Winter 2007

Carding Home the Profits By Randall Mielke

A Place for Boxed Cards

For most retailers and vendors in the greeting card industry, boxed greeting cards are entities unto themselves.

“The individual cards that are sold at the checkout counter cannot be the same as the boxed sets,” says Dave Phipps, communications manager for Avanti Press Inc. “The boxed set needs to be a more general application. When you buy boxed cards, it is your personality. A counter card is more to the person. The boxed cards say something about you. It is like you put your brand out there.”

And putting the boxed sets out for display sometimes takes a little effort. “The seasonal boxed cards take up a huge chunk of the card department,” says Steven Wardlaw, a buyer for Faces in Northampton, MA.

“We pack up a lot of the everyday cards and make room for theholiday ones. We spend time rebuilding fixtures that are in storage during the rest of the year to display the seasonal boxed cards.

Randall Mielke

Mielke is a freelancer who writes about retail, business and economic development for a variety of publications.