There have been several articles about greeting card sales I the US during the pandemic that are worth reading:
- Fast Company: Remember greeting cards? They’re making a COVID-19 comeback.
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Greeting card sales stack up in pandemic. ‘It’s quarantini time!’.
- Newsday: In a season marked by the pandemic, Christmas cards make a comeback.
As I go through data for the Q4 2020 newsagency sales benchmark the results in Australia are similar to what you will see in the above articles. Not in all stores but most. The growth was most prevalent in the stores with a stronger gift and giving success as the two go hand in hand.
The card category has had a good covid. Sales are up, hopefully in a way that sticks through 2021.
Across in the UK, the news is not so good with City A.M. reporting a tough year for Card Factory, the card retailer now supplying the reject Shop in Australia with cards.
Closed stores over the Christmas period meant Card Factory suffered significant losses, sending its shares down 4.1 per cent this morning.
Card Factory experienced a year-on-year decline of over 38 per cent, where forced store closures prohibited openings for 37 per cent of available trading days.
Sales over the eleven-month period fell from almost £425m in 2019 to £281m in 2020.
The greeting card retailer said it expected to report a loss before tax of around £10m for the year, compared with a pre-tax profit of over £65m a year earlier.
Executive chairman, Paul Moody, remains convinced that Card Factory resonates strongly with its customers and will bounce back from a tough year.
He said: “Despite the obvious uncertainties in the first half of 2021, I am confident that we have the opportunity to return the business to sustainable profitable growth and will do all that is necessary in the near term to ensure that we can maximise that opportunity.”
Card Factory’s online services performed very strongly, achieving like-for-like sales growth of 137 per cent during the same period.