If e-mail and texting has you thinking paperless, think again.
Who still doesn’t love to get a real, hold-it-in-your-hand,
keep-it-forever letter?
If e-mail and texting has you thinking paperless, think again. Who still doesn’t love to get a real, hold-it-in-your-hand, keep-it-forever letter? Love letters, thank-you notes and even quick hello notes are very much in – even in a world where pop star Fergie does a summertime ticket-less concert tour sponsored by Verizon Wireless (with entry via phone messages).
“To get a letter in the mail is really exciting,” said Kathleen Neuman, 21, a senior at Loyola University in Chicago. Neuman, an advertising and public relations major, began writing home to friends and relatives in Ohio when she started school. And she’s found herself the subject of envy among her school friends.
“Everyone else is like, ‘Man, I wish I got a letter in the mail,'” she said. “But you have to write letters to receive letters. When you write them you get them.” Neuman keeps hers in a shoe box, including cherished ones from her grandmother who passed away a few years ago.
“She always signed her letters, ‘xoxoxo,'” Neuman said.
Six-year-old Kate Burgess of Hillsborough, N.C., is another prolific letter-writer who has a routine of stopping at her family’s roadside mailbox on her way home from school to see if she’s received replies, according to her mother, Alisa Burgess.
“I roll down the window and I let her get the mail out,” Alisa Burgess said. “She can tell a bill from a letter.”
Asked whom she writes to, Kate said mostly her cousins and friends. “Like, sometimes I say, ‘Have a good week or have a good weekend,'” she said.
Kate’s letter-writing started at Cameron Park Elementary School in Hillsborough, which has an in-house mail box for kids to write others in the school. Kate now has a collection of stationery and stickers given to her as gifts.
“I learned to write in kindergarten,” Kate said. “I draw pictures of people, too, sometimes.”
Stationery, card products and specialty paper including gift wrap is a $14-billion industry today, according to Dominique Schurman, CEO of California-based Schurman Fine Papers, which makes and sells its products through its 170-plus Papyrus stores and other retailers.
“It’s a way to stand out from the noise and provide someone with something really meaningful,” she said of old-fashioned correspondence.
Papyrus is doing a good business in blank correspondence as well as printed message cards that have room to add a few lines of your own. Women are the primary customers, Schurman said. Some customers bring in their own logos and artwork for custom-made cards, especially invitations.
Letter press stationery, where your initials or name are impressed into thick, good-quality paper, continues to be popular, she says. And once someone orders personalized stationery, Schurman added, they tend to be hooked.
In introducing paper lines, Schurman said she follows fashion trends, although there’s about a year lag time. This fall, for instance, Papyrus will feature in its papers, journals and inks, the metallics that are already popular in shoes and handbags. In the spring, expect paisley and the neon colors of the ’70s at Papyrus stores.
Designers have gotten into the paper business too.
Kate Spade introduced a stationery line in 1998, available at retailers including Papyrus. Martha Stewart has just introduced stationery and other paper products at www.marthastewartcrafts.com. And Target recently launched a new Web site with stationery and invitations and templates to print cards on home computers, www.target.com/mystationery.
Peter Hopkins, spokesman and historian for Crane & Co., the Massachusetts-based company that has been making stationery since the mid-1880s, said when it comes to buying stationery today, people still like white and ecru, but colors are becoming increasingly popular.
“Over the past six or seven years we’ve seen a huge increase in consumer demand for color whether that’s colored paper or borders or inks,” Hopkins said. “It appears with the explosion of color more so than ever, that one’s stationery design is a reflection of one’s personality.”
Hopkins added, “If someone’s using flame red paper from Crane’s, they are probably an interesting person, someone I’d like to spend time with.”
Of course, there are other ways to personalize your message.
Rebecca Chirlin, 23, of Marblehead, makes her own cards for special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries.
“If I do a card I do simple bubble letters with stickers and sometimes draw pictures and small things like flowers, and I did a couple of things with sequins on them,” Chirlin said.
Of the cards she sends, Chirlin added, “I think people like it and it’s a nicer thing to give than an e-mail. It’s more personal for the person who’s receiving it.”
Sylvia Katz, 82, of Lady Lake, Fla., admits she’s been doing more e-mailing than letter writing these days. Still, she expects to receive handwritten thank-you cards from her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Schurman said value is clearly being placed anew on the written word and letter-writing, both by schools and parents, who are teaching their kids to write thank-you notes and more.
“There is hunger for that again,” she said. “When e-mail started everyone said it’s the end of the paper business and we obviously have seen that hasn’t been the case.”
