If you are looking for Father’s Day Cards (June 19th this year) or Birthday Cards for any other time of the year, we hope you give our site a try. Elephant Journal readers can get 20% off their entire order by using the code ELEPHANT20 during checkout.

When we set off last year to form our own company we didn’t have a business model, only ideas. We knew, however, that anything we created must contribute to society and uphold our own ethical and environmental standards.

When we started Card Gnome, a site that allows you to send a real greeting card directly from the web, we did things differently. We made sure that we were having minimal impact on the environment, treating artists fairly and giving back to our local community.

Getting a greeting card makes someone feel special and loved and if done responsibly can have minimal impact on the environment. Our printing facility is family owned and operated in Fort Collins, Colorado and prints all of our cards using recycled paper, organic ink and 100% wind power. The earth is our friend, and we treat it as such.

Some of our best friends are artists, so we know how they get tossed around by most companies. Traditional card companies pay artists between $0.02 and $0.10 per card, while we share our profits and pay $0.75 per card. We also feature our artists on the back of the cards, printing both a picture and a bio so customers can form a connection with the person creating their cards.

Our artists are not the only ones creating cards either. In order to give back to the community, we’ve encouraged non-profits (like IDE, a Denver based non-profit that creates income opportunities for the rural poor around the world) to run card fundraisers through the site. The non-profit receives the commission on the sale of the card, and we are working on giving users the ability to add extra donations to each card!

When you buy from us we hope you not only love the experience, but also feel good about treating the earth well and creating a sustainable income source for our artists.

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Joel Wishkovsky is the co-founder of Card Gnome, a Greeting Card company that makes it easy to send eco-friendly cards from boutique designers. Joel graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a BS in Management Information Systems and Economics before joining General Electric’s prestigious leadership programs for IT and Finance.