Let’s leave the present behind and travel back to the past to 1985 and 1986 when I was on the first of two teaching sabbaticals. It was the year I studied at The School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. I was hoping to start my own business and though the creative part was the biggest high of my life, the business part was a reality check.

I studied entrepreneurship, business law, graphic design, greeting card design and wrote, designed (art, logos), copyrighted, trademarked and registered, and produced, one quarter of a million greeting cards. I hired a museum-quality lithographer and watched two-hundred, fifty thousand cards of twenty-four designs roll off the presses.

My instructor at The School of Visual Arts also produced greeting cards and he warehoused my eighty cartons, each weighing forty pounds, in his SoHo warehouse. I had people packing kits and samples. I had sales reps. My cards were all over the country and in stores in Manhattan where I would visit them.

I was pregnant.

It was the year I had my son.

But I had to return to my job in the New York City school system. To make things more chaotic, my instructor/warehouser and his business partner dissolved the business and I had to get all of those boxes out of the warehouse. Eighty of them.

I ended up dumping half, taking the tax loss and storing what was left in my father-in-law’s garage.

So, in the process of digging through our basement, I found some long lost boxes and I figured I would archive them here and let you have a look.

Surprisingly, because I spent extra to have them coated, they are in excellent condition for greeting cards that are about thirty-five years old. Not so sure about the envelopes.

Each card had a die-cut window through which a food motif peeked through; who doesn’t like food?

Cards 1-12

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next 12 can be found here.