It all started …

If we had the happy chance to sit and talk at my favorite, most-productive writing place of all — the seashore — and you asked me how and why I created this company, I’d start by explaining our name. It’s a play on the word “cathartic,” that freeing feeling that comes from getting strong, often long-held emotions out into the open. (You’ve likely seen celebrities on talk shows after writing their memoirs … they’re often asked, “Was that cathartic for you?!”) The name came to me in the spring of 1992 … having grown as much as I thought I was going to doing public relations in Chicago, I’d just sold my half of our PR agency to my business partner. My intention was to find something challenging and new to do living in Italy. Then I learned my father was dying.

Staying put in Chicago, over the coming months I wrote about all my fond memories and wishes for my dad. I’d always loved cards and, into dozens of blank ones, I poured all the things I still had time to say to this much-loved man — sometimes laughing, more times crying, as I did.

One night, after a major card-writing-while-wailing jag, I sat back — completely spent — and sighed, “Whew. What a cardthartic experience!” I remember cracking up at the thought of what my plain-spoken Midwest farmer father would make of such a crazy made-up word like “cardthartic,” that came out of nowhere!  Then, I must have tucked that word away somewhere deep inside.

When Dad sadly passed away that summer, my siblings and I received cards that were absolutely amazing. Well, the cards themselves were dreadful, but the personal messages penned by people who clearly shared a love for our father were beautiful, simple and profound. They thoroughly honored emotions. And written as they were by ordinary people — not trained writers, I mean — made the sentiments all the more extraordinary.

Reading such true and touching words, the career marketer in me couldn’t help but wonder, “Why don’t card companies publish real-life messages like these?!?” Having sold my PR firm and stayed in the States with time on my hands, I had to ask, “Hmm … why don’t I?!?” With that, all thoughts of moving abroad were put aside, and Cardthartic came to be. Well, the concept anyway.

Creating Passages

As if it were yesterday, I remember sitting on the floor of a big closet back in my Chicago apartment, rereading that stack of condolence cards. I’d planned to tuck them away in the box dedicated to such keepsakes but, there I sat, reading and crying and smiling all over again. Given that you’re reading this, I’m guessing you can relate!  Instead of putting cards in the box, I started pulling others out! I found scores of cards and notes that my clever and, at the time, alive-and-kicking mother had sent me throughout my life. I loved re-reading the gushy letters from long-lost boyfriends and grinned at the notes scribbled by crazy college pals. Taking in all the great and different ways people had of honoring emotions, in that box I found the inspiration for our PASSAGES line.

Take this message college roommate Laura Cendejas penned in a birthday card around 1980, and that we still publish to this day: “In a world so full of change, I’m thankful one thing is constant: Our friendship.”

Then and there, an exhilarating sense of purpose kicked in. As I culled through the scores of saved sentiments, it was clear that they would resonate with many more people than just me. In the days that followed that night, I was on a roll. My PR career had given me the opportunity to do so much and varied writing, as well as to launch and promote products for some of the world’s most successful brands — The Chicago Bulls, McDonald’s, Miller Brewing Company, Motorola — so I thought how hard could launching a fresh new voice in the out-dated card market be?!?  (Haha, how naive I was! The answer I now know is: “Very.”)

I culled 48 potential messages from my keepsake box, tweaked them and then asked the “authors” for permission to publish them. For images, I reached out to childhood friend Larry Kanfer, who — in the years since we’d headed off to college and lost touch — had become a well-respected landscape photographer. I also cold-called photo editors of Travel & Leisure, National Geographic and Islands magazines for photographer suggestions, and they all kindly introduced me to their favorite freelancers. It was a given that our cards would be Made in America with soy ink on recycled paper. Cardthartic had its Passages line!

Keeping it Real

It was exciting to get a call from a trade editor saying she’d received our press release announcing the launch of Passages. “So, how would you describe your new cards?” the editor asked, and I proudly replied, “Relevant and intelligent.” Nothing but silence, then giggling on the other end of the line. “What a concept!” she laughed, and went on to explain that she believed, “Sadly, ‘relevant and intelligent’ hardly applies to this $7 billion industry.” At the time, that was both sad and true. Two decades ago, you could really only find sappy, schmaltzy, and trite.

I felt I knew from personal experience what was missing in the marketplace: Cards that honored emotions with depth and authenticity. Cards that said things a real person would actually say. So, for our Passages cards, we continued to mine card messages from actual notes, emails, and good old everyday conversations about life’s joys and challenges. When someone would comment, “Your card sentiments sound so real!” we could say, “That’s because they are.” And, when people told us, “You say just what I would if I could,” we considered it high praise. And still do today!

Growth is Good

With the Passages line going strong, a decade later we began seeing an uptick in the submission of terrific images of kids and pets, so could not resist launching our Little Reminders line. As cute as they may be, they’re still very true to our core mission of honoring emotions. As the backs of these cards all say: “By their very being, kids and animals show us how to live freely and love fully. May these Little Reminders inspire us to follow their lead.”

Back in my Chicago PR days, I’d received a great piece of advice from highly-respected package designer Bill O’Connor: “To create breakthrough products and packaging,” he said, “look at all the products on the shelves, and see what’s NOT there.”

Our Meanings of Life line began that way. I have always been intrigued by symbols and their significance, and knew many other people are, too, yet there were no cards that attempted to do what we wanted to: Share all the interesting, accessible little anthropological stuff. We chose to begin with a few of my favorites — the winged heart, spiral, dragonflies — which are still among the most popular today. We have more than 150 icons to date. Of our Meanings of Life line, we’re always proud to hear people say, “Wow, I never thought I’d learn something from a card!”

Full Circle

Today, we publish 730 total designs, all still Made in America with soy ink on recycled paper. The cool part is that, up until about five years ago, I was writing all these cards. Now, we have such an amazing following, that a good many of our best messages bubble up from our Cardie Community! With every new release, we aim for at least half of the card
messages coming from community members. Just as with our very first designs, we’re gratified to say they sound so
authentic because they are!

Cardthartic cards, magnets, boxed notes, art prints, and minicards are carried by 2,000 Retail Partners in the US and Canada. Because we choose not to be sold everyplace (just the best places (:-) and not all our Retail Partners have space for such a selection, we offer everything here online.

As much as I love our website and ever-growing community of Cardies who buy online, it’s so much more fun and inspiring for us all to shop in our Retail Partners’ stores! There, beyond Cardthartic, you get to see all the fabulous products these eagle-eyed retailers have sourced, along with their awesome in-store merchandising. And, boy do we admire the tireless way our wise, independent Reps provide service and counsel to these store owners and buyers, as if those stores were their own.

We say it all the time, “We’re not a company doing business with other companies; we’re people doing business with other people.” And we do love our people! So, at online checkout, you’ll see that we ask Cardies to give us the name of the local store where they love to buy Cardthartic so we can split the sale with that Retail Partner. We began that practice in March of 2020 when all those great stores had to close their doors due to the pandemic. It’s felt so good to practice what we preach about “In it Together,” that we’ve just kept the revenue-sharing going!

On We Go

One of my favorites is Passages birthday card 93494 featuring the little girl jumping hopscotch. It reads, “It’s when we get into the higher numbers that the game really starts to get interesting.”  That, of course, goes for businesses as well as birthdays! It astounds and frankly saddens me that only three percent of all US women-owned businesses ever generate more than $1 million in annual sales; we are proud and grateful to well-exceed that. Looking back, I chuckle at how clueless I was starting out, thinking, “How hard can making better cards be?” when it is so very!

Back at the beginning, I clearly had no idea that creating a good, strong card entails nothing less than conveying peoples’ most intimate, innermost emotions. Oh, and figuring out how to say Happy Birthday 1001 different ways! As our CEO Ana Behm wrote our colleagues in a note one Thanksgiving: “I feel blessed to be making a small difference in the world, doing work that I love, with wonderful people I enjoy.” For this, and work that is truly best done while sitting on a beach, I thank my dad. I can’t wait for the day we have our first Cardie Con and card-lovers from all over come sit and have a Cardthartic Experience with me.  (:-j

 jodee stevens
founder & chief creative