The Digs&Manor Collection
Anna Danielle launched her greeting card company back in 1998 and enjoyed what she now realises with the joy of hindsight was rather a lot of new kid on the block success. However, like most things fashion based, your time in the limelight is limited. The danger is you’ll be so busy keeping up you won’t realise you’re in the good times until they have passed. Well this happened to Anna and just as sales had plateau’d and then started slowing down, the 2008 recession hit. And it was like someone had quite literally turned the tap off.
A very wise Australian distributor (Jenny at McMillian Cards) advised her to come up with something new. Something that was exactly the same but also completely different! A concept Anna was all too familiar with from her design degree days. With many attempts and more than her fair share of average/mediocre /complete failures it was beginning to feel like she’d never crack it.
Then she created her Digs&Manor collection. And it was debuted at the Spring Fair 2013. And when Jenny (the aforementioned Australian Distributor) viewed the new cards and raised her thumb, it was a gloriously satisfying moment.
The Creative Process
Anna kept the watercolour artwork and the gently humorous captions but changed from the slim rectangular card shape to a square card format. Many of Anna’s photographic inspiration showed the dogs and cats within the home. Making it a small mental skip to link her love of interiors and colour with her artwork. The fact she had also just moved house probably helped these individual loves to come together! By using the AppleMac as part of her creative process she created flat walls of colour and added her artwork to the room settings. Bingo! Now all the new style needed was a name… house, home, room, digs. That was it, the dog in his digs, (see what she did there) and the cat in her manor. Digs&Manor. Simples!
The Digs&Manor Collection
All the designs start life as a greeting card and generally if they prove popular in that format we roll them out onto our other gift lines. Now that we are older, uglier and hopefully a smidgeon wiser, we try and keep this range to a maximum of 48 designs. Each season we pull slow sellers and replace them with new ideas. This ensures the collection stays strong and fresh and our stockroom doesn’t become overwhelmed with failures. Anna is still thoroughly enjoying working in this style and with the constant stream of potential muses being sent via email & Facebook page there seems little danger of the inspiration drying up. For this Anna is truly grateful to you all.
