The Evolution of On Line Greeting Cards
06/17/09
Blue Mountain Cards offers a wide selection of greeting cards created in its signature style of soothing nature illustrations combined with freeform poetry and prose. A large portion of the company business comes from its online Blue Mountain Cards greeting card products, which are delivered through electronic mail over the Internet.
Boulder, Colorado husband and wife team Stephen Schutz and Susan Polis Schutz started Blue Mountain Arts (now including Blue Mountain Cards) as a way to spend time together and share their hobbies of painting and writing, respectively. Combining watercolors that Stephen painted with poetry that Susan wrote into posters that appealed to the hippie mindset of the early 1970s, they persuaded a local bookstore to sell a few of those posters, which quickly sold out. Other stores soon began to carry their posters as well. Stephen and Susan subsequently turned their artistic talents to the development of Blue Mountain Cards greeting cards and were the first to develop blank all occasion greeting cards for personal messages. They also changed the content of preprinted greeting cards from the then prevalent rigid and formalistic poetic style to the expressive freeform poetry that Susan favored. The product line eventually expanded to include calendars, stationery, and gift books, and their customer base grew.
Blue Mountain Cards entered the Internet age when it launched its website offering free electronic greetings in 1996. The idea to offer electronic cards was conceived when one of the Schutz children went off to college and the family began communicating through email. Family birthday and holiday greetings were transmitted back and forth in this manner, and Blue Mountain Cards electronic greeting cards were born.
Blue Mountain Cards started with 35 basic birthday, graduation, thank you, and emotional support designs. The sender chose and personalized a design from the Blue Mountain Cards website, and an email notification was sent to the recipient, who then accessed the card through a pick up window on the website. The uniqueness of Blue Mountain Cards came from the fact that they were offered free of charge and were able to be edited to accommodate whatever personal message the sender wished to add.
Blue Mountain Cards now includes over a thousand different designs for every mainstream and obscure American holiday, as well as those of other cultures and religions, with French and Spanish language accessibility. By the end of the twentieth century, Blue Mountain Cards had become one of the most visited sites on the Internet, largely through word of mouth and testimonials of card recipients.
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