How did Blue Mountain Cards survive the dot com
Have you heard of Blue Mountain Cards? It all started back when ecards became big in the 1990’s. It seemed like everyone thought somehow giving away ecards was going to be a business model. What you must remember is that advertising revenue models were seen as very acceptable back then. This has no changed with people wanting to know where the real revenue is coming from. However, with web 2.0, you could argue that it’s started all over again.
Ecards are a difficult business space for me to understand. The business model is essentially one where you are killing another business model, the paper greeting cards space. It seems like the classic case of doing something through technology that was previously manual. But I don’t think it’s that simple. An ecard is not the same thing as a paper card. You buy a paper card at a store and physically write on it. An ecard comes from a company like Blue Mountain Cards and is completely electronic. The products here are just not the same. So in essence, the technology is really impacted the very product. This is not unique, just look at tvs, video games or any other electronic based market.
How exactly did blue mountain cards dig out of this hole? I’m not entirely sure, but I think that Blue Mountain Cards had a serious lead going into the game. They had a good plan. The top management at Blue Mountain Cards seemed to know that the ride would not last forever. So the company was sold while things were still really really hot in the dot com sector. An amazingly well-timed move. I’ll bet many people wish they had that type of timing.
So now it’s 2008 and what is a business model like Blue Mountain Cards still doing around? One view is that the original builders of the business picked an once-in-a-lifetime period to exit the business and made an unprecedented amount of money.. However, these were experience people who were also making a serious move in a serious industry. The greeting card business is huge. Regardless of their underlying financials, this business made a name for itself in a multi billion dollar business space. I am betting that this is why they are still around today. It’s a textbook case of building a brand in a new market. The part that is not text book is how Blue Mountain Cards got out at the top of the market. I guess that’s where a little luck goes a long way.