DESCRIPTION Whigby Holiday Cards CLIENT Whigby DESIGN CREDITS Frank Viva PRINT CREDITS CJ Graphics TYPE CREDITS Neutraface

QUANTITY PRODUCED 1,000 PRODUCTION COST $280 PRODUCTION TIME 5 days DIMENSIONS: WIDTH × HEIGHT × DEPTH Folded: 4.125 in × 5.5 in Flat: 8.25 in × 5.5 in PRINT METHOD Offset PAPER STOCK Finch offset uncoated NUMBER OF COLORS CMYK

In the last decade I have met a handful of masochist designers who set themselves up for what I consider to be the biggest challenge of all: to be your own client. Such is the case of Viva & Co., the design firm behind Whigby: a company that provides greeting cards, wrapping paper, tags and a few other items through their online store and by their presence in hundreds of stores across the nation.

The business model is simple: we treat Whigby as another one of our clients (albeit a very demanding one). We formulated a creative, marketing, sales and fulfillment plan that we stick to and update yearly. Our products are sold in hundreds of stores like Kate’s Paperie and Selfridges & Co.—the next big initiative on our calendar is the New York Gift Fair at the Javitz in January 2010. Whigby is an experiment and an adventure. It has already been a success from this perspective: we’ve learned so much about the kinds of issues some of our smaller entrepreneurial clients face, that we can serve them better with each passing day.

These cards featuring cats and dogs are Whigby’s first foray into the holiday card market, where they seek to communicate a simple idea through a simple design: during the holidays, let’s try to forget our differences.