Design-focused online invitations and stationery company Paperless Post has launched its first iPad application today, which now offers all the content from the Paperless Post website – including its over 10,000 customizable designs – for use on the iPad. Though the company had previously launched an iOS application for iPhone, that app is intended for managing your events via mobile, including your RSVPs and comments, as well as for communicating with your guests through both private and group messages.
The new universal iOS app leaves the iPhone experience as is, but introduces customized cards and invitations for the iPad.
Founded in 2009 by brother and sister James and Alexa Hirschfeld, Paperless Post is known as something of the “anti-Evite.” While Evite, Punchbowl, and Facebook Events and others work well for managing more casual get-togethers, Paperless Post had been primarily focused on offering more high-end, premium greeting cards and invitations which are then shared online and via email.
Explains James, “when we think of what makes “us” us, one of the big things is our focus on design – it’s really not an afterthought. I don’t mean that in a rude way about other people, but it really is our thing. Design and technology are the two things this company is obsessed with.”
But being able to access the company’s design capabilities had, until now, been limited to the web. The new iPad app changes that. The app offers over 600 free designs, and many more paid, including cards from exclusive cards from kate spade new york, Oscar de la Renta, John Derian, and Jonathan Adler, and others, which are purchased using in-app currency called “coins.” Users can customize their cards and invites by selecting from 68 different fonts, 142 colors, 86 custom backdrops, as well as adjust character and line spacing, and alignment.
“The tool is built off the model that you used to find if you went to the stationery store – where you could customize the fonts, customize the colors. You could add a photo. You can do the kinds of things you would do if you were having a pro do it for you,” says James.
With this level of design emphasis, it almost seems like a loss if the cards are only sent out via email, as the app allows for today. However, that may soon change. Last fall, Paperless Post launched “PAPER,” an invitation printing business that finally allowed you to send your customized invitations through the postal mail. Plans to integrate the iPad app with the PAPER business are now in the works. “It will happen,” promises James. “Every design that’s available in PAPER would be available in the app.”
That would position Paperless Post on iPad against a number of other greeting card/invitation mobile app makers, including Sincerely Ink, Red Stamp, Shutterfly’s Treat, and even, as of recently, Evite itself, which just this month moved to offer paper invites, too.
As for when this integration would happen, James couldn’t comment, though surely the company would want to have the option available ahead of the holiday greeting card season. But for other platforms, like Android, deadlines are less fir. Though James says that Android is definitely on the radar, a launch date for that platform is far from being firm.
Paperless Post today has over 40 million accounts, and reports 300% year-over-year new user growth across all its products, combined. Though it doesn’t disclose revenues, James puts them in the “eight-figure” range, and growing at 175% year-over-year.
The new Paperless Post iPad app is available here in iTunes.
