In the News

Christmas, Meet Hanukkah
Elise Okrend saw a market for interfaith greeting cards. Despite a feast-and-famine sales cycle and traditionalists' objections, business is booming.

With Christmas and Hanukkah converging on Dec. 25 this year, Elise Okrend hopes families will send out greeting cards celebrating both holidays. If they do, it could prove to be a banner year for MixedBlessing, her Raleigh (N.C.)-based company that specializes in interfaith and multicultural holiday cards.

Founded in 1988 by Okrend and her husband, Philip, MixedBlessing has endured criticism from religious leaders and skepticism from others about the staying power of its niche market. Okrend, who is already busy gearing up for the 2005 holiday season, took time out recently to speak with Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow.

Q: How did MixedBlessing get started?
A: I was working in printing and design in Manhattan, and my husband was an attorney. I've always been a creative type, and I had a neat idea for a holiday card one year. I realized we know a lot of people who are in relationships where one person is Jewish and one isn't. I felt there was a need for a card we could send to them both, so I came up with a graphic design of a Star of David merging with a Christmas tree. I showed it to my husband, and he was really enthusiastic and thought I had hit on a great concept.

Q: Are you in a mixed marriage yourselves?
A: Everybody assumes we are, but no, we're both Jewish. Our idea is just to make families who are of different religious backgrounds feel good about celebrating the holidays together. We try to think of the warmest and most delicate, lighthearted ways to combine the two holidays.

Q: What was the reaction when you first put the designs out?
A: We had to persuade retailers that this wasn't just a fad -- it was really a niche market that would last over the years. We got a lot of press because the idea was new, and that brought out some religious organizations saying they didn't like our concept. They were worried about the holidays being combined and felt it wasn't right. But, actually, their condemning the cards stirred up more publicity, which got us more customers and showed people we were here!

Q: When did you realize you had a viable small business on your hands?
A: Our first holiday season, we came up with six designs, and my husband threw them into the back of his car and drove around New York City trying to sell them to corner card shops. That went well, so we came up with the name and incorporated. But we ran the company for several years on the side while we both worked our regular jobs. We'd come home from work and process orders on our dining room table at night. After about five years, we began to make sales to some department stores. That's when we realized we couldn't handle everything ourselves, and also when we saw that the business could support us. So we quit our outside jobs to focus on it full-time. My husband now does life coaching, so he's involved in the company about half time.

Q: You decided that rather than lease office space and hire employees, you'd contract all that work out. Why?
A: I didn't want to set up my own operation to do all the collating, illustrating, and shipping in house, and I didn't want to have to deal with employees. So I set things up so that when I get an order, I enter it into the system, and it's out the door. I still do all the designs and creative work myself, so I wear many hats. What really helped us early on was attending industry trade shows, like the National Stationery Show every year to display our line, get exposure, and find vendors.

Q: How do you deal with the cash flow and other challenges of running a seasonal business?
A: It's something you learn to manage. The first few months of the year are spent on product development, getting the cards designed, illustrated, and printed, preparing our catalog, doing sales and marketing, and working on our Web site.
The main thrust of the business starts right now, in August and September, when the shipments are being made to the larger stores. The imprinting and personalization, plus the direct sales, take place between now and the end of the year.

Making revenues last through the off season has been a personal challenge. It's a matter of good budgeting, because we know how much we're going to make in a given year, and we just have to live off that. With the holiday line, we're able to pre-sell, so I have a pretty decent idea of what quantity I'm going to have in my inventory before I go to print.
Of course, the stores pay after the fact, and that requires some juggling on our part. But everybody who orders personally from us comes in with a check or credit card over the Internet, so that's been very helpful.

Q: When did you set up your Web site?
A: The site is about six years old. It's interesting, because our original concept was just to sell through retailers, and the direct sales were not something I really thought was going to happen. But in the last few years, that's where we've seen our strongest growth. Especially now, with the small card stores having a rough time competing with larger retailers, our direct sales are becoming more and more important.

Karen E. Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.
Edited by Rod Kurtz

As seen in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Sun Sentinel
Merry Mazeltov? Card companies combine mistletoes, menorahs
MATT SEDENSKY, Associated Pres Writer

KANSAS CITY, Mo. 11/27/04- Every December, Zack Rudman and his wife send out cards with winterscapes and generic holiday greetings. Finally, though, the Kansas City lawyer found a variety that seemed to better suit a Jewish man and an Episcopal woman with two young children as familiar with the menorah as mistletoe. It screams "Merry Chrismukkah!"

Across the country, two holidays that once seemed to share little more than a calendar page are increasingly being melded on greeting cards aimed at the country's estimated 2.5 million families with both Jewish and Christian members.

"It's representative of the way people live and the way they spend the holidays," said Elise Okrend, an owner of Raleigh, N.C.-based MixedBlessing, a card company devoted to interfaith holiday greetings. "And it's an expression of people understanding the people around them."

MixedBlessing, like other companies, has found such interfaith greeting cards have a stable market niche and a slowly growing customer base. The company was among the first to come out with holiday cards suitable for Jewish-Christian families about 15 years ago and is still perhaps the only company to focus entirely on that market segment. In its first year, it sold about 3,000 cards from nine different offerings. This year, Okrend projects sales of 200,000 cards off its 55-card line.

Kansas City-based Hallmark Cards Inc. says among its most popular categories of Hanukkah cards is the one that combines Jewish and Christian themes. The company tried the idea with just one card in the mid-90s; today they have four. "The essence of these cards is not about interfaith households as much as it is about friends and family members of different faiths acknowledging the different holidays that they all celebrate," said Shalanda Stanley, a product manager at Hallmark.

American Greetings Corp. has also increased its Hanukkah-Christmas line offerings since its introduction eight years ago. There are around 10 this year.Kathy Krassner, editor of Greetings Inc., a trade magazine, said mixed-faith holiday cards are one of countless niche categories introduced by greeting card companies."It's an interesting market," she said. "But it's a limited market."

The newest player is Chrismukkah.com, which helped put a name on what many interreligious families have been celebrating for years. Ron Gompertz founded the company this year with his wife, inspired by an episode of the popular Fox series "The O.C." in which Seth Cohen, a character whose mother is Protestant and father is Jewish, coins the term.

"It's a little bit of both," Gompertz explains. "Spin the dreidel under the mistletoe." As with anything addressing religion, though, cardmakers are careful not to offend. The Chrismukkah site even offers a disclaimer: "We respect people's different faiths and do not suggest combining the religious observance of Christmas and Hanukkah."

"Our intention wasn't to merge the religious aspects," Gompertz said, "but rather the secular aspects of the holidays."

Gompertz's explanation hasn't gone over well with everyone. He says the site has angered some conservative Jews who believe it promotes intermarriage. Cards from the Livingston, Mont.-based Chrismukkah.com use humor to create a hybrid holiday. Gompertz is Jewish and from New York City. He married the daughter of a Protestant minister from the Midwest. His company offers greetings including images of a Christmas tree decorated with dreidels, a menorah filled with candy canes and simpler varieties featuring messages including "Merry Mazeltov" and "Oy Joy."

"It's whimsical. It's humorous," said Gompertz. "This is a way of diffusing the seriousness of it."

Most of American Greetings' Hanukkah-Christmas cards are humorous, too. One shows three snowmen - two dressed in traditional winter hats and scarves, the third wearing a yarmulke and prayer shawl. Another features a list of Hanukkah songs that never caught on, including "Shlepping Through a Winter Wonderland," "Bubbie Got Run Over by a Reindeer" and "Come On, Baby, Light My Menorah." "We don't go over the line," said Pam Fink, who works on Jewish-themed cards for American Greetings. "We're careful to make sure it's lighthearted funny, but not too far."

More serious messages are offered, too. One Hallmark card begins "Hanukkah and Christmas - two different holidays, but each a celebration of peace and joy, of love and family and friends." Cardmakers say similarities between the two holidays, and the strong secular side of each is what makes combining them possible, something not necessarily true of any other season.

That hasn't stopped Gompertz from floating around an "Easterover" idea, featuring a "Rabbi Rabbit." Still, Gompertz thinks he'll probably pass on that idea. "That threatens to push the levels of what's acceptable," he said.