Bringing about change in the Birthday card industry

One of the goals of the Better Birthdays campaign is to Influence the card designers, manufacturers and retailers to start making and selling age-positive cards. So we are really glad to be building positive ways of getting this message out both in the USA and the UK. 

In this blog we will explain how these conversations have got started, in different ways on either side of the water, and then reflect on the recent uptake in the UK. Culture change takes time, and we are just at the beginning. We hope this beginning will support the industry to grow a new narrative about ageing which enables people at all ages to have better birthdays throughout their life.

 Changing the Narrative has run two age-positive birthday card design competitions (2020 and 2022), calling for artists to design cards that countered the negative narrative about getting older (link to blog).  The campaign had coverage in over 20 popular podcasts and media outlets, and the American Greeting Card Association invited Janine, Director of Changing the Narrative, to give a presentation at their Summit in 2021  Anti-Ageist Birthday Cards on Vimeo. 

In the UK Canopy has been meeting with senior executives in the UK Greeting Card industry to raise awareness of the surprising impact of ageism on people’s health, wellbeing and life expectancy. As a result of these meetings ageism has been added to the agenda for the UK Greeting Card Association’s diversity and inclusion committee and an explanatory blog post about the Better Birthdays campaign included on the Association’s website.

In the February issue of Progressive Greetings (the UK industry’s magazine) there is a two-page article, Age Old Fun, focusing on ageism in Birthday cards from within the industry with a range of designer’s perspectives commenting upon the issue. Our conversations, and the reflections of card retailers expressed in the article, reveal the surprise with which the industry learns that ageist jokes can be offensive, discriminatory and harmful. But their discombobulation is to be expected. It is merely a reflection of how unaware and accepting our whole culture is of ageist jokes and the marginalisation of people based on their age. The card industry isn’t alone in thinking that ageist jokes are harmless, so do most people, despite the strong evidence to the contrary. That’s how culture works, these assumptions are invisible until they are made visible through efforts to expose and change them, which is how culture changes.

Amanda Fergusson, the CEO of the UK Greeting Card Association acknowledged that the industry didn’t know much about ageism or its effect on health and mental wellbeing. She says “There are emerging cohorts of older people who want cards which reflect their attitudes to growing older – age pride! We can also see that designs which aim to be age friendly sometimes miss the mark due to the subtleties of negative language or associated imagery”.  

We hope that as the conversation in the industry grows it will deepen in its exploration and understanding. We would love to see articles and promotions which showcase images of the emerging range of cards which are age-positive. We would love to hear people in the industry reflecting on how their own attitudes have changed as they have come alive to the presence of ageism in our everyday culture. We would love to see design competitions run in the UK to encourage designers to think creatively about how to make jokey or clever cards which celebrate age.

As Jakki Brown, co-founder and Editor of Progressive Greetings says “while it is

a complicated subject, the main thing is to get people thinking. They used to think it was OK to smoke in cars and wolf whistle!”