Focus on

Ever-expanding

Paul Urban, MD of Kingfisher Cards, talks to Greetings Today about the fantastic growth of the company, its best sellers and his biggest bugbear!

It’s been a few years now since Kingfisher Cards made its debut at the Spring Fair showing a small range. How much has that range grown? We now have more than 1,500 card designs covering all the occasions and relations along with a good range of open birthday. We also ventured into gifts for the first time with the Julie Dodsworth range from Broughton & Beech.

That’s some range growth! Is that what the plan always was? No, absolutely not! It’s really just snowballed. We concentrated on the task of producing good-value cards that were really high quality and as commercial as I could possibly make them. I guess it’s worked. What’s your focus? I’m not sure we really have one and maybe that’s the appeal. We do plenty of the obvious captions but we also do a huge amount of special captions covering at least 300 unusual titles. We needed a separate brochure just for those! Where on earth do you put all that as a small business? Not so small now! We started off with a small business unit on a self-storage complex, ended up with five, and now we’re in the process of moving out to a new 4,000sq ft warehouse of our own.

So is your distribution done in-house? Yes, definitely. I’m a bit of a control freak and I wanted to know that we could get orders out as quickly as possible with as few mistakes as possible. We get a few wrong but we do try to learn from every mistake. The warehouse team is really dedicated. What’s your most popular range? That’s really difficult. Caboodles, our cute range, has been phenomenal and exceeded my expectations because I’m not a big fan of cute myself. Sealed with a Loving Wish is very wordy and has a big following, and Calypso, which we launched recently, is very bright and different for us. The Special titles are important to us too. I understand you had shops when you were young. Does Kingfisher Cards fancy a High Street presence? No, I’ll leave that to others. I consider our job is to be the supporter of retailers, not a competitor to them. We won’t sell direct to the public with our own website, either. You still exhibit at both Spring Fair and PG Live. Are they worth it? Yes, absolutely, although they are pretty expensive. Spring Fair this year was excellent, we were swamped - and PG Live is just a fantastically focused greeting card show that I know the retailers love.

Do you enjoy the challenge of running your own company? What’s not to love? You never really switch off when it’s yours, you work crazy hours and the different commitments stretch you to the limit. But when it works, you feel great. Every retailer reading this will feel the same way. Your biggest bugbear? Seasonal sale or return. As an industry we effectively produce millions of seasonal cards and then throw a large percentage of perfectly good ones into a bin. If we really cared about environmental matters we should really do something about that, but it would need to be industry-wide.

01803 431515 sales@kingfishercards.co.uk www.kingfishercards.co.uk Quickfire round

Hardest thing about the industry? Suppliers who use Covid as an excuse for poor service and continue to do so.

Best thing about the industry? The passion. Everyone I meet is passionate about greetings cards Biggest challenge the industry faces? Footfall on the high street. We need retailers to sell to and retailers need footfall to sell cards. Unfortunately, successive governments don’t appear to care. Where will you be in five years? I’d like to think I’d be sunning myself on a tropical island but it’s more likely that I’ll be down at the warehouse keeping on top of it all!