I visited Cardfed‘s website not wanting to like it. At first I thought any sort of digitization or automation of physical postcards was a soulless idea, but now I believe they’re injecting a new life of into the medium. Cardfed’s offering can be split in two parts: first, they allow you to select from their wide collection of postcards, type in some text, and your card will be printed and sent anywhere in the world for €2.50. Alternatively you can also upload your own picture and send it for the same price. All their postcards are printed professionally on high-quality card stock, and are sent out from several locations worldwide within 24 hours.
To me, what’s “lost” in the lack of a handwritten card is made up with the ability to upload your own pictures. Instead of sending a standard postcard of the Grand Canyon featuring pictures taken in the early 90’s, you’re able to send a picture of yourself in front of the Grand Canyon, which is definitely more interesting for your postcard receiver to hang on their fridge.
And if you’re not the best photographer, you can also select from the travel photography and graphic design they have in their collection. There’s a money making opportunity in their collection as well– You can upload your images to the Cardfed website, and they’ll pay you €0.20 everytime someone uses it. That may or may not sound like a ton of money to you, but say you create a stylish and trendy postcard for the upcoming holiday season and it gets sent 650 times, that’s €130 in your pocket in passive income.
And speaking of the holiday season, Cardfed says they’re able get cards out to anywhere in Finland if you get to them 2 days before Christmas eve. There’s also a neat feature which allows a user to retrieve address details with telephone number, so there is no need to dig up those dusty address books anymore. Finnish users can find a Christmas targeted version of Cardfed here.
Cardfed was founded in 2009 by Ville Kulmala. They currently are somewhat based in The Netherlands, and half of their team is made up of Finns and Swedes.
