Love Birds - Greeting Card

The romance card industry runs on one move: rent a poet. Not a good one — a licensed one, deceased, out of copyright, whose lines about hearts entwining can be reprinted forever above a stock photo of two wine glasses at sunset. Every February the drugstore fills with this material, and every February millions of people hand their actual, specific, irreplaceable person a card written for absolutely no one. We find this insulting on everyone's behalf, including the poet's. Real love is not generic. Real love knows which side of the bed, which take-out order, which look across the room means leave now. So our love cards work the opposite way: the front says something true and slightly rude — Bombshell, Hottie, a congratulations on the fornication — and the inside stays blank, because the mushy part is none of our business. It's yours. Write the private thing. Reference the incident. Letterpress and foil make it look like a document of state; your handwriting makes it evidence. Anniversaries, Valentine's Day, or a random Tuesday when they emptied the dishwasher unprompted — the occasion doesn't matter. The specificity does — and no poet, living or licensed, can outwrite the person who was actually in the room.

Chive Studio has pressed paper since 2004, and in that time we've learned that romance survives on specificity, not script fonts. Our love cards are designed in-house by people in actual relationships — a detail we mention because it shows. The compliments are delivered like accusations, the anniversaries are congratulated honestly, and the inside of every card is left blank on principle: we handle the letterpress and the foil, you handle the part you'd never let a stranger write. It's a division of labour that has worked for two decades. The wine-glasses-at-sunset people can keep the sunset.