Blue Mountain Cards Changed the Way We Send Greeting Cards

Blue mountain Cards offers a wide selection of greeting cards created in its signature style of soothing nature illustrations combined with freeform poetry and prose. A large portion of the company business comes from its online Blue Mountain Cards greeting card products, which are delivered through electronic mail over the Internet.

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. Combining watercolors that Stephen painted with poetry that Susan wrote into posters that appealed to the hippie mindset of the early 1970s, they persuaded a local bookstore to sell a few of those posters, which quickly sold out. Other stores quickly followed suit. 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. Their customer base grew along with their product line, which soon included calendars, stationery and gift books.

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. The family would send birthday and holiday greetings to each other in this manner, and the Blue Mountain Cards electronic greeting card industry began.

Blue Mountain Cards started with 35 basic birthday, graduation, thank you, and emotional support designs. The sender chose and personalized a design from the Blue Mountain Cards website, and an email notification was sent to the recipient, who then accessed the card through a pick up window on the website. 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. Blue Mountain Cards has since grown into one of the most visited sites on the World Wide Web, mainly through customer and recipient word of mouth.