Season's Greetings

With the market for greeting cards on the rise, Russian companies have found that there's money to be made in New Year's wishes.

For proof that any holiday can be given a political spin, take a look at Soviet New Year cards from the space-race days of the 1960s. One card shows two children holding a Voskhod rocket aloft. Another features a child in a space suit descending the gangway of his ship, where a big-bearded Ded Moroz welcomes him to Earth with bread and salt.

These days, though, Russians prefer showier cards with raised illustrations of galloping troikas and snowy forests, and handfuls of glitter sprinkled on top. What's more, while the same Soviet-era cards would remain in circulation year after year, the greeting card market is now on the rise.

Competition is fierce among leading Moscow card companies for the most eye-catching postcards of Ded Moroz, the Russian version of Santa Claus, and the snow maiden Snegurochka, both traditional symbols of the Russian New Year. In a departure from the Western Christmas colors of red and green, Ded Moroz wears a floor-length blue robe, while Snegurochka sports a luxuriously fur-lined blue dress and long blond braid.

"For Russia, the main New Year colors are blue and white," said Tatyana Shchelkova, the product development director at the Moscow-based greeting card company Art & Design. "Russian people love traditionally drawn designs of Ded Moroz, of his troika of horses."

A division of Ohio-based holding company ZPR International Inc., Art & Design started business in Moscow only 10 years ago, but now sells over 100 million cards per year, Shchelkova said. It competes with other leading Moscow companies such as Mir Otkrytok and Otkrytoye Pismo, which is licensed to print Hallmark Cards.

"I think that Russian people always loved greeting cards, and now as the supply from greeting cards manufacturers is growing each year, of course everybody can find something," Shchelkova said. Although Art & Design is licensed to print Western designs, most of its New Year cards are created in Russia, to fit in with local tastes. This year the company printed more than 250 different designs.

Other than images of Ded Moroz and Snegurochka, one of its best-selling greeting cards this year features a rooster, the animal of the year, according to the Chinese calendar. "It's very popular to give a card with the animal of the year ... which you will never see in the United Kingdom or the United States," Shchelkova commented, saying that they sell "huge amounts" of such cards.

Christmas cards were first produced in Russia in 1898, and soon became a popular tradition. The custom died out in the early communist era, but began again in the 1950s, recast and mass-produced for the Soviet New Year.

Despite print runs of as high as 30 million, well-wishers of the 1950s and 1960s were left with little consumer choice, since the same few designs were repeated year after year. Rather than folding cards, the New Year cards of this period were often flat, with designs inspired by the latest economic achievements: rockets, lit-up apartment blocks and building cranes.

New Year is still the leading holiday for greeting card makers, Shchelkova said, with International Women's Day and Valentine's Day — a recent introduction — next in terms of sales. Religious symbols are making a comeback on Orthodox Christmas cards, although these remain far less popular than New Year cards.

"Now Russian people are getting closer to religion ... and many people would like to congratulate [others] with such cards for Christmas," the director said.

Last week, staff at Art & Design, which is based in an office on Maly Gnezdnikovsky Pereulok, were finishing cards for next year's Easter celebrations and for high school and college graduation, which take place in late May. After the sales figures come in for this year's collection, they will start working on next year's New Year cards.

"We are a very big wholesaler and we also work with big wholesalers, so, you know, the way of the card is long," Shchelkova said. "We start preparing the collection in early spring."

Other staffers at Art & Design were working on birthday cards last week. One designer was constructing an elaborate paper creation that opened up into a three-dimensional model of baskets of flowers. Another was assembling a collage of photographs of a tie, a glass of cognac, a shoe, a bottle of wine and some corks for a man's birthday card. The office had a quiet, heads-down atmosphere. "In spite of the fact that they are creative people, they have a plan," the director said.

Photographs of vases of flowers and frosted Easter kulich cakes were arranged on a stand. These are raw material for illustrations, and are shot in an in-house photo studio. Later, the images are embellished with colored backgrounds and glitter. The flowers used in the photo shoots are given to the workers, Shchelkova said.

"We make more than 2,000 designs a year," she continued, adding that it can take as little as half a day to put a card together. Designs are only repeated if they are bestsellers, so approximately 95 percent of them are new every year. "The market is growing very rapidly, and mostly the market demands new designs," Shchelkova said.

The texts inside the cards, however, are often reused. Ranging from four to eight lines, usually in rhyme, they begin by describing a New Year scene linked to the picture on the front of the card — "Snegurochka walks in silvery snowflakes, after her comes the wonderful New Year" — and then bless the recipient of the card with the "love of relatives," "friendship" or "luck."

"Not everybody can write something inside, and people prefer to buy a card with a text," Shchelkova said.

In humorous cards, the text plays a central role and tends toward slang. One Art & Design card this year shows a collage of dollar bills, and wishes upon its recipient "money that chickens simply don't peck," an expression meaning fabulous wealth and referring, in part, to the Chinese animal of the year.

Although editors work on the premises to correct the texts, most of the writers are freelancers, Shchelkova said. "For cards in a classical style, it's mostly women. For humorous designs, it's mostly young men."

Many of these freelancers live in other cities and communicate with the company by e-mail. What's more, Shchelkova said, unlike the designers, they don't need a higher degree to be hired. "We don't care about your age, your position or where you graduated from."

While greeting card writers never get the satisfaction of a byline anywhere, in the United States they at least have a higher profile. Hallmark Cards holds a writers' tour, which allows authors to meet members of the public and hear how the cards have affected their lives.

Since 1988, the American Greeting Card Association has even held an annual Oscars-type ceremony, at which card-makers receive golden statuettes called Louies for their work. Among the categories is a prize for cards in foreign languages, which Art & Design pocketed in 1999 for a folksy, hand-drawn image of Snegurochka.