Paper greeting cards Things to consider
Boulder, Colorado husband and wife team Stephen Schutz and Susan Polis Schutz started Blue Mountain Arts (now including Blue Mountain Cards) as a way to spend time together and share their hobbies of painting and writing, respectively. Combining watercolors that Stephen painted with poetry that Susan wrote into posters that appealed to the hippie mindset of the early 1970s, they persuaded a local bookstore to sell a few of those posters, which quickly sold out. Other stores quickly followed suit. The Schutzes then directed their attention to the development of Blue Mountain Cards greeting cards and introduced the blank all occasion greeting card for personal handwritten messages. They also changed the content of preprinted greeting cards from the then prevalent rigid and formalistic poetic style to the expressive freeform poetry that Susan favored.