Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Meet Card Cafe

Hello, my name is Dave Miller. In the spring of 2004 myself and my partner Teague Bengtzen were busy running a busy commercial printing company. I had an idea and met a friend at his house to get his opinion on my idea. This meeting with my friend Dwayne sparked a completely new and different idea. As soon as I arrived back at to the office, I walked straight to Teague’s office. I explained this new and very raw idea. This big idea was to creating a web based application, from which consumers could select from a collection of greeting cards, or create their own cards by uploading their own photos, then personalize the card, enter the recipients address and their return address and then we would print and mail the card for them. For the next few days Teague and I were constantly in and out of each other’s offices expounding on the idea. We almost wore the carpet out. From this Card Café was born.

Almost immediately work got underway to develop a system in which we, and others, could leverage the advantages of current technology, while always maintaining the personal and intimate nature of real paper traditional greeting cards. Card Café partnered with industry leader, Kodak, to acquire the digital technology to make this happen, then developed an industry leading web site. We also, immediately began to raise money to fund this new venture. We contacted as many friends and family as we could to get our first round of funding. Raising capital was new to both of us and although we made several mistakes along the way, we obviously raised enough to move forward. We will talk more about our failures and successes of raising money in the coming weeks.

Today, Card Café is a leader in the online greeting card industry. Card Café gives customers the ease and convenience of shopping for real greeting cards and gifts from their computer without the hassle of spending unnecessary time at a store. In addition, our company gives customers the ability to add gifts to the cards and schedule all their greeting cards at one time for a year in advance. Card Café is still a very young company, we have experienced several bumps in the road, and we have had to improvise, adapt, and overcome. We are currently in growth mode and working hard on our business to business sector. Teague and I look forward to sharing more about our journey in business in the coming weeks.

Posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Card Cafe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.