If you are unsure of how to express your feelings towards a significant (or insignificant) other this Valentine’s Day, consider sending him or her an online greeting from someecards.com. With its tongue-in-cheek tagline “when you care enough to hit send,” the site offers everything from compliments to insults, love advice to general disgust in the so-called Hallmark holiday.
The site calls out the holiday for what it is, making references to the absurd and ridiculous symbols of love in a self-deprecating kind of way. One of the most popular cards reads, You make me feel like a pudgy, naked, wing child has shot an arrow into my chest cavity.
No matter your relationship status this Valentine’s Day, someecards has it covered with its numerous sassy salutations to be sent via e-mail or shared across the social networking universe. For those in lust, the site offers cards which read, I can’t believe how much I’m not sick of you. and I’m ready to change my Facebook relationship status if you are. For those in love, humorous cards proclaim, I’d like you to be my emergency contact person. or Someday I want to adopt an Asian baby with you. And for all those single Maniacs out there, This is the perfect night to troll the city for updateable alcoholics and Let’s spend Valentine’s Day alone together.
In case these examples didn’t give it away, someecards have very little in common with typical greeting cards. While cards you buy at the store tend to use grand, “flowery statements,” Duncan Mitchell, co-founder and CEO of the company, said the cards on his site are more about honesty. “We wanted our cards to be ‘cards for every occasion from extremely important to utterly pointless.’”
The site offers cards for birthdays, holidays and anniversaries. But it also offers cards for not-so-typical events, with categories including breakups, cry for help, flirting, occupy something, somewhat topical and workplace. The cards are witty one-liners, accompanied by stock, Victorian-style art.
“I think the art works because it contrasts with the message,” Mitchell said. “The images should be surprising and hopefully add another layer of meaning. Sometimes the art is silly and adds emotion, and sometimes the art is more literal and adds context.”
Someecards express the unarticulated thought. The cards are smart and to-the-point, but most importantly the cards are funny because they are true. For example, there is a Mother’s/Father’s Day card that reads, I love how we don’t even have to say I’m your favorite child.
One of Mitchell’s favorite cards reads, When work feels overwhelming, remember you’re going to die. 
“It sounds, on the surface, cynical, but it’s really a positive message because it’s saying lighten up, don’t take things so seriously,” he said. “That’s why it is so popular. The little things that bug you day to day, you need to put it in perspective.”
The cards work in these daily life situations because people need a little help communicating with one another. “These are cliché moments that aren’t articulated well,” Mitchell said. “We write cards for any occasion that people need a smarter, funnier, truer and maybe even more specific way to communicate about.”
When it comes to writing cards, there are a bunch of rules to be followed. The cards take a specific moment and describe it in a one lined sentence filled with sharp humor. “The biggest thing is that the card is true. It has to be a surprising truth, like ‘Oh that’s totally what I was thinking, but I never thought of it that way,’” Mitchell explained. “The cards are almost always written in the first person. The truth is the overriding concept. Jokes that aren’t true aren’t as interesting.”
The idea of someecards started back in 2007, when Brook Lundy, co-founder and President, and Mitchell would surf the web for quirky greetings to send to one another to lighten the load of the work day. Lundy quickly realized there wasn’t much on the Internet that made any sense to send between buddies. He soon came up with the idea of sending and sharing personal greetings online. Lundy and Mitchell ran with this idea and developed a small website, which they sent out to friends and family. The response was overwhelming, with site traffic on a constant rise.
Within a year, Lundy and Mitchell saw such success in their business they ultimately had to leave their big-time jobs with New York advertising firms. They figured with their backgrounds in online advertising, navigating an Internet company wouldn’t be so hard. They were wrong.
“One of the jokes we always talk about is how we were Internet experts who ended up realizing we know nothing about the Internet,” Mitchell said with a laugh. “I think we were good at our jobs, but there are so many other aspects to making a business online. We had to figure out a lot of it from scratch.”
Mitchell said the team had to generate ad sales, develop and scale the site, make it fast and make it work across social networks. As they built their business, the web changed. Sites like Twitter and Tumblr became overnight successes. Lundy and Mitchell knew they had to stay on top of the social networking world to continue to develop their brand.
“We designed the original business before twitter was big, so we had to learn along the way how to use different social media and make it work,” Mitchell explained.
Someecards continues to use social networking to its advantage. The company has a Facebook app and a fan page, an iPhone app, and about 1.7 million twitter followers. Someecards has certainly got its name out there, averaging about 5.5 million visits to the site per month.
“When we started, at that moment, the idea was pretty surprising and out there. There hadn’t been anything quite like it,” Mitchell reflected. “It was taken in by people pretty quickly.”
Although someecards seems like an obvious name for the site, Mitchell said a lot of time and energy went into picking the name. “It’s tricky naming something online, especially when you don’t have the money to buy a URL,” he explained. “We came up with a huge list of names, but most of them weren’t available. The idea came out of how we thought about this company—we thought the name should be self-deprecating and not try too hard.”
All the cards on the site are free, but consumers will notice some cards on the site which serve as advertisements. The cards stick with the one-line content, with the sponsor’s logo in the bottom left corner. “These cards are never an ad for the brand, show or product, but rather a message that relates to the mindset of the consumer,” Mitchell said. “It’s the most innovative part of our business model.”
Some of the largest brands in the country work with someecards, including NBC and Budweiser. Currently, NBC is partnering with someecards to promote its new show, Are You There Chelsea? Other partner cards include Fox’s new animated show Napoleon Dynamite, Dove Men’s Care, Comedy Central, Microsoft and Ford Motor Company.
Most of the content is written by a team of writers, run by Lundy, who also functions as the head writer. There is also a team of people who are given daily or weekly assignments and submit their work via e-mail. But one of the most unique concepts the site has is the user card section, where anyone can create their own e-card. Mitchell said over 1,000 cards are created per day. These cards are differentiated by a your ecard logo in the corner, as opposed to the someecards logo.
“We pick the best user submitted card and use it in the regular part of the site,” Mitchell said. “The idea has really taken off, and people rate them and send them. We find the ones that are most appropriate for a bigger audience and move them into the regular site.”
Cards on the site are never deleted, they just vary in popularity. “We keep everything live,” Mitchell explained. “The way it works, the site and sections are all organized by the most popular cards. The less-interesting and older cards fall to the end of the section. The cards that are visited the most organically surface.”
Whether you’re looking to send a card to a loved (or unloved) one this Valentine’s season, or if you’re simply trying to tell your co-worker You’re somewhat useful at work but irreplaceable at happy hour, someecards has all the things you’ve been wanting to say in online greeting card form. Send one today at www.someecards.com.
~ By Kaitlin Busch | Assistant Editor
~Images provided by Someecards.com
