Retail Interview Cards for Good Causes
All in the name of charity Naomi MacKay talks to Jeremy Lune, Chief Executive of Cards for Good Causes, about the organisation and what it does Tell us a little about you. I have more than 30 years’ retail experience, initially in the commercial sector with Sainsbury’s and House of Fraser, before moving to the charity sector. I have been in my current role for six years.
Tell us a little about the Cards for Good Causes’ history. Cards For Good Causes is the trading arm of The 1959 Group of Charities, which got together in, you guessed it, 1959, to collaborate and offer customers a choice of Christmas cards to support a variety of causes. The company itself was formed in 1988 and at its peak had nearly 400 pop-up shops. While retail trends and the pandemic have impacted this, we still trade in more than 100 locations, as well as online, with the support of more than 5,000 volunteers, and have passed back more than £35 million in the past 10 years
Can you explain more about your notfor-profit status and how that works? As a trading company, we want to generate as many sales as possible and pass back every possible penny to the charities that we sell cards on behalf of. Like any retailer, we have costs and we need to cover these, but our shareholders are national charities and we don’t pay dividends or bonus schemes. The past couple of years have often seen us trading at a loss due to external circumstances so when we do have profitable year, we either counter those losses to keep a
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“We trade in more than 100 locations, as well as online, with the support of more than 5,000 volunteers, and have passed back more than £35 million in the past 10 years’’
stable balance sheet, or pass back excess to the charities.
Tell us more about the premise behind how Cards for Good Causes works. Historically, charities give us their Christmas cards to sell and we take a percentage of the sales to cover our costs (we don’t make a profit) and pass back everything else. For the 2022 season, we are moving towards a royalty model, where we produce the cards on behalf of participating charities and pass back a royalty for each sale.
What about online sales? How are sales split between online and the pop-up shops? It won’t surprise anyone if I say that the balance is shifting towards online, and this was accelerated by the lockdowns in 2020. Online sales are becoming increasingly important to Cards For Good Causes, with the targeted split this year being 22% online vs 78% high street. This split isn’t as pronounced as many other retailers, but it is a significant shift from pre-pandemic levels when online sales accounted for just 4% of sales
Tell us more about the pop-up shops. We run two types of pop-up shop in the Christmas season - Traditional and Host which run from October through to the end of December. The Traditional shops are those where we provide everything (staff, till, display
equipment and volunteers) and rent the space. These are usually in spaces such as churches and community centres as well as, increasingly, empty shop units. The Host shops are those where we provide just the stock to set-ups such as libraries, Tourist Information Centres and cafes, which then receive commission as a percentage of sales. Again, the pandemic has changed so much for us and accelerated some changes that were beginning to happen anyway. In 2019, we had more than 300 shops but the impact of Covid meant that last season (2021) we were down to just 65. We are now looking to build upthe chain to a sustainable level - this year we have around 110 sites planned. Our most predominant sites are in the Home Counties, as well as places such as Bath, Stamford, Oxford, York and Edinburgh, where there is a good mix of our core customer base as well as tourists.
How do you source products? We buy our main card range from a longestablished group of UK-based, charity-friendly publishers. In terms of gifts, we tend to work with a network of established suppliers, although we are always on the lookout for new product ranges. Pre-pandemic, ranges were discussed at trade fairs and followed up with face-to-face meetings, although this obviously changed during the pandemic when these meetings took place remotely and ranges were chosen through online catalogues.
