88 ANNIVERSARY ACHIEVEMENTS To mark Eco-Friendly Card’s 30th Anniversary, Louise Prance speaks to Sue Morrish about the company’s journey Congratulations on your 30th anniversary! What were the reasons behind the initial launch of Eco-Friendly Cards? Glebe Cottage Studio (the original name of The Eco-friendly Card Co) was established with the help of the Princes Youth Business Trust by a young photographer, Scott Morrish, who was fresh out of art college and looking for a way to fund his new darkroom. Publishing cards with images of rural Devon, where he lived, seemed a good idea and Scott drove around the country lanes visiting selling his cards to independent retailers such as post offices and garden centres and Glebe Cottage Studio was born. A few years later after I (Sue) joined the business we started offering cards from south-west artists to increase the diversity of our offering to independent retail. What was your business strategy when launching and how did you plan to innovate the market? There wasn’t a strategy! If anything it was an accident, we tried something and found it worked, and built on it. As the business grew it became clear that we wanted to produce unique and beautiful cards for independent retailers in the most environmentally responsible way possible, whilst also being competitively priced. Trying to get suppliers to think about “green issues” in the nineties wasn’t easy – often we were seen as a bit eccentric, for example by asking for recycled paper. We were the first publisher to use compostable packaging for our cards all the way back in 2006 and were also the first direct-to-retail (DTR) card publisher to hold our own FSC Chain of custody. Now we have a whole list of environmental commitments that apply to all our products that include the materials we use, how the cards are printed and carbon-balancing our paper
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