How not to get started as a Greeting Card Publisher #3
or ripping it all up and starting again...
What started as quite a light-hearted series about how I got started designing greeting cards, see Part 1 and Part 2 , has actually prompted more than a few serious questions from you like;
How do you price cards for the current market?
What marketplaces and resources do you use?
Barcodes, do I need to use them and how do they work?
VAT (sales tax) should I register from the beginning?
What type of cards sell best?
If I had to do a Trade Show today, which one would I choose?
Don’t worry I’ll be returning to the story soon, but now I’m thinking I might have a useful amount of knowledge and experience to share with you.
When I first started ten years ago, there wasn’t huge amounts of information available online so I did my research the old-fashioned way, basically, trial and error and some lucky breakthroughs finding certain people and organisations that have helped me and that I’ve used constantly since I started
Nowadays, there are courses on Domestika, Udemy and Skillshare on how to design and sell greeting cards, but I’m not entirely sure they cover the questions above?
So my question to you is, what would you like to know, have you thought of producing a range of greeting cards but don’t know where to start? Do you have a question to add to my list? Would you find it useful to get into the nitty-gritty of everything I know? Just hit reply and let me know what…
Now, where was I?… Ah yes, I was going in the wrong direction and I knew it, in fact
mentioned this recently, not about me (we’ve never met), but what to do when you want to burn your business to the ground (it would’ve been useful to have read her post back then), it’s the exact position I was in, I wanted to sweep everything off my table in a dramatic style (like they do in the films), plonk down a (beautifully illustrated) map and plot a brand new course.Thankfully, a chance meeting with a larger publisher gave me an alternative to think about.
If I wasn’t going to self-publish my card ranges anymore, what if they took on all my current greeting card collections and pay me a royalty instead?
This would mean they’d do the trade show circuit and I’d still be earning something from them, therefore taking away all the sales and marketing aspects, the stress of finding new stockists and giving my overwrought, overthinking, ‘just over it’ brain a big break.
Sound too good to be true? Well, it would also mean a big hole in my finances, royalties are nice but no where near the amount I was making when selling direct.
With greeting cards it’s all about volume sales, depending on who you are selling to you can be making anything from £0.50-£2.50 profit per card sold, if you sell 20,000 cards in a year, that’s a minimum of £10k. To do this full time, as a living, I’m hoping you see now the need for warehousing, palettes and staff.
Then, if selling through a third party that’s reduced to 10-12p per card sold (if you’re lucky) and 2-4p if it’s to a distributor, you would need some serious volume sales to make up the difference, but it was still an income from work I’d already done so at this point in time it felt an attractive offer, and definitely better than burning my business to the ground and starting again. Plus it would give me back my creative time, what I was missing most and so I decided to try it.
Where did this leave me, what type of business was I left with?
A lifestyle business is a business set up and run by its founders primarily with the aim of living or maintaining a certain lifestyle. It's meant to be a business which adjusts to the lifestyle - so that the founder can live their life as they like. Wikipedia
We’d already started to travel a lot and were renting a place in France, so any work that I could do from ‘any’ location was very attractive. If it didn’t fit this criteria then the answer was no. Having these restrictions really helped in defining how I’d shape my future business.
Once I’d been introduced to the concept of royalties, I started to see other opportunities, Thortful had just launched in 2015, I joined as a founding member, Moonpig approached me and I started designing for them a couple of years later
Thortful started with paying artists an almighty 50p per card sold, several years in they reduced this to .30p (having over spent on TV adverts and marketing according to one, possibly a little disgruntled old member of staff). It has changed as a platform over the years, but it’s a good place to start if you’re wanting to get started.
This card went viral on Thortful, let me know if you received it/sent it or recognise it?
The original model I used for this is Tilli, sadly no longer with us, but I know her owner was so pleased to hear the joy she was giving others and still is.
Next up in my quest for a lifestyle business was freelance illustration. I met Dicky Bag at a dog show I was doing and they asked me to design a pattern for them (my first freelance illustration job), 6 years later this is still one of their best selling designs and we’re launching a 3rd design this year at Crufts.
I’ve not even mentioned my pet portrait commissions, these were my side-hustle when I very first started working towards a creative business, but I enjoyed them, I improved over time and all of a sudden these took off aswell. They now account for a third of my annual turnover.
A lifestyle business it was then, no need for staff (phew), outsourcing was my new best friend, I outsourced my branding to Rosie Robinson, my product photographs to Richard Bryan, a tweak to my Shopify shop to a developer I found on Fivvr and lastly, those who’ve known me for longer know I started some new ranges of greeting cards and started to self-publish again (albeit on a much smaller scale) I outsource my printing and packing to the Imaging Centre and fulfillment to a warehouse. I continue to design for Thortful, Moonpig, a number of smaller card marketplaces, like, Cardly and Touchnote, I publish my own cards, prints, coasters and take on freelance illustration work alongside my commissioned paintings.
I also joined the Design Trust Business Club, over the years they’ve really helped me stay on track and fill in any knowledge gaps I had in running a creative business.
A happy ending after all, the publisher I worked with was Natural Partners Art and I know the owners are regularly on the look out for new artists to work with, if you feel you have a collection ready to publish and would like to dip your toe in, you could always contact them…
If you’d like to support me further, you can buy cards and other things (I have some tea towels and coasters available alongside my usual cards and prints) direct from my shop, or you might consider upgrading to a paid subscription, at the moment all I have are a couple of free downloadables for paid subscribers so the main benefit of upgrading would be for the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting a small creative business, but just sharing this post with a friend you think will find it useful would be marvellous too!