Hallmark can suck it

1)     Card printing stations

2)     Most grocery stores and pharmacies have entire aisles dedicated to hallmark cards. Wasting shelf space and leaving consumers with a lackluster product.

a.      Who: Grocery Stores and Pharmacies

b.     What: Greeting cards are antiquated and take up space

c.      Why: No innovations have been made to the greeting card company even though many technological innovations have taken place.

3)     Testing

a.      Who: Consumers

b.     What: Consumers buy the same card for their loved ones even though there are ways to better customize their cards

c.      Why: Hallmark has made it so easy to just pick up a card sign it and be done.

4)     Interviews

a.      Person one (my friend who lives in the North East)

Interesting idea, you could always have a website online to customize cards there as well and have it shipped to people's homes or to whoever they gifted it to. Maybe have a function to add pictures yourself to further customize it making it very Interactive. People choosing out different shapes or set designs and drag and drop on a blank card of their choosing

b.     Person two (my friend from Miami)

I like the idea, I think the opportunity could go further by expanding into locations with high travel volume such as airports, rest stops, and hotels. I think a limit I see to the idea is once you start adding websites wouldn’t it be easier to just send an email? Also, the cost of shipping would take up most of our operation.

c.      Person three (friend from ST. Pete)

I see this having stiff competition from established companies such as hallmark and others that have an iron grip on this industry. Also, the limit to how useful this will be how long it takes to customize and print the product might just be too much to outweigh the benefits of it.

d.     Person four (Manager at Publix)

I don’t know how much this will catch on seeing as the card aisles tend to be less populated than our other aisles. Not a lot of traffic in that aisles. Also, I don’t know if every store out there would be able to afford buying a new machine just to fix a relatively small issue.

e.      Person five (My dad who worked with printers)

I think this is a great idea that’s just waiting for the taking. The other day your mother spent 15 minutes at CVS looking for the right card to fit a retirement party. That’s ridiculous so much space is being taken up by product that is not getting moved. I used to work on printers and I think this is a feasible idea.

5)     Overall, I see promise in this idea if not for a nationwide application perhaps for more populated areas that could see more traffic in stores. I know now that I need to account for reliability and usefulness.