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 go to a greetings card outlet or visit an on the web greetings card website and send the desired card. Have you ever wondered what greetings card is focused on and how achieved it originate. When you yourself have the desire to know, this short article is for you.
So, lets begin with what is a greeting card. Originally, greeting cards derive from postcards ( which are single sided without the fold ) and are an illustrated, folded card usually featuring a note of greeting and other sentiment poems to a loved one. They can 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 usually are given on special events such as for instance birthdays, Christmas and other holidays, they’re 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 biggest producers of greeting cards in the U.S. It’s the UK, where more cards per head are sent than every other nation. The UK continues as a global leader of this type, as well as leading the world in the region of greeting card design.
What laid the foundation for the greeting card industry and when and how achieved it all began ?
The custom of sending greeting cards can be traced back once again 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 possess printed New Year’s greetings from woodcuts as early as 1400, and handmade paper Valentines were being exchanged in parts of Europe in the early to mid-1400s.
However, by the 1850s, the greeting card had been transformed from a comparatively expensive, handmade and hand-delivered gift to a well known and affordable means of personal communication, due largely to advances in printing and mechanization.
This trend continued, fuelled by new trends like Christmas cards, the initial that appeared in published form in London in 1843 when Sir Henry Cole hired artist John Calcott Horsley to style a holiday card that 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 standard offering. In the late 1990s the market was clearly beginning to separate in to three different segments: