Litterature’s line of cat cards includes new adoption, birth announcements, happy holidays, congratulations, missing you, humorous, sorry, get well soon, sympathy, blank cards, thanks to professionals, cards used by professionals to market their business, and happy birthday/”Gotchaday.”
Because not everyone is privileged to know the exact date of their cat’s birth, “Gotchaday” was invented, Rogak explained. It’s the anniversary of the date when you first brought your companion home.
Litterature added a line of eight sympathy cards — four for cats and another four for dogs — in early 1999, based on customer input. The most requested card features a cat silhouette sitting in a window; the inside verse simply reads, “With much sympathy.” While the card was designed for cat lovers, its simplistic and tasteful design makes it appropriate if someone loses a non-pet member of the family.
Rogak and Morganthaler both noted that sympathy cards are strong sellers because of the intense people-pet bond. Hallmark introduced its first pet sympathy card in 1984 and today offers a range of cards that acknowledges the sense of bereavement.
But we’ve only begun to stratch the surface of the cat card market. At Papyrus, a Water Tower paper specialty store where I found the Lang Christmas cards featuring the Lowell Herrero’s art works, there were numerous other cards featuring cats and other animals. Most were photographs or original works of art, but all in very limited production. One of the most popular is produced by Marcel Schurman, a painter and sculptor, who owns the rights to many of the photos and art works shown in his cards.
