Customized photo greeting cards are a work of art
0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Oct 22, 2007 | by Anne Eisenberg New York Times News Service
When the time comes to pick a holiday card, many people choose a family snapshot, typically printed on a flat sheet of photographic paper, along with a greeting.
Now online photo services are offering an upgrade to the humble photopaper card — by selling fancy, folded cards that can display as many as 10 digital snapshots on glossy, high-quality paper stock.
The customized cards may be just the thing for people who can’t decide on one single, perfect shot. Instead, they can upload their photographs to a site and insert a handful of favorites into, for example, a card that opens like an accordion to display six panels – - each, for example, with a different, charming view of the new baby.
Or they can choose a traditional, folded card that accepts a collage of seven small photos on the cover, probably enough to show off everyone in the family, including the cat and dog.
Kodak Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com), Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com) and Zazzle (www.zazzle.com) offer cards printed on thick paper, along with gift items like calendars and mugs decorated with digital photos. Zazzle also offers customized United States postage stamps — images of dogs, babies and family members are especially popular.
Costs per card drop as orders grow larger, and envelopes, often in a choice of colors, are included with most orders.
Kodak Gallery has hundreds of original greeting card designs at its Web site. One square card of a snowman unfolds to display a photo in the center panel ($2.79 each for 11 to 25). Another, a double-sided accordion card, can be filled with options like two panoramic photos or 10 individual ones ($3.29 each for 11 to 25). The cards look classy and are sturdy enough to stand firmly on the mantel.
Shutterfly, too, has many sturdy cards on its site, including collage cards in a variety of styles ($1.79 each for 21 to 50).
People who don’t want to stamp, seal, address and mail their own cards can upload their address books from, for instance, their Palm hand-helds, and Shutterfly will do the job for 49 cents a card.
About 70 percent of the company’s customers are women, and more than half that number are mothers, said Jeffrey Housenbold, the chief executive.
“Women often are the people who take on the role of family historian or chief memory officer,” he said.
The potential market for cards and other customized photo merchandise is promising, said Alan Bullock, an analyst at InfoTrends, a market research firm in Weymouth, Mass. In 2006, online photo service providers had about $450 million in revenue, Bullock said, about 40 percent of it from photo merchandise.
Cards make up about a quarter of that 40 percent, and they may soon be even more popular.
“We see the folded cards being one of the fastest-growing segments of the photo merchandise market,” he said. “Once customers see them, they fall in love with them.”
To help the love affair along, some online photo service sites have signed deals with Target, so that consumers can see the cards on shelf displays and buy gift certificates that can be redeemed online for cards and other merchandise.
This season, Kodak Gallery, for example, will offer a boxed gift certificate in Target stores that can be exchanged for 11 accordion cards and envelopes ($35.99).
I tried out the Shutterfly and Kodak Gallery sites on a PC and a Mac. Both sites were easy to use. Their software found the photos stored on my computer and transferred them to their Web sites. Then I dragged the photos into place in different designs. At Kodak Gallery, I chose notecards ($1.29 each for 11 to 25) with a personalized photo on the cover; they arrived promptly in the mail. The colors were brilliant, the paper substantial and elegant.
To send the cards in style, I logged onto Zazzle and put the same image on a stamp that I’d used for the front of the note cards. Zazzle sells personalized stamps in three sizes ($14.95 to $18.95 for 20 first-class stamps).
Zazzle prides itself on quality control, said Bobby Beaver, its chief executive. I found this out first-hand. I ordered stamps three times, and twice received an e-mail message about errors I was about to make — in one case, I’d chosen a caption for the stamp that did not show up well against the dark background