The holiday greeting card season is nearly upon us, and today another company going after this market, Cleverbug, is relaunching its mobile application under new branding (“CleverCards”), with a boatload of other features in tow, including a new address book called CleverBook, added support for Android, and the introduction of new photo gift products, like photo calendars, and more.
The Dublin-based company first launched in January this year, with a different twist on the mobile greeting cards you design and customize using an app on your iPhone. The “clever” in the startup’s name refers to how the app integrates with your Facebook account, to not only remind you when to send birthday cards, but to also allow you to customize those cards with photos pulled from your friends’ Facebook profiles.
In addition to being able to send printed cards through the postal mail, virtual cards can be posted to friends’ Facebook walls, too, the company explained to TechCrunch earlier this year.
With the rebranding to CleverCards (a better name, let’s be honest), the service is available on iOS, desktop and now Android, offering designs for all the major U.S. holidays and special occasions, which can be shipped anywhere worldwide. Print cards are $2.99, while those sent digitally (to Facebook, email, SMS, etc.) are free. At launch, the company is also giving out users’ first printed card free, as a sign-on bonus.
Another new feature in today’s app is CleverBook, a smart address book option that helps you collect friends’ birthday details and mailing addresses, if that information is not already available via their Facebook profile. This sounds similar to a feature that competitor Sincerely provides, as its apps can also contact your friends via email on your behalf if you’re missing their mailing address in your iOS contacts.
With CleverBook, however, the option doesn’t appear at the end of building a card and preparing to send it, but rather in the app’s sidebar menu. Here, two features, “Collect birthdays” and “Collect addresses,” help you collect the info you need, though you have to be careful about things like this since users are sensitive to app spam. And you’ll have to be careful here, too, to make sure you don’t overdo it. For example, after going into the “collect birthdays” section to choose friends, all friends were set to “on” by default and the back button that would allow you to escape this area was disabled. The only option to exit the screen without contacting everyone was to close and kill the app, or disable each person one-by-one. Blasting everyone is great for that quick viral boost, but there’s a fine line between being helpful and greedy, and CleverCards is toeing it pretty close with the absence of an “Unselect All” option.
Also new today, CleverCards has added photo gift products in this release, including holiday card multi-packs, gift cards from retailers which you can design and customize using Facebook or Camera Roll photos, 2014 photo calendars, and more products may be on the way in the future.
CleverCards reports 300% month-over-month growth, but declined to share user numbers. It has users in 170 countries worldwide, and utilizes 76 print and logistics facilities to manage the sending of cards.
The app itself is a free download on Google Play or iTunes (iPad or iPhone), as well as via the web.