As part of an eco drive, greeting card publisher James Ellis has reworked its hugely popular Shakies card collection to arrive at Paper Shakies, made from 100% recyclable paper, including no plastic or glitter. The new collection, which will debut at Top Drawer in a few weeks time uses translucent paper and paper confetti instead of a plastic and glitter combo.
Sharing the motivation behind the reworking of such a strong trademarked range concept that has been around since 2003, James Stevens, md of the Bristol-based publisher told PG Buzz: “the fact that we were using a lot of plastic and glitter began to bother us more and more. We made some changes last year to Shakies and introduced biodegradable glitter and paper-based confetti to replace the plastic we used to use. We made a change again last month and now we use eucalyptus-based glitter that will biodegrade in water in 28 days.”
However James said that he felt more could be done. ”In the old design of Shakies a plastic bag was still required to hold everything together. We looked at biodegradable bags but there were issues to do with how to get them to biodegrade which are well documented.”
The breakthrough was when they hit upon the idea to use specialist inks on translucent paper combined with paper confetti. This move was in fact by a meeting with one of James Ellis’ retail customers who announced that they no longer wanted publishers to supply cards in plastic outer bags. The retailer’s initial request was for paper bands to be used instead but this wasn’t deemed practical for James Ellis due to the slightly dust conditions in the fulfilment warehouse the publisher uses, plus as the cards are outworked by hand away from the warehouse, the cards needed something to protect them in transit.
“We began to look at tracing paper as a solution for the outer bag and this proved the breakthrough to getting rid of the plastic in our Shakies,” says James.
The new Shakies Paper range is printed on tracing paper and the confetti sits behind utilising no plastic at all. “And we are using a waxed paper as an outer bag which is biodegradable and recyclable,” adds James.
James confirmed that the plan is now to change all the range over to the new plastic-free Paper Shakies concept over the coming year “but as we have over 250 cards in the Shakies range, this is going to take a little while!” James points out.
While Paper Shakies are being launched naked with a specially designed card clasp label, the publisher will supply the cards individually wrapped if requested.
On the ‘naked issue’, James says it is “a tricky one. We surveyed out agents last month and got a very mixed response. One of the questions we asked was: ‘In your opinion what percentage of your customers would order their cards unwrapped? In two regions the answer was 0%!
We would like this to be 100%, but this is going to take a bit of time and we’ll listen and respond to our customers’ requests and wrap cards if they want them to be wrapped,” explains James.
His hopes are “that biodegradable plastic alternatives will improve and that the government will standardise recycling in the UK and provide the public with a better understanding of what they have to do.”
Paper Shakies will launch on James Ellis’ at Top Drawer, which takes place at London’s Olympia September 8-10 on stand U10. The range comprises around 48 cards that are combination of reworked popular designs and brand new designs with more in the pipeline.
Top: James Stevens, managing director of James Ellis Stevens with some of the new Paper Shakies.
