If you are looking for an extra revenue stream, are creative and imaginative then making your own greeting cards to sell could be the perfect business.

Ok this is not for everyone, the greeting card business is very competitive so you really have to be creative with your designs but the beauty of greeting cards is that the materials are very cheap and the profits can be high (people will pay a premium for a handmade card).

I ran a greeting card business a few years ago on a very small scale, I didn’t have time to pursue it but you can make a reasonable income from it.

What materials do you need?

High quality envelopes are essential, Lizs crafts sell a huge selection of envelopes and craft materials on Ebay, the great thins about them is you can buy in small quantities (they sell them in bathes of 100) if you check the other envelope retailers you generally need to buy in amounts of 1000+

Good quality card. You can buy card from art shops but it tends to be very expensive and not cost effective. I bought my card from the paper mill. The paper mill is a seconds shops for paper and card board, there is one in Livingston and one in Salford Keys. It works out very cheap around 4p per A4 sheet of card which will make 2 greeting cards.

Cellophane envelopes. Lizs crafts also sell the cellophane envelopes and they do various different sizes.

Other crafts you may need could be: ribbon, thread, tissue paper, felt, ink, paint, pens, coloured pencils, glue. One suggestion is to have a look at what odds and end you have lying around your home, you can use virtually anything, old beer bottle tops, jiffy clothes, string, fabric, buttons.

Card making ideas I used: when I made greeting cards I used a variety of designs ideas: Marbled paper, Anaglypta wallpaper samples I got from DIY stores, Old acetate I printed onto, Hand stitched lettering that I sewed directly onto the greeting card. All I can suggest is try things out, if they don’t work then you haven’t lost out on much.

Where can I sell them?

Selling them is actually the more difficult part to making them. I had various different places that I sold my greeting cards, find out if there are any craft fairs running in your area. You generally need to pay for the hire of the table for the day but you can usually make a good profit from the days sales depending on how busy the fair is.
Carboot sales are actually another unexpected place to sell greeting cards, I happened upon it just by chance one day when I was selling stuff from a clear out I had done. I sold a lot of cards I didn’t sell them for as much as I would have done at a craft fair but I made quite a lot of money.

If you can get a shop to sell your cards then this is by far the easiest way to do it, because you don’t need to physically be there to sell them, they do all the hard work. I got my cards in a few shops in Glasgow, it can be quite difficult because most shops buy from wholesalers and are not so keen buying from individuals. The best thing to do is phone up the shops first and find out what time of the year they buy their stock. If you can arrange for the buyer of the shop to see your stock before they visit a wholesaler you will have a much better chance of them buying your cards.

If you are being really serious you could consider selling your cards wholesale, one of the best places to see what the competition is like is Topdrawer, which is a gift fair that runs a various times in the year in London and Glasgow. It is expensive to have a stall at Topdrawer but if you get enough orders from shops then you could make some serious money and you will probably get repeat business from the shops as well.

How much profit are you actually talking about?

Profit depends on whether you are selling them yourself minus any stall costs or whether you are selling them to a shop which normally buys them for between 30% – 50% less than the price they will sell them at.

In this example I am assuming you are selling them yourself and there are no other costs to consider.

Envelope- 20p
Card- 2p
Cellophane envelope- 10p
Trimmings 30p

Total costs = £0.62 per greeting card, you could potentially sell the greeting card for around £2.50 making you a profit of £1.88!

Other things to think about are: selling greeting cards is essentially running a small business, and you need to pay TAX on any profit you make. If you don’t know what you should be doing then get in touch with the Inland Revenue and make sure you are doing everything correctly you don’t want to end up owing them Tax at a later stage.

If you are under 30 the government run various start-up schemes that they award grants to get small businesses started. If you live in Scotland then get in touch with business gateway to see if you are eligible, another place to try is the Princes Trust who also award small grants.

Postcards.

Believe it or not the humble postcard is a huge money maker, if you find the right printer postcards can cost pennies to make and you can sell them for anything up to £1.50. If you don’t think you can be bothered with making greeting cards then postcards is the way forward, most shops don’t sell arty postcards so there is a much less competitive market

I made greeting postcards as well as greeting card. I used the online printer Vistaprint, at the time I used them it cost around £7 for 100 cards including delivery. This is very cheap for such a small run; if you go to a high street printer they will probably laugh if you quote them a price like that.

I sold most of my postcards in art galleries at 70p per card and they kept 30% of the amount as their profit. If you can get enough outlets for your postcards you will make a nice second income from them and when the shops want more you just need to reorder them from the printers. EASY!