Gaskin says the startup has been likened to fellow design startup Canva a number of times but says the two are only “somewhat related”, with Cardly putting more focus on letting consumers express their sentiments.īut he does see Canva’s recent unicorn status as a vote of confidence for Australian design startups, saying it “certainly doesn’t hurt” to see Canva do well.Ĭardly’s traction to date can in part be attributed to the more than 50 independent artists the startup has designing its products. This means they do “all the heavy lifting” says Gaskin, and lets Cardly throw as much or as little volume at them as they want. It helps to have a “hugely scalable” platform like Cardly, which handles the design choice and card creation on its own website, but lets its contractors handle the printing and sending of the cards. The combined greeting card market in the US, UK, and Australia is $17 billion, so we always thought internationally from the get-go,” he says. “Building relationships across multiple different countries is not something startups have to usually do straight away, but it seems easy to us. This lead the startup to branch out globally from day one. International from day oneĭespite being a hundreds of years old industry, the greeting card industry in Australia is only worth around $1 billion, according to Gaskin. It’s not the first time Cardly has been offered that sort of cash: Gaskin and Clift did accept a $250,000 deal from Shark Tank investor Naomi Simson last year, however, the funding didn’t end up going ahead. “It has been hugely invigorating for the business.” But there’s no greater validation than someone saying ‘we share in your vision, and here’s some money’ - not just platitudes,” he says. “When you’re going through the journey of creating something from scratch, any validation you get is great. Gaskin says the raise took a bit longer to complete than the founders would have liked, and although it started out with a lot of momentum, he admits it got a “bit bogged down” at times.ĭespite that, he and Clift are excited to have a number of committed investors on board, which they view as the ultimate form of validation. “But my experience in e-commerce and business development for Samsung taught me a lot about digital business and scalability.” Investment the ultimate form of validationĬardly has just locked down a $230,000 capital raise, led by Queensland University of Technology’s Creative Enterprise Australia accelerator and contributed to by a number of angel investors, including Alan Jones. That’s really why something like Cardly made so much sense to me.” “My experience in newsagents from a young age led me to understand the finer side of the greeting card industry, like issues with artist compensation and environmental impact. “Cardly is my first ‘true’ startup, as I was running my own digital consultancy business beforehand,” he says.
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