Blue Mountain Cards Bring Innovations to the Greeting Card Industry

With its now signature style of soothing nature illustrations and freeform poetry and prose, Blue Mountain Cards offers a wide and popular selection of greeting cards for any occasion. A great deal of Blue Mountain Cards business comes from its line of electronic greeting cards designed for delivery over the Internet via email.

Blue Mountain Cards was founded by Boulder, Colorado husband and wife team Stephen Schutz and Susan Polis Schutz as Blue Mountain Arts, originally as a vehicle for them to spend time together sharing their hobbies. Stephen and Susan combined their watercolor and poetry design into posters that appealed to the early 1970s hippie culture and convinced a local bookstore to carry the posters, which quickly sold out. Other stores soon began to carry their posters as well. The Schutzes then directed their attention to the development of Blue Mountain Cards greeting cards and introduced the blank all occasion greeting card for personal handwritten messages. They also changed the content of preprinted greeting cards from the then prevalent rigid and formalistic poetic style to the expressive freeform poetry that Susan favored. The product line eventually expanded to include calendars, stationery, and gift books, and their customer base grew.

Blue Mountain Cards entered the Internet age when it launched its website offering free electronic greetings in 1996. Blue Mountain Cards electronic greeting cards were born from the Schutz family practice of communicating with their son, away at college, through email. Family birthday and holiday greetings were transmitted back and forth in this manner, and Blue Mountain Cards electronic greeting cards were born.

Blue Mountain Cards started with 35 basic birthday, graduation, thank you, and emotional support designs. An email notification containing a link to the Blue Mountain Cards website was sent to the card recipient, who accessed the card through an electronic pick up window on the site. The uniqueness of Blue Mountain Cards came from the fact that they were offered free of charge and were able to be edited to accommodate whatever personal message the sender wished to add.

Blue Mountain Cards has since expanded to include over a thousand different designs that cover every conceivable American holiday and those of other cultures and religions, with French and Spanish language accessibility. By the end of the twentieth century, Blue Mountain Cards had become one of the most visited sites on the Internet, largely through word of mouth and testimonials of card recipients.

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