Thinking Of You In 2020 – guest post by Ümlaut Brooklyn
We’re home in Brooklyn, sheltering in place along with you and millions of other people across the country and around the world. The things that used to mark our days have all shifted – the commutes, the meetings, get-togethers with friends and our daily routine of filling orders are all missing. The result is a lot more time to think and feel and out of that can come anxiety and stress but also some new ways of thinking about things.
Not to mention dealing with remote schooling (which has been an epic fail for us btw) and roaming the local bodegas in search of toilet paper.
As wholesalers our partners are the thousands of stores, museums and boutiques that keep our towns and cities humming. They are the “local flavor” and set the tone that we are proud of in our communities. Many of them are independent and run by people whose kids go to school with our kids, who we see at the grocery stores and out for dinner at our local restaurants. And pretty much all of them are closed now either deemed unessential or because illness had left them unable to continue to do so.
As card designers we’ve been thrilled to see how many people online were calling for more card sending and letter writing. It really is the original way to staying in touch and so perfect for the time we’re in now. A card is always more special than an email and even more so now.
We’ve been wondering what we can do for our retailers and when we saw that Thinking Of You Week is shifting to make every week Thinking Of You Week, we knew we had our answer. The card lovers of the world are a powerful force and our retailers are an essential service to them. We want to be sure that we’re doing everything we can to support our retailers, to keep them well stocked on cards so they can so they can be there for their card loving customers.
Ümlaut Brooklyn is dedicating Thinking Of You Week to our retailers, every single one of them. For the people who are still open in any way: doing curbside pickups, home deliveries, online sales, honestly anything at all we just want to help. So, we’ve dropped our order minimum to whatever you want, giving everyone free shipping and adding in an additional 12 cards at no charge to each order. We’ll keep doing this as long as we still have stock. It’s not going to revolutionize anyone’s business, but it may help, and we want our retail partners to know that we understand what they’re going through and we are dedicated to putting things back together with them. We’re looking forward to better days when our community can gather together again.
