Our Business Model

Our Proposition

Card Factory is the UK’s leading specialist retailer of greeting cards, dressings and gifts, with an estate of over 1,000 stores across UK and Ireland; a growing online offering through cardfactory.co.uk and gettingpersonal.co.uk; and supply through a further 4 franchise stores and 921 partner stores, mainly in the UK and Australia.

Our products are always high-quality, yet through our vertically integrated design, production and retail model, can be offered at significantly lower prices than competitors.

Our design insight

As we learn to adapt to a post-Covid-19 era and the changing needs of consumers, our design studio and commercial team are using our insights, sales data and trend analysis to ensure our product offering remains relevant and current for our loyal shoppers, as well as learning how to satisfy new targeted demographics.

This year, through our deeper dive into our data and further segmentation work, we will be able to highlight new opportunities both in how we talk about our brand and develop our product offer. Examples of how we are responding to changing trends and consumer preferences includes our range of cards for new pets with our ‘from the dog’ cards being a successful incremental pick up last Father’s Day; and our continued drive to ensure we are inclusive in our product offering from LGBTQ to cards for the rise of blended families.

Our Value Chain

Our production advantage

Operating our own large-scale print facility in Basildon, Yorkshire, which has capacity to produce 270 million cards per annum, is a key USP for Card Factory. This Printcraft facility, which primarily serves the Card Factory business, is capable of printing all of our UK produced cards and some 70% of all counter cards we retail through our store network. New ranges can be produced in four weeks and additional quick selling lines can be remanufactured in a matter of days if required. Our online stock cards are also manufactured through this facility. This flexibility allows us to operate small print runs to minimise surplus stock holdings, without the lead times of upwards of 12 weeks typically encountered for imported products and also, as we have seen this last 12 months, additional shipping costs and space constraints.

Our sales channels

Our 1000+ stores across the UK and Ireland is our main route to market, offering our full range and retail experience to our customers. Additional access to our range is available from our online offer (from cardfactory.co.uk and gettingpersonal.co.uk) and via our UK and international retail partners.

Our Virtuous Circle