Having talked to various friends and families to develop some ideas I also thought I would find out a bit more about the greetings card market generally. This helped in terms of understanding the brief and refining my approach to the cards. According to the Greetings Card Association the UK greetings card market was worth £1.5 billion in 2015 (up by 5% on 2014).
The statistics are fascinating and not necessarily what you might assume given the digital alternatives:
- Everyday cards increased by 60.1 million on 2014
- Birthday cards £564 million (up 10.4%)
- Relations and occasions cards £586.4 million ((up by 17%)
- Christmas cards are 12% of total card sales
- 85% of all cards are bought by women
- the market includes 1,000 publishers, and there are 400 members of the GCA (350 are micro/small businesses)
- £50 million was raised for good causes from charity card sales
Greeting cards are divided into a number of categories:
- Spring season
- Valentines
- Mother’s Day/ Father’s Day
- Easter
- Everyday
- Ages – Birthday specific
- Everyday – congratulations, Engagement, New Home, New Job, Get Well etc.
- Relations – specific family members
- Christmas: Singles or counter, and Boxes or multiples
- Wedding Anniversaries
I also discovered there is something called the Henries Awards for Greeting cards and they use slightly different categories:
- Cute
- Contemporary Trend
- Wholesale
- Traditional words – sentimental
- Contemporary words – sentimental
This additional research helped me think more about the possible markets for my proposed cards and who their buyers might be.
