Our key shopper ratings for ‘value for money’ and ‘wide range of cards’ have improved even further in 2020. As the supermarkets lose their monopoly on physical retail space, we expect to gain share from them. We expect Card Factory sales to bounce back strongly for Q2 2021 onwards following the reopening of our stores across the UK. The next largest greeting card retailer after Card Factory, a supermarket, realised a small increase in market share to 12% (2019: 10%).Ĭard Factory’s share of the UK online greeting card market share (by volume) increased slightly from 2.1% (in 2019) to 2.3%, with the ‘out-of-home’ market share reaching 25% (2019: 33%). Supermarkets unsurprisingly benefitted from the lockdown periods and grew their market shares as they were permitted to trade for 12 months as essential retailers. Card Factory’s market share of the volume of UK greeting cards was reduced to 20% (2019: 33%). Online sales will step down accordingly from 2020 to 2021, however we believe online sales will continue to be higher than pre-pandemic levels because of the underlying growth from longer term shopper behaviour trends.ĭespite the periods of non-essential retail closure, Card Factory remained the biggest card retailer in the UK in 2020 by a considerable margin.
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Retail store sales will recover as shoppers return in large numbers to buying in stores again. We expect shopper behaviours in 2021 to revert in large part to pre-pandemic patterns. So the combination of selling a greater proportion of cards in the year through the higher priced online channel caused the total value of the card market to increase to £1,425m, up by 6.7% the year before. The average online price per card is approximately twice that sold in retail stores. One quarter of single card volume in the UK (approximately 206 million cards) in 2020 were sold online, up from a share of 8% in 2019.
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The closure of specialist card retailers (including Card Factory’s physical stores) as non-essential retail for approximately 5 months of the financial year drove a significantly higher than normal proportion of shoppers to purchase their cards online compared to previous years. Evidence suggests that the categories which were most impacted related to large social gatherings such as children’s birthdays, milestone birthdays and milestone anniversaries and weddings. The resulting overall market size has been estimated at 834m single cards in 2020, which was down 4.7% on 2019. The number of UK adults who purchased greeting cards in the year remained at 76% (consistent with 2019), although the number of cards purchased per adult was slightly down.
![greeting card shop 3 greeting card shop 3](https://www.peggiecollinsdesign.com/uploads/2/4/4/6/24467258/greeting-card-1_orig.jpg)
Whilst Covid-19 caused major disruptions to retail in the year, the UK greeting cards market remained resilient. Despite three national lockdowns in the year to 31 January 2021, 76% of adults still purchased greeting cards in 2020