Well known and respected for its traditional and sentiment based ranges, Cherry Orchard Publishing is now up gearing up for its customers to have more of a laugh.
“Let’s just say, Cherry Orchard finally does humour x 3!” Jackie Collins, md and co-founder of the Tewkesbury-based publisher revealing its move into the humorous card sector.
The company teased about its latest diversification in the October edition of Progressive Greetings, leaking a tagline There’s Something Funny Going on at Cherry Orchard’.
As well as being popular for its product ranges, Cherry Orchard also scores highly on the service it offers to its customers, reaching the finals of the Best Service to the Independent Retailer award in this year’s Henries.
Jackie Collins reveals that she has been “itching” to make a move on the humorous card sector for some time and feels that “now’s the time to take action.”
The immediate success of its launch of its contemporary Wot A Mug card humorous range at PG Live, published under licence provided some extra gusto to expand in this direction.
“With would-be stockists competing for exclusivity on the range, the response was unprecedented for a new product launch,” explains marketing manager Helen Pallen.
In addition to Christmas and Spring Seasons designs being introduced under Wot a Mug, Dirk and Shirl is the second range to join the Cherry Orchard humour cavalcade. Based on two ‘stick figure’ characters, the range makes humorous observations of gender behaviour.
Another range is to be unveiled shortly.
Cherry Orchard is working towards building a humorous card portfolio that will cater for a wider audience combining a blend of traditional humour and contemporary styles that lend themselves to the ‘Insta-worthy’ world of people sharing and tagging friends in jokes or messages of positivity as well as good-old fashioned jokes that simply relate to modern-day life.
“Following the success of Wot a Mug, we wanted to make sure that we could provide a solid rounded selection of humour to strengthen and extend the genre in our portfolio by offering a wide range of styles and price points,” says Jackie.
* On another tack, Cherry Orchard is not just striding out on the card publishing front as members of its team has been putting their best feet forward for charity.
Cherry Orchard’s creative director Beverley Fisher completed her Wellchild 8 in 48 challenge, Trek the Lakes with her team members Mandy Luckhurst and Angela Miller, raising £3,000 to support the important work done by WellChild children’s charity. In just 48 hours, they tackled the peaks Skiddaw, Helvellyn Lower Man and Helvellyn on day one in about six hours and day two saw them complete twelve hours of walking going from peak to peak over another five mountains heading back across the Scafell mountain range towards the finish line at Keswick!
