Next Friday (May 22) will see Carly Pearson, senior buyer of Sainsbury’s for greeting cards and wrap join an audience of greeting card publishers via a PG Buzz-hosted meet-up.
“We are all living through these scary times; a period that will impact on our personal and business lives in the short-term, medium-term and longterm. As evidenced by the collective response to the sustainability issue, the greeting card community has always been good at working together to find solutions and better ways of working,” Carly told PG Buzz. “I am only too happy to have this opportunity to be part of an open discussion with publishers as to how we all embrace the new ways of working together over the coming months.”
The hour-long Zoom meet-up, (with Skylight Media’s md Simon Pryce in the ‘control room’), will be open to Sainsbury’s existing greeting card publishers with some additional spaces for card publishers who are not currently supplying the retailer.
Invitations will be sent to Sainsbury’s card publishing suppliers today (Friday 15 May) by PG’s Jim Bullough asking them to RSVP by 5pm next Tuesday (19 May) if they would like to attend. Other (currently non-supplying) publishers wishing to register their interest in attending should email Jim on jimb@max-publishing.co.uk. This group will then receive confirmation/notification on Wednesday (20 May) as to whether there is space for you to attend.
Reinforcing both Sainsbury’s and the general public’s commitment to greeting cards Carly added, “As our greeting card sales during the Covid crisis underlines, the UK public have an engrained passion for buying and sending greeting cards. While our focus has been and is on ensuring the safety of our customers and our colleagues and prioritising essentials in store, it was important to work with the UK Greetings team to find a way that our card displays could be replenished with many publishers’ designs. None of us really knows what the ‘new normal’ will look like, but we are all in this together.”
Top: Carly Pearson, senior buyer of Sainsbury’s is leading an open discussion on the way forward on a PG Buzz Zoom Meet-up next Friday.