With Father’s day around the corner, many people have found themselves waiting until the last minute to grab a card for the dad in their life. While some will get the card out on time, others will find themselves in a bind while last minute shopping for that perfect card. Unless they decide to card shop at GreetingBee.com.
For the cost of the average greeting card and stamp, you can visit GreetingBee.com, customize a card, and they will mail it to the recipient for you. There is no hassle and the card shopping is done direct from your computer.
Tell us about GreetingBee.com.
GreetingBee was conceived to apply a fun, fresh, and innovative approach to the creation of one-of-a-kind custom greeting cards and to allow anyone to send environmentally friendly paper cards with the same convenience as sending an e-card.
With our service, there are no more trips to the post office or lost time trying to find the right card. Anyone with a web browser can quickly create a unique greeting card from scratch or from one of our designer templates and have it professionally printed and mailed.
What inspired you to launch your business?
I believe that some of the best ideas for new products come from solutions to your own problems. I thought that surely there was a good way to create a unique card and have it mailed from a home computer with all of the modern conveniences that the internet offered in 2006. What I found was overwhelmingly dissatisfying.
So, one summer day in 2006, I found myself rushing around in the scorching Phoenix heat trying to find an appropriate birthday card for my Grandfather who was turning ninety. As I stood in line at the post-office waiting to overnight a card that I wasn’t completely happy with, I became compelled to create a service to solve the problem of mailing professionally printed cards that anyone can make using a home computer and their web browser. Soon after, I recruited the services of my long-time friend and very talented artist, Brian Westergaard, to manage the art production side of the business. Together, we set out to make the service a reality.
What separates you from the competition?
As long-time video game developers, we borrowed technology and techniques from video game production to bring fun and interactivity to making custom greeting cards. Rather than limiting our customers to rigid pre-designed templates, we created an environment that provides complete creative freedom.
Everything about our card designs, from the card’s text all the way down to the candles on a birthday cake, can be edited using a simple drag and drop interface. We provide an extensive library of additional graphics for our customers to place on their cards; each graphic or text element can be rotated, resized and positioned to suit a customer’s personal taste. We also gave them the ability to add their own photos to any card without placement restrictions. Essentially, we took the power of a traditional desktop card design application and made it available to anyone with a web browser.
We found that a card by itself is sometimes not quite enough, especially for birthdays and around the holidays; so we began offering to insert gift cards to some of the nation’s largest retailers into the envelope along with the professionally printed greeting card. We also found that some people like to design their cards weeks ahead of time and schedule them to be sent on a certain date; so we began providing the ability to schedule cards for future delivery.
Our customers can quickly make a one-of-a-kind custom card, include a gift, and schedule the card for delivery weeks or months ahead of time to as many recipients from their address book as they see fit. It’s really the combination of all of these features that sets us apart from the competition. To our knowledge this combination is unique within the greeting card industry.
How many different cards and styles do you currently have available?
We currently offer more than two hundred and fifty exclusive card designs in a standard 5”x7” folded greeting card and a 5”x7” flat card which is popular for photo cards and invitations.
How much does a card cost?
GreetingBee operates on a tiered pricing system with prices ranging from $2.65 plus postage and handling for a single 5”x7” folded greeting card all the way down to $1.60 per card for orders containing one hundred or more cards. Larger orders benefit from increased production efficiencies at the printing press and we believe in passing those savings directly to our customers.
Our flat cards typically run about $0.10 to $0.20 cents less than our folded greeting cards and start at $2.50 plus postage and handling for a single flat card and drop to $1.30 per card for orders above one hundred cards.
Both card styles are professionally printed with environmentally friendly inks on Forest Stewardship Council certified, store-quality, card stock and are mailed inside of a premium envelope with an affixed first class stamp.
What are some of the goals that you would like to reach over the next year with the business?
Our goals are probably similar to most young companies: growth in our customer base and increased brand awareness. Greeting cards are a natural vehicle for viral marketing and easily integrate into the social networking websites that are so popular these days. We expect GreetingBee.com to increase its presence in this area as we try to build community awareness around our product.
Do you think we can expect to see other customizable options to sell with your cards, like custom gifts, stickers, etc.?
We’ve actually talked about custom stickers and additional product lines as natural extensions to our card design technology. For now, we’re intensely focused on delivering a single product line, greeting cards, announcements, and invitations. There’s still a lot of room for innovation in the greeting card space. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some exciting announcements from GreetingBee this year.
What previous experience did you have that you were able to apply to your business?
Developing a technology heavy greeting card publishing business requires engineering expertise, artistic talent, and the management experience necessary to execute a business plan. We were able to leverage our extensive careers in the video game industry, managing the production of blockbuster games for clients such as Microsoft and Sony, to create the perfect marriage between art, engineering, and management experience.
What lessons did your business teach you?
For an internet business, SEO or search engine optimization is everything. Establishing a customer base is challenging and takes a great deal of time and effort. Most people are under the impression that once a new website goes live, customers instantly start flocking to the site via Google and other search engines. The truth of the matter is that it takes many months to build a successful SEO campaign that lands your website on the first page of the search results.
Had we known the extent of the problem, we would have engaged a SEO expert earlier in our website’s design process. There are lots of so called SEO experts in the field. The main lesson we learned is to do your due diligence and find a reputable provider; an incorrectly executed SEO campaign can be more damaging than no SEO at all.
Do you have any advice you’d like to share with anyone who might be interested in entering into the greeting card industry?
Selling greeting cards is a cents per unit sold kind of industry. Controlling overhead expenses is paramount. Consider working from home, doing the hands-on work yourself, working with students from local art schools, and contracting freelance labor. Services such as oDesk.com allow you to build a virtual workforce that scales with seasonal demand without the expense of traditional office space and without the additional payroll overhead of a direct hire employee.