And remember class. No Goofing off

The Greeting Card industry has been declining since the turn of the 21^st century with the rise of the internet, and adoption of social media into our daily lives. Hallmark and American Greetings have seen diminishing returns year after year and have had to shrink their production and lay off most of their workers. While venturing into a market that is seeing diminishing returns the market is still nothing to brush off. At 1.5 billion dollars annually, the market is still breathing, and with two companies losing their costumers year after year, I believe it’s all for the taking. That’s where my venture comes in. I propose an innovation to the greeting card industry that we sell B2B in order to revitalize a nostalgic product with a new experience.

My innovation consists of a replacement to the physical greeting card isle, opting out for a printing station that lets customers choose their desired design of card, customize it, and print it out for a similar low price. The business would sell these printing machines to chains of grocery and convenience stores and have our machines in their stores. We would set up contracts for our them to use our machines. In the contract we would keep up with maintenance while we get a portion of the profit.

Through this class we conducted server opportunity assessments such as interviewing potential customers, researching different market segments, talking to experts in our field and doing other kind of things all in order to find out where to best target our innovation to serve an unmet need and fully use the entrepreneurial ideas taught in this class.  I interviewed many students who I believed could be a good market segment as they are young and as such are adaptive to new technologies and innovations. They thought the idea was good and they would buy into it as long as the price was affordable, and the convenience didn’t get hindered as a result of all the new technology. I also interviewed middle aged people between the age of 40-50 and found that they too would adopt it as long as it’s not too complicated and it would retain the personal touch a handwritten card would. While speaking to industry insiders about my innovation they warned to stay in large volume areas where more people shop and to avoid selling too small in rural areas as writing up contracts and producing these units might be too costly if I don’t get on mass production route soon.

With that I believe Publix would be my first target costumer, it would be hard to try to retain my rights to the technology as they might try to make it a part of the Publix brand. However, this would be a small problem as I would then soon after finding success regionally, move on to national chains such as Walgreens and CVS. Once those start generating revenue I would want to move larger scale such as Walmart, Target, and other large stores that sell internationally and so on. Once I have contracts with all national retailers and stores I can think about going public or staying private. Of course, as the company gets bigger and bigger More and more money would need to be invested into maintenance and upkeep in all the locations we have a printer set up.