OK so if you’ve been following me for a while now, you know that my “thing” is licensing my art as greeting cards. At this point, I’ve lost count of how many hundreds of designs of mine have been published as cards. I am grateful for this ongoing opportunity and do not take it for granted. But as you can imagine, with so many designs produced, inevitably, some have been great successes in terms of how they’ve sold… aaaaand some have been major flops. I thought it would be fun for you to get to see some of those fails. So here you go!
This first one was a series of brains I illustrated that I thought were SO fun and such a creative/hilarious idea. Turns out I was the only one that felt this way lol. These cards just did not sell!
Anyway, the idea here was to illustrate the different areas of the brain of a Mom brain, a toddler brain, and a bride to be. I mean come on! These are funny! They did not work as cards though. Oh well! We move on…
This next one was also a big flop. I was trying a more contemporary balloon design vibe here since balloons as a concept ALWAYS sell. I have designed sooooooooo many balloon cards, all with great success in sales! And having been an art director at a greeting card publishing company that once pored over sales stats of all of our cards, balloons in general ALWAYS sold great! So I thought I’d try this one. Did. Not. Sell.
This Cool Cat was a layered, handmade card that was more fun to look at in person than you can see here buuuuut despite that…nope. The peeps didn’t want it lol.
And then of course we have this Monkey Loooooove design. It was an anniversary card and I guess folks just didn’t see themselves as monkeys in love which…in hindsight…is definitely fair.
And the last one I’ll share (though I could surely dig up others as well!), is this party hats design. We thought it’d be fun to try a black, white and gold more classy color palette for this one. Apparently we were the only ones that thought it was “fun”.
What I will say is that the more designs you license over time, the more you feel inclined to take some risks and try new things. Sometimes that pays off, oftentimes it does not. In the land of commercial art, you are usually most rewarded for staying in your lane. That said, if you take a risk and it DOES land, it can hit in a major way. Those stand out risky successes often pay off big time, so I say keep experimenting!
Design flops are where licensing for strictly royalty payment is a bummer because you only get paid based on how many pieces of your design get sold. And when a design sells poorly, it’s quickly discontinued never to be sold again. Boohoo.
I’m thankful to the publisher I work with for having given me the chance to try some of these riskier design options because it’s always fun to take a chance! Ya never know what might stick, but you also have to realize that not everything will work. I hope you enjoyed this trip down greeting card fails lane!
At the end of the day, we’re all human. Sometimes we fail, sometimes we succeed. But, as Wayne Gretzky once said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, so I encourage you to get in the game!