Holiday greetings -1$ apiece

Opportunity: Quality greeting cards

Shopping for holiday greeting cards can be a chore - but at least it is manageable. However, finding the right greeting card in Romanian shops is outright frustration. Most supermarkets and all bookstores feature a greeting card section, but they all carry the same cards. The offer is divided between funny messages fit only for friends and tired-looking cards with designs from 30 years ago. If you’re looking for cards with a formal but innovative design, cards you can send to business associates or distant family, your choice is limited to 1-2 cards of the whole product line displayed.

Beyond this, cards displayed in supermarket or bookstore shelves quickly become an unintelligeable mess as customers rummage through them, and customer service is difficult to obtain and unable to offer any type of advice.

This opens a huge opportunity for a firm to use the model Hallmark so successfully promoted in other parts of the world - a wide variety of quality cards, as well as other gifts and ornaments, and friendly staff able to also expertly pack your gifts in dedicated locations.

This could be a homegrown model or a Hallmark master-franchise. If shop operation is not your thing, there’s also ample ground for producing higher-quality cards and distributing them through the venues already in existence.

Written by Sara


3 Responses to “Holiday greetings -1$ apiece”

  1. Areses Says:
    December 14th, 2006 at 7:16 pm

    This might be somewhat of on opportunity on the short term - but on the long term, I think people will send emails or e-cards. Greeting cards are obsolete.

  2. Steve Says:
    December 14th, 2006 at 9:05 pm

    e-cards are, of course, gaining in popularity but.. to recipients who are bombarded with so much electronic communications - email, sms, IM, etc - a high quality paper card might be appreciated more just for the very fact it is not another electronic message.

    also…you’ll still need that paper card when going to a party or giving a gift and so on…

  3. Elly Says:
    December 15th, 2006 at 4:01 pm

    I can’t say I’m a greeting card fan, nor that they are obsolete. But there are occasions when it is nicer to send greeting cards to friends and family than to send e-cards, or it is more professional to send quality greeting cards to business partners… Sara has a point. It’s difficult, indeed, to find an original greeting card here in Romania… and there are always people who buy cute stuff because they are nice and not because they really need it :)

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