Welcome to Boomf - the home of personalised cards and gifts which go the extra mile. Earlier this year, it introduced its Modern Woman line, which touches on themes like promotions and the frustrations of trying to be a superwoman-"things a few years back that women weren’t concerned with or were too up-tight to laugh about,” said Rachel Bolton, a Hallmark spokeswoman.Treat your favourite people to personalised cards and gifts they’ll never forget Hallmark, however, has launched a number of alternative card lines.
Hallmark instead chose to open a chain of party-goods stores, another format it had been testing. Hallmark recently abandoned Heartbeeps, its two-store alternative retail experiment, which had been open for a year. Ellen Mora, vice president of Recycled Paper Products’ retail store division, said the company has helped open 15 stores under various names since last September and will assist in establishing 17 more by this fall.ĭespite the growth, some alternative stores have not succeeded. Recycled Paper Products has its Rocs alternative card store in Chicago, which serves not only as a retail outlet but also as a model for independent operators interested in setting up shops. Now it sells alternative cards along with such gift and stationery items as the $2,000 fuchsia plant, which Rubin said is “outrageous” but “will sell.” He said store sales hit a record high the first weekend Small World was opened under its new format. The Small World store at Puente Hills Mall once featured mostly such products as the “Hello Kitty” line from Japan-based Sanrio. Rubin, a founder of the Art Explosion chain, was hired by Denver-based Coach House Gifts of Denver to change its 30 It’s a Small World stores into alternative card shops. Chain Store Age, a trade publication, reports that annual sales of a typical mall store average $167.60 per square foot. A card store in an ideal location can generate annual sales averaging $300 to $500 per square foot and running as high as $900 a square foot, according to store operators. Because cards tend to be impulse purchases, such shops benefit from the heavy volume of customer traffic.
The cards are being sent for any and all occasions, not just for such special events as birthdays and anniversaries.Īlternative card shops are increasingly opening in malls. The big appeal of alternative cards is that they offer a cheap (85 cents to $3) way of communicating messages and images appropriate to today’s life styles. Hallmark has offbeat lines like SummerTree Press, Love Talk and Lite, which it calls “a third less serious than regular greeting cards.” American Greetings also has alternative lines and is testing Squiggles and Giggles, its version of an alternative card shop, but will not disclose where the stores are or how many it is testing. Artists and photographers are discovering a new outlet for their talents, and enterprising entrepreneurs are cashing in with stores that go by such names as Aahs!, the Card Factory, Art Explosion, Paper Doll and Freudian Slip.Įven the big card makers are getting into the alternative act. The increasing popularity of alternative cards is catapulting once small-time card makers, such as Recycled Paper Products, Paper Moon and California Dreamers, into multimillion-dollar companies with worldwide operations.
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