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INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | DECEMBER 8, 2000 CLICKS & MISSES By Larry Armstrong A Christmas Cheer for Shutterfly Standard e-cards leave a lot to be desired. For that personal touch, check out what this innovative Web site is doing with old-fashioned, ink-and-paper greetings
But I've been on the receiving end, too. There's nothing quite like opening your inbox and finding an e-card from Blue Mountain or Egreetings sitting there amidst the spam. Open it, and there's a hyperlink to retrieve it, along with a little advertisement promoting the e-card company. No matter how appropriate or charming or clever it is, it always seems to be accompanied by a message from the sponsor: stuff to buy at Blue Mountain -- as if you forgot to include a gift. At Egreetings, it's "print this card," as if you were too cheesy to send the real thing. Call it ad-supported thoughtfulness. I guess I'm an old-fashioned guy: This year, my cards went out the usual way -- in tasteful buff envelopes with a holiday stamp in the corner. Inside, there was real card stock designed to stand up on the mantel, and on the front, a picture of me and my family. (O.K., my dog.) Open it up, and there's a suitable greeting, with a personal message that I composed and inscribed above the fold. They cost me a couple bucks each, but it really wasn't much more of a chore than launching a gaggle of e-cards from my computer. You see, I did the whole thing over the Internet. SWEET PRINTS. There has been a proliferation of photo print shops on the Web, and many of them have expanded into greeting cards just in time for the holidays. I've become a fan. I took a tour to see what was available and settled on Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com). It's about the most expensive option -- but it has the classiest cards and is by far the easiest site to navigate. There are others, but if you want your photo cards printed, signed, stuffed, stamped, and mailed directly to friends and family without ever handling them yourself, your best bet is CardStore.com. You can get them at the company's Web site (www.cardstore.com) or at any of its partners' -- including Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodak.com, marthastewart.com, and the U.S. Postal Service (www.usps.gov). They'll set you back about $3 apiece for up to 10 cards and fall to half that per card if you buy 100 or more.  What makes Shutterfly the best of the CardStore partner sites, and even better than CardStore itself, is that it has the most sophisticated tools for editing your photos online, such as cropping to get only the part of the picture you want, adjusting the colors, and adding borders and special effects. It also has come up with a step-by-step procedure that is easier to use, and more attractive, than CardStore.com. Best of all, it previews the evolving card at each step along the way. PICTURE PERFECT. Shutterfly is really quite easy to use. I picked a picture of Coby the dog and myself resting on a sofa, cut off the edges on all four sides so that the picture pretty much filled the 5-in.-by-7-in. card, and added a red border that reads "T'was the night before Christmas" across the bottom. More important, the stockings were hung across the top, helping to obscure some crookedly hung picture frames that somehow crept into the top of my snapshot. Clicking the "next" button took me inside the card, where you can choose a standard greeting, or write your own. I did that in a 24-point Arial type in black, and then "signed" the card in red -- maroon, actually -- using a slightly smaller font that imitates a felt-tip pen. Above the fold (on the left side if your card is vertical instead of horizontal,) I wrote a couple of personalized lines in the same felt-tip look. You can write a general salutation, such as "Dear," and Shutterfly will automatically insert the right first names when you address the envelopes. There's enough room for a full Christmas letter, if that's your style, or you can personalize each note for each recipient.  UPLOADING ADDRESSES. At that point, you're finished if you want to be: Shutterfly will send you the cards and envelopes in boxes. Or if you want Shutterfly to finish the job, you can continue to the next page to address the envelopes. Unlike some of the other CardStore.com partners, such as Snapfish.com, which require that you type the addresses one at a time, Shutterfly has a feature some may find nifty that allows you to upload your Microsoft Outlook or Palm address book to its site and simply check off the names you want. For me, however, this was actually the one weak link in the process: You have to convert your address book to a specially formatted file, and then upload it to Shutterfly. The worst part: Shutterfly's address list requires a "country" field, so I had to edit each domestic address to add "U.S.A." You're almost there. All that's left is picking the postage stamp you want -- Shutterfly sells them at cost -- and paying your bill. And here's an interesting twist: You have to pay 8.25% tax on each card mailed to a California address. Folks transplanted to California pay the tax on all the cards they box and ship to our homes. So we might as well let them do it: We save the tax if Shutterfly mails the cards to out-of-state friends, and there are no shipping and handling fees for cards it mails.  Yeah, it meant I had to plan ahead a little more than usual. And I have no clue what I'll do with all those boxes of cards I picked up at Macy's for a song after Christmas last year. But I have the satisfaction of giving a lot of people a tangible little gift that can be opened, handled a bit, displayed, and maybe tucked away in a drawer or album. How many, I wonder, still have that clever little bit of Flash animation I e-mailed them last year?  Senior Correspondent Armstrong is based in Los Angeles  | | |
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