Blue Mountain Cards Changed the Way We Send Greeting Cards

With its now signature style of soothing nature illustrations and freeform poetry and prose, Blue Mountain Cards offers a wide and popular selection of greeting cards for any occasion. A great deal of Blue Mountain Cards business comes from its line of electronic greeting cards designed for delivery over the Internet via email.

Boulder, Colorado husband and wife team Stephen Schutz and Susan Polis Schutz started Blue Mountain Arts (now including Blue Mountain Cards) as a way to spend time together and share their hobbies of painting and writing, respectively. 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 soon began to carry their posters as well. Stephen and Susan subsequently turned their artistic talents to the development of Blue Mountain Cards greeting cards and were the first to develop blank all occasion greeting cards for personal messages. Another innovation credited to Blue Mountain Cards was the introduction of expressive freeform poetry and prose to preprinted cards. The product line eventually expanded to include calendars, stationery, and gift books, and their customer base grew.

Blue mountain cards entered the Internet age in 1996 when it launched its website offering free electronic greeting cards. The idea to offer electronic cards was conceived when one of the Schutz children went off to college and the family began communicating 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 electronic line began with 35 basic designs for the more common occasions such as birthdays, graduations, thank yous, and emotional support. 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 now includes over a thousand different designs for every mainstream and obscure American holiday, as well as 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.