By many estimates, the greeting card industry is in decline, with sales shrinking and retailers moving to cut shelf space in recent years as birthday wishes and holiday greetings moved to social media and text.
But for those looking to send their loved ones something more than a text this Valentine’s Day but worried a paper card is a little too 20th century, consider e-cards, which in recent years have moved beyond the basic GIFs of holidays past, with digital card makers offering customization options, embeddable video, digital gift card options, and even artificial intelligence to help you draft the right sentiment.
“One of the first, biggest holidays of the year is Valentine’s Day for our greeting card business,” says Matt Douglas, founder and CEO of Sincere, the parent company of online card maker, Punchbowl.
Douglas, who prefers the term digital greeting card to e-card, in order to emphasize his product’s similarities to print cards, says his business got a big boost in 2020, when voyaging to a drugstore to buy paper greeting cards suddenly felt like a risky proposition. Just as organizations previously committed to in-person meetings suddenly saw the advantage of Zoom, envelope-and-stamp stalwarts came to explore the advantages of digital alternatives.
“We had never seen anything like it in our business,” he says. “It was an inflection point where all of a sudden, the world said, ‘I want to send a greeting card that looks and feels like a greeting card, but I don’t want paper.'”
And just as e-books offer advantages like adjustable fonts and searchability, digital cards bring some pluses, such as embeddable video and notifications when recipients open the cards, he points out. Even when Punchbowl’s cards do purposely emulate the physical cards of yore, they’re heavily customizable, with options to personalize the virtual envelope, stamp, and other design elements—within reason. “We learned the hard way you have to constrain some things,” he says. “Otherwise, consumers create abominations.”
Punchbowl is far from alone in the industry: Print greeting-card giants Hallmark and American Greetings each put their own spin on digital cards; Paperless Post (perhaps best known for the digital invitations featured in a recent Saturday Night Live sketch) offers holiday e-cards in styles from “simple and minimal” to “modern” and “boho”; and Someecards.com has its signature vintage-looking cards available for a range of occasions, from anniversary to divorce. Even NASA has gotten into the act, with customizable e-Valentines featuring satellites, spacecraft, and celestial bodies.
