and two baby sitters to help with production. The group scrambled and got the order out in a few days. Felter said she has since hired GoodSource, Goodwill of Silicon Valley’s business-to-business division, to handle production, and Omega Printing in Palo Alto to print the cards.
Felter currently has 66 cards in her line, and about 30 stores around the country sell her products. Captions range from “Congratulations on your divorce! Nobody liked that bastard anyway…” to “Happy Valentine’s Day … I love you more today than yesterday. Yesterday you bugged the crap out of me.”
Photo from Across The Line Cards