How to Start a Greeting Card Business in 2026 beginners step by step guide from scratch

i'm gonna be sharing my personal experience of how made 500 in my first month of selling greeting cards and basically how you can do it too so first you have to decide if you want to sell printed or handmade cards obviously these ones are printed so printed them in bulk but you can also sell handmade cards so you can just make it handmade and if you're not sure how you can digitize your art then you can actually just youtube it didn't know how to do this so just did this on adobe illustrator just searched how to digitize my art after you figure out how to digitize your art or if you are going to do handmade card decide on the size because when you go look for envelopes you want to make sure your card is like the right size like it's like standard size that will fit into envelopes so for me i'm in canada so what did was and like before sold cars had no idea what sizes like were popular so actually just searched like what are the most popular greetings card sizes in canada and found out it's 5x7 card or 4.25 times 5.5 card which is this is the like the smaller card size so after designed it in adobe illustrator then searched for print shops in my area used google maps and then took look at their website lot of print shops do lot of different things so it's really hard to get quote on their website so actually called up couple of them asked about their paper what it would cost like give me an estimate and it's actually even better if you can go in person because then you can like feel the paper and like the thickness you can look at whether you want like glossy finish or like matte finish so once you find print shop that you like it's cheaper if you print lot of cards so for me was selling these around christmas time and yeah guess that would sell bunch so think the first time printed maybe like 30 or 40 of each one of these designs and would say it was about one dollar per card that was like the cost of printing so then after you've printed your cards you want to take some nice photos so what you can do is you can actually buy like one dollar poster from the dollar store you can put it down on your floor and you can lay out your cards and take some pictures in like from different angles you can take if you have like set of cards like me then you can take picture with all four cards but you can also take them individually to take bunch and some nice props you can use are just like dried flowers or leaves or ribbon and if you're making handmade cards you don't have to make like 50 cards at once would actually just make couple samples like maybe would make three designs and just like one or two of each and then you can like take pictures of them if they're handmade now after you have beautiful pictures of your cards you then want to think about more of the business stuff like how are you going to price your cards now pricing cards it will depend on where your location is and the design of the card like the paper the size of the card but generally what you can do is would search online for similar cards especially if they're from like small businesses so don't look at like hallmark or like those or walmart cards look for small businesses who sell something similar to you and then see what they price the cards at so for me the first time priced the cards think it was about it was either four or five dollars per card and then also sold it in set of four cards and made it little bit cheaper with the set if you're selling handmade cards it should be lot more expensive than printed cards because you're going to like you actually have to take time to manually create the cards themselves so when you do your research search for handmade cards and look for some something similar to yours and you can price it around that by the way do have business plan template that you can download for free and this will really help you to get started with thinking about how to run your business do some market research find your competitors and kind of like figure out your pricing so if you want to download that it's in the link in the description now if you're just starting out with selling cards have three suggestions of where you can sell the cards the easiest way is definitely just selling it to your friends and posting it on your own social media this is actually what did when first started out would literally just post it on instagram and ask my friends to order and then could like meet up with them in person they would give me cash or would collect payment with credit card and if you haven't collected payment before you can use platforms like paypal stripe or wave these are all free platforms that you can use to collect credit card payments but there is small 2.9 fee which is like very very standard fee if you collect credit card you're gonna have to pay that so other than the payment collection platform for your for credit cards you might need something else just to collect the order so let's say you have some cards like mine and you have like couple of designs and maybe you have like two envelope colors the easiest way is actually to just create google form and then you can get your friends to order there then you can invoice them using paypal stripe or wave or you can collect cash and then you can go from there now if you want to make it little more guess professional which you don't have to when you start out think using the google forms and just selling to your friends on social media is like such genius way because think lot of the times we'll underestimate how much our friends can support us and they actually really do like if have friend who has hair salon who just started hair salon and let's say even if she charges more would go to her would want to support my friend rather than going to just some random like hair salon so if you want to explore some other platforms definitely try out etsy it's very easy to set up very easy to use it's very straightforward and then another way you can do it is to set up e-commerce on your own website this does require bit more effort but in the long term it's like it's good to just have website if you're having if you're starting an art business so some websites you can start off with researching are squarespace they have really easy e-commerce platform or you can use shopify and then there's also lot other ones like wix wordpress but you can research those if you're enjoying this video so far make sure you give it thumbs up and take screenshot of this video post it to your instagram and tag me at dina calligraphy love it when can connect with my fellow subscribers and my followers and would love to shout you out back if you gain couple more followers my next tip for you for getting sales when you start your greeting card business is actually to start it around the holiday time definitely the holiday is like the easiest time to sell greeting cards because everyone buys greeting cards during that time and that's when started my greeting card business it's easy to just launch people will buy christmas cards anyways so it's just easy to start around that time now if you're watching this video and it's like february or march and that's like not near the holiday time you can definitely still start but focus more on like happy birthday cards anniversary cards you can get started on those and then when christmas rolls around definitely come out with couple of like holiday designs know that starting business can seem very very daunting and scary but want you to remember you don't have to wait until your cards are perfect or your photos are perfect or your website is perfect or instagram is perfect just start doing it and would say if you can do things to about 80 percent good then you're okay so don't let perfectionism stop you and good luck with your greeting cards if you're interested in more videos about how to start business or side business with your art or calligraphy then make sure you check out these videos right here and i'll see you in the next video bye you