Canadians are turning to holiday cards to spread some much-needed joy this year. In some cases, the personal touch of handmade cards is even helping to bridge the physical distance keeping so many people apart because of COVID-19.
The pandemic has brought incalculable sadness to many Canadian families, but for Niki Hawel, who lives in London, about 190 kilometres southwest of Toronto, the plight of seniors in long-term care homes was closest to her heart in the early days of the pandemic.
“I thought about one of my grandparents being in a home and feeling like they were alone,” she told the CBC in an interview. “I couldn’t really process that.”
Which is why she hatched a plan to show residents of such homes that they were not alone in the best way available to her at the time: greeting cards.
The project first started with her and her daughter making cards for residents of long-term care homes in the London area, but as word of the project spread, more volunteers signed up. It has since grown to become something she calls the Smiling Seniors Project and has an ambitious goal: 2,000 greeting cards sent this holiday season.
“It seems like something that’s so small, but to them, it’s everything,” she said. “I didn’t want anybody thinking that they were just forgotten about.”
Sales boom
The U.S.-based Greeting Card Association told CBC News that it’s hard to get a handle on overall sales numbers this year because retail shutdowns are clearly having an impact, but the group that speaks on behalf of the greeting card industry says that cards aimed at expressing the sentiment that the sender is “thinking of you” are “up significantly” this year, and there are indeed “unprecedented increases in online purchases.”
“We are seeing earlier purchases of Christmas cards this year, and are optimistic that it will be a strong season, but it’s still too early to make that conclusion,” the GCA’s executive director Nora Weiser said in an emailed statement.
“The trend the last few years has been to purchase cards later, so the early strong sales this year bode well.”
Jon Hamilton, a spokesperson with Canada Post, says the letter carrier’s overall transaction volume is up by about 40 per cent this year, and a big part of that is cards.
“We know anecdotally this may be the year that everyone actually sent off those Christmas cards they buy every year and never quite get to, because they’re not going to make those in-person connections,” he said in an interview.
Small business owner Amy Kwong typically sells most of her cards wholesale to other retailers, but this year she’s seen an uptick of sales to consumers, mostly from online orders. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
The vast majority of Hawel’s cards are homemade. But the need to reach out via a greeting card is driving a sales boom in the store-bought variety, too. Amy Kwong owns a card and collectible store in Toronto. The physical location is called I Have A Crush On You and is in the trendy Liberty Village area of the city.
Her greeting card business has changed this year. She normally sells mostly wholesale orders to other stores, but she’s noticed a growing business selling online this year to individuals via her web portal, Smitten Kitten.
The dark days of March and April were hard on her business just as they were on many others, but she says business has picked up since then as people wanted to find new ways to reach out to loved ones they couldn’t see face to face.
“A lot of our stores cancelled their orders, but come September, October, November, sales picked up again so Christmas wasn’t cancelled,” she said. “So that was good.”
Kwong’s seeing the biggest sales from one type of card: those with dark humour that poke fun at the world’s plight in the pandemic.
“The cards that we design are more lighthearted,” she said. “I think maybe they want to send something that will get a giggle out of their friends — and her top seller contains a lot of words that aren’t fit to print on this website.
“It sort of reflects the, you know, the pandemic that we’re going through.”
Other card sellers are seeing a similar uptick. E-commerce website Etsy sells handmade artisanal items on behalf of local vendors and it says searches for greeting cards on its platform have almost doubled this holiday season.
Etsy card seller Emily Schirmer shows off two of her hottest sellers this holiday season. (Pierre-Paul Couture/CBC)
Montrealer Emily Schirmer is seeing that firsthand. She temporarily lost her day job in the spring when the pandemic first hit, which gave her more time to work on her Etsy store that was never really a major source of income for her before. “I had all this time so I started making illustrations and I made them into cards, she said.
“I started getting more sales and it just kind of took off during quarantine this year,” said Schirmer.
One of Schirmer’s most-popular cards riffs on an incident that most Canadians remember well: Justin Trudeau’s “speaking moistly” slip of the tongue in April.
WATCH | Trudeau’s viral ‘speaking moistly’ moment
While he points out that he’s not a medical expert, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he understands that masks can help protect people from “breathing or speaking moistly” on others. 1:15
She made a card about it, and her business blew up.
“The caption is, ‘I got you this card so I wouldn’t have to speak moistly on you,'” she said. “That was the card that really took off.”
Her sales have grown from about one a month before the pandemic to about 40 a day now. She had 27 orders total prior to this year, but is now up to 1,700.
While the pandemic has been tough on everyone, she says, she’s glad she’s been able to spread a little joy, and turn a passion project into a job for her, personally.
“I really wanted to do something that was very lighthearted and kind of added a little bit of humour to kind of lift people’s spirits a little bit,” she said.
While her Trudeau card was what got the ball rolling for her business, her top seller captures the spirit of this holiday season aptly.
“It says: ‘That’s a wrap 2020,’ and it’s a picture of a toilet paper roll with a bow on it.”
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
