Free greeting card explored
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. Stephen and Susan combined their watercolor and poetry design into posters that appealed to the early 1970s hippie culture and convinced a local bookstore to carry the posters, which quickly sold out. Other stores soon began to carry their posters as well. Stephen and Susan subsequently turned their artistic talents to the development of Blue mountain cards greeting cards and were the first to develop blank all occasion greeting cards for personal messages. Another innovation credited to Blue Mountain Cards was the introduction of expressive freeform poetry and prose to preprinted cards.