If you need to wish your friend or acquaintances happy and belated birthday, or wish your near and dear ones merry Christmas, or send your beloved one happy valentines day wishes or perhaps say hello or offer a “get well soon” message to your bosom friend , you merely visit a greetings card outlet or visit an on the web greetings card website and send the required card. Maybe you have wondered what greetings card is about and how achieved it originate. When you yourself have the desire to understand, this information is for you.
So, lets focus on what’s a greeting card. Originally, greeting cards derive from postcards ( which are single sided with no fold ) and are an illustrated, folded card usually featuring a message of greeting and other sentiment poems to a loved one. They could be either printed or handmade. Now, with the advent of Internet though, virtual greetings cards have evolved which doesnot fit into the above-mentioned definition.
Although greetings cards are often given on special events such as birthdays, Christmas and other holidays, they are also sent on ‘non-occasions’ to express ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’ ;.They are manufactured and/or hand-made by countless companies big and small. Hallmark Cards and American Greetings are the greatest producers of greeting cards in the U.S. It’s the UK, where more cards per head are sent than some other nation. The UK continues as a world leader in this area, in addition to leading the entire world in the region of greeting card design.
What laid the inspiration for the greeting card industry and when and how achieved it all began ?
The custom of sending greeting cards could be traced back to the ancient Chinese, who exchanged messages of good will to celebrate the New Year, and to the early Egyptians, who conveyed their greetings on papyrus scrolls.
By the early 1400s, handmade paper greeting cards were being exchanged in Europe. The Germans are known to own printed New Year’s greetings from woodcuts as early as 1400, and handmade paper Valentines were being exchanged in various parts of Europe in the early to mid-1400s.
However, by the 1850s, the greeting card have been transformed from a somewhat expensive, handmade and hand-delivered gift to a well known and affordable way of personal communication, due largely to advances in printing and mechanization.
This trend continued, fuelled by new trends like Christmas cards, the first which appeared in published form in London in 1843 when Sir Henry Cole hired artist John Calcott Horsley to create a holiday card he could send to his friends and acquaintances. Technical developments like color lithography in 1930 propelled the manufactured greeting card industry forward.
Throughout the 1980s the trend began to show, with consumers increasing trying to find greeting cards that have been differentiated from the conventional offering. In the late 1990s industry was clearly beginning to separate directly into three different segments:
