American Greetings, Crane & Co. Team Up

GDA Staff -- Gifts and Dec, 11/18/2010 2:21:57 PM

Cleveland, OH - Greeting card company American Greetings Corp. and fine stationery manufacturer Crane & Co. Inc.  announced a multi-year partnership to produce a greeting card collection called Perfectly Said by Crane & Co. The collection is being launched in Wal-Mart exclusively, American Greetings spokesperson Frank Cirillo told Gifts & Decorative Accessories.

"This collaboration represents a great opportunity for us to pair our editorial excellence with the best-in-class craftsmanship that Crane & Co. offers," said John Beeder, senior vice president, executive sales and marketing at American Greetings. The cards will be printed on higher grade paper stock, allowing for a greater number of special finishings.

American Greetings will produce and distribute the cards, Ann Usher, new business manager at Crane & Co., told Gifts & Decorative Accessories. The deal is structured as a licensing agreement.

"We recognize that although we have a very successful card line under the Crane & Co. brand, we were really selling cards only in a very small distribution channel. [...] we're missing a huge part of the greeting card market. [...] We really wanted to expand the reach of our business in the greeting card category [...], and the best way to do that was to partner with one of the companies that is the master of those sorts of mass channel business models," said Usher. Crane is not concerned about the line stealing customers from its existing greeting card line, she said, since the existing line has more of a "niche sensibility".

Plans are in the works to expand the line beyond Wal-Mart into other American Greeting distributions, according to Usher, but there are no plans at this time to extend the line beyond greeting cards into other products.