This article first ran in the Newsletter on July 14, 2011

Applying a Little Leverage

Let’s talk about designing, shall we? Artists and photographers can spend hours working on one card design, getting it exactly right. The color, composition, design elements and text have to come together to make an appealing and attractive package.

You decide your design is perfect for a birthday card. You upload it, add some snazzy inner verse that’s quite clever, if you do say so yourself. And you sit back with a smile, waiting for the sales to roll in ‘cause that card’s clearly a winner.

But somehow, the sales don’t come. Or you sell one here and there. What’s the matter with shoppers, anyway? Don’t they see how brilliant your card is? Why aren’t they buying?

To get to the bottom of the conundrum, we’re going to have to touch on a delicate subject, one which has baffled, disgusted and riled artists since GCU’s beginnings. I’m talking about…repetitions.(cue dramatic crescendo)

Yes, those long, never ending, tedious lists of duplicate cards that pop up in the New Cards section. The same design, repeated over and over, the only difference being the age, relationship, or both. THOSE cards. You know what I mean.

A couple of the most asked questions from the GCU forum come to mind – “How can any artist possibly stand to do all that repetition?” and “How can customers stand to wade through all that repetition – it’s so boring!”

I’ll start with something which may not have occurred to some artists: Greeting Card Universe is a retail site meant to entice shoppers and fulfill their needs. I understand why artists might view 100+ cards of the same design with dismay, but shoppers don’t think that way, and they aren’t using the site the same as you are.

Very often, when shoppers come to GCU, they do so through a search for a specific kind of card, such as “happy 50^th birthday to my uncle.”

When shoppers are browsing, they’ll often start with a specific category, then drill down as needed. For example, the other day I had a shopper buy a card after browsing Invitations >> Wedding Attendants/Bridal Party Invitations >> Be My Ring Bearer?

Your sales notifications can make interesting reading.

The beauty of GCU is that shoppers can have it any way they want it – they can do an off-site or on-site search for a specific card, or they can dig into categories and sub-categories until they find what they’re looking for, or a combination of both.

Another thing to note is that per the Big Kahunas at GCU, who presumably know best, shoppers hardly ever browse the New Cards section. It’s just us artists who can be a wee bit obsessive about it.

As to how artists can stand the mind-numbingly task of creating duplicate cards, the answer is simple: money. I make repetitious cards all the time. It’s boring. Believe me, I’d much rather be doing something else. But I keep myself going by thinking about sales and how much money I’ll make when shoppers buy my cards. It’s a powerful incentive, especially now that I have several years worth of data telling me that for me, specific cards outsell general cards by a significant margin.

Apparently, people like sending a “Happy Mother’s Day to my Birth Mom” card in lieu of a general Mother’s Day card, even when the designs are the same.

Don’t forget that when shoppers are either browsing by drilling down categories, or searching for a specific card, they rarely see duplicate content because all those repetitive cards are each in their own sub-categories. You see them in a big boring lump in New Cards, but in reality, they’re scattered across GCU’s categories list.

When I make a new design for a category like Father’s Day, I consider how best I can leverage that design to make it go as far as it can and work for me as much as possible. If appropriate, I make a general card + a series of relationship cards or age specific cards. I might also recycle that design for a totally different category, since by GCU’s rules, I can use the same design 3 times (age and relationship specific cards count as one use).

Do the work once, leverage it to work for you many times.

If you can’t bring yourself to do age and relationship specific and other repetitious cards, I understand. This isn’t for everyone. As I said, it’s a lot of work. However, if you feel like you can stand it, leveraging your designs could work for you.

P.S. – I’ve been told that UK card buyers prefer blank cards. There’s no reason you can’t include one blank card as one of your “three image use” designs. In fact, many artists already do that to cover all the bases.

Here’s a Newsletter article that first ran in October 2011:

Little Orphan Category

What’s an “orphan” category, you ask? It’s a category at Greeting Card Universe that contains few or no greeting cards. It’s a category that’s neglected. Unloved. Begging for attention.

And you should give those poor little orphan categories your attention. Know why? Because adopting an orphan category can lead to some very nice sales for you because you’ll have hardly any competition.

Here’s how it breaks down: in a popular category like, say, Birthday – General, you’re competing with thousands and thousands of other artists, some of them pretty heavy  hitters whose cards are well established. Some sub-categories, however, are wide open with very little competition. By focusing on those, I may be able to take advantage of my fellow artists’ lack of attention by designing cards to fit those neglected sub-categories.

It gets better, because sometimes you can find a whole CATEGORY that contains very few cards, and adopt that as your own. I did that not too long ago, and I’ve already sold a few hundred cards – and no, I’m not telling you which one 

Most of us design generic cards suitable for a multitude of recipients, but in addition to that, if you want to see your artist commissions go up, you should be designing cards for specific specialty categories and sub-categories … and you should also be adopting those poor, lonely orphans while you’re at it.