Inspiring you to achieve great success

I’ve been involved with the arts all my life but have never encountered anything like the greeting card industry – it’s an industry with so much profit and growth potential. Before The Afro Card Company I read an article about the American greeting card industry where a percentage of greeting card publishers are black. It stated that ‘afro greeting card sales in the mainstream US market stood at $936m.’ In the UK this figure is £0.00. I rang up the Greeting Card Association (GCA) and asked if they had any black members and the answer was ‘no' - I became there first black member.

My wife was unable to find a suitable card for my 40th birthday so she took one of the fine art images that I had drawn off my computer, printed it and made it into a card.  I loved it and that is when the idea for The Afro Card Company was born.  We began selling the cards at local community events in October 2005 then supplying local shops and now, less than 2 years later, we supply shops all over the UK, South Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the US and have won three major business awards.

I studied the business hard and had many late nights working out how I would compete in such a vast market – I conversed with printers and envelope manufacturers and when I had completed my first range I took my samples to Business Link. My advisor advised me to take a stand at the Spring Fair, NEC, Birmingham. My wife and I had just three weeks to prepare for the show and at times wondered if we were taking on too much. Luckily for us the show was a great success. The Afro Card Company was launched.

Black and Minority ethnic (BME) people in the UK represent a significant cultural consumer force but many advertisers and businesses are failing to target ethnic minority communities and are missing out on a market with a combined disposable income of approximately £32billion, according to research by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

It’s our aim to fill this niche in the UK market and meet the needs of the growing African Caribbean community by securing mainstream outlets for the purchasers of quality afro-greeting cards in the UK and re-address the balance between US and UK afro card sales relatively speaking. We’re going from strength to strength – we were awarded ‘Business of the Year 2006’ by the African Caribbean Business Federation (ACBF) at a ceremony endorsed by Prime Minister Tony Blair. We represented black businesses in the House of Lords, indeed we see ourselves as pioneers.

The rise of The Afro Card Company is continuing proof that BME companies are at the forefront of product development and innovation in the UK’s creative sector. Entrepreneurialism is the wave of the future; very often minorities have difficulty acquiring the skills to help pave their futures but with more BME entrepreneurs we will create more jobs in our communities – our only limits in achieving success are the limits we place on ourselves.”

Click here for more about me

Sales Agents