MIAMI, FL--(Marketwired - Mar 25, 2014) - "What do you get when you cross poison ivy with a four-leaf clover? A rash of good luck." These, or other more traditional jokes, wishes or sayings are printed on millions of St. Patrick's Day cards that people sent and received all over the country on March 17th this year. St. Patrick's Day, or "Lá Fhéile Pádraig", as the Irish call it, is a cultural and religious holiday that commemorates the death date of Saint Patrick, the patron of Ireland, who lived from AD 385-461. Saint Patrick's Day was made an official Christian holiday at the beginning of the seventeenth century to celebrate the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. It is a celebration of the Irish heritage and culture in general and by no means restricted to Ireland. Irish and non-Irish people all over the world dress in green, party and send out greeting cards to their Gaelic and not-so-Gaelic friends.
On average, this amounts to approximately 7 million St. Patrick's Day cards every year. And compared to Christmas, this number is not even that impressive: Each December the USPS delivers around 1.6 billion merry wishes all over the U.S. The tradition of sending greeting cards is even older than Saint Patrick -- it can be traced back to the ancient Chinese, who exchanged messages to celebrate the New Year, and to the early Egyptians, who conveyed their greetings on papyrus scrolls. Europeans started to exchange handmade paper greeting cards around 1400 and by the 1850s they had become a popular and affordable means of personal communication, mainly due to the advances in the printing technology. Louis Prang, a German immigrant, started the greeting card industry in America with his small lithographic business near Boston in 1856. Today, Americans purchase approximately 6.5 billion cards every year, making it a profitable market that Matt Argall, an avid entrepreneur, is now looking to venture into.
While printing techniques have changed over the centuries, cards are available in a multitude of different paper types and the sentiments got a more modern twist to them, the basic idea of a greeting card is still the same: Expressing friendly wishes to somebody we care about. Businessman Matt Argall has been watching the greeting card industry as a possible new business venture, and with retail sales summing up to roughly $8 billion every year, it is not hard to understand why. Despite the increase in electronic greeting cards, the popularity of paper cards has not faded. Some marketers even say, especially younger generations, who spend a lot of time during their work and free time in front of the computer, value traditional cards and continue to buy them.