What's Up With the Greeting Cards?
My Motivation
A good place to start is to say what is NOT motivating me. This is not a motivation to make money. I don't need money nor do I desire to profit from this endeavor. I am doing this to bring people together in more meaningful ways.
For the most part, I am not a creative person. It's unfortunate, but true. As much as I love music, I do not play an instrument. As much as I love the arts, I am certainly no artist. I don't live a life of regrets, but I do wish I had done some things differently in my youth. My only excuse is that I was lazy. I did what was fun or what would put money in my pocket.
Despite my creative shortcomings, I have always been fascinated with photography. This goes back to my high school days in the late 1970s. I would be the kid that would bring my Minolta 35mm to the party and take photos of my friends doing what we did back then. I have continued my passion of photography to this day and have combined it with my travel, which is frequent. Whether on business or pleasure, I tend to bring my camera with me on all my trips which is not always to the liking of my favorite travel partner, Diane. I must admit, it can be pretty boring and frustrating for her to watch me photograph a bee for 15 minutes, only to find another bee just a few flowers away. I am annoying that way.
Over the years, I have worked meticulously to improve my photography skills and I'm actually proud of what I can do now compared to 15 years ago. I have captured a nice portfolio of random subjects from landscapes, cityscapes, animals, nature, sunrise/sunset, and my latest obsession, very long exposures of water scenes. This leads me to my greetings cards idea.
Finally, I Segway to "What's Up with the Greeting Cards?".
It's actually a combination of things that began with conversations that I had with my mom, Shirley, late in her life. She told me on multiple occasions just how good it made her feel to get a card from someone in the mail. She would talk about that for days and that stuck with me to this day. She never threw any of them away. I know this, because I have boxes of them with me now, longer after her passing.
Secondly, I have worked in the technology industry since 1984 when I graduated from college from Southern Illinois University - Carbondale and I have been a part of the digital transformation over the last 4 decades. This has served me well as far as m career goes, but I am nostalgic about things of the past, including the simplicity of sending and receiving letters or cards in the U.S. Postal Service. Cryptic text messages or a voice message seem to be the preferred way of communicating these days. I'm guilty of that as well.
So, in early 2023, I got a "creative" idea to make my own brand of Greeting Cards. I was actually very proud of myself because it was truly creative, and that is a side of me that I don't see very often. So, I made a silent pledge to myself to FOLLOW THROUH on this idea and not drop it at the 10 yard line.
My idea was to create hand-crafted greetings cards that were centered around photography. At first, I was determined to only use my photographs only, but I quickly realized I can easily allow my customers (you) to send YOUR OWN PHOTOGRAPHS to me and I can us them for the greeting card just the same. An example might be you want to send a good luck card to your grandson attending attending his first day of school. In this scenario, you can send a photo of the two of you for it to be displayed on the cover of the greeting card. This is one example, but the list is endless.