Digitalisation, cell phones prove too much for greetings cards

Executive Director of Archies said that times keep changing and blamed the cell phone for the near decimation of the culture of sending and receiving greeting cards.

Amaravati: Sandesh Mahadevappa (44), a Vijayawada-based senior Postal Department employee, recently rang in the new year by posting 30 greeting cards to his near and dear.

Mahadevappa, who is familiar with pre-cell phone life in India said buying and posting greeting cards is his small way of keeping up an old tradition, which has almost faded away to the ‘allures’ of digitalisation.

Varun Moolchandani, Executive Director, Archies, India’s top greeting cards company said times keep changing and blamed the cell phone for the near decimation of the culture of sending and receiving greeting cards.

“Greeting cards constitute just 10 per cent of Archies revenue now when they alone used to contribute 40 per cent 25 years ago,” Moolchandani told PTI.

Similarly, sensing the bleak future in store early, Indian conglomerate ITC had wound up its ‘Expressions’ greeting cards business many years ago, despite possessing robust paperboards, paper and packaging businesses.

“We (ITC) have withdrawn. We are not into greeting cards at all anymore. Long time back we have withdrawn ourselves from greetings cards (business),” an ITC Executive confirmed to PTI.

Reeling under the digital curse, Archies was compelled to slash its design studio employees from 85 in 2000 to 30 in 2023.

Tirunagari Praveen (37), a short film director from Malkipuram doesn’t remember when he last bought a greeting card or received one but noted that all the greetings he received for Christmas and New Year, including the ongoing Sankranti festival were Whatsapp forwards.

Before the smartphones, Praveen said he used to receive greetings through short messaging service (SMS).

M Kalyan Kumar (30), who runs two popular gift shops in Vijayawada noted that his shops stopped stocking greetings cards five years ago due to lack of business and highlighted that digital greetings come at no cost through WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and others.

Neither of his shops sold a single greeting card for New Year 2024 while they have been dusting some 30 leftover pieces every December to sell but failing.

However, this was not the case a couple of decades ago as Kumar highlighted that greetings cards were a rage back then, so much so that several traders in Vijayawada’s Besant Road market used to set up additional stalls outside their stores to sell hundreds of varieties.

Not only Vijayawada, places such as Bhimavaram in West Godavari district also used to see seasonal traders setting up makeshift stalls to cater to the demand in December and make a quick buck.

P Poorna Chandra Rao (53), a stationery shopkeeper near the defunct Venkatrama theatre in Bhimavaram fondly recalled the brisk greeting cards demand around Christmas time, especially from aquaculture migrant workers from Kerala.

“Those days we had the speciality of selling a greeting card for every occasion. If somebody was leaving overseas, we had a sendoff greeting card, a card to say Thank You and a card to say sorry but now there is nothing,” added Kumar.

And to cope with this rush, the 150-year-old Department of Posts used to set up dedicated post boxes for greetings cards.

In the 90s, the main post office in Bhimavaram had dedicated post boxes for greeting cards to metro cities, marked as ‘Greetings to Bomaby’, ‘Greetings to Calcutta’ and ‘Greetings to Delhi’.

"We used to set up dedicated greeting card post boxes for Presidency towns to meet the rush. We have five Presidency towns, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi," said G Siva Naga Raju, Assistant Director, Andhra Pradesh Postal Circle.

Besides the Presidency town boxes, an additional green box also used to be added for mailing cards locally, along with supplementing all these boxes with gunny sacks as they used to run over.

Further, Kumar observed that digitalisation also ate into the sales of diaries as cell phones come with digital diaries.

To counter the decline, Moolchandani said Archies is banking on bunching greeting cards sales with other items and also introduced greeting card gift packs, among other strategies.

The Postal Department came up with e–post greetings, which entails taking messages or images from customers and printing them on an A4 size paper for same day delivery.

Moolchandani observed that a Whatsapp greeting can get deleted in seconds whereas a tangible greeting card will remain as a memory for life.