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Key people at BlueMountain Arts.
Blue Mountain Arts is an independent publisher of greeting cards, gift books, and calendars based in Boulder, Colorado. The company operates within the social expression industry, generating approximately $20 million in annual revenue with an estimated enterprise valuation of $64 million. Supported by a workforce of 51 to 100 employees, the business maintains a revenue per employee ratio of roughly $345,000 through direct retail and online sales channels. The publisher previously developed an e-greetings division that was sold for nearly $1 billion, and it currently distributes physical products globally in Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish. The firm's catalog features the prominent publication To My Daughter with Love on the Important Things in Life, which has sold over 1.5 million copies worldwide. Blue Mountain Arts was founded in 1971 by Susan Polis Schutz and Stephen Schutz.
Key people at BlueMountain Arts.
BlueMountain Arts is a greeting card, book, and gift publisher founded in 1971 by poet Susan Polis Schutz and illustrator Stephen Schutz, specializing in inspirational products that blend poetry, art, and themes of love, friendship, family, and nature.[1][2][3][4] The company pioneered e-greetings in the 1990s, creating animated online cards that became massively popular, leading to the sale of its e-card division (bluemountain.com) for nearly $1 billion, while continuing to produce physical cards, posters, calendars, scrolls, and books sold through thousands of retail outlets worldwide.[1][2][4] It serves consumers seeking emotional, heartfelt communication, solving the problem of expressing personal sentiments through creative, accessible formats, and has reached over 500 million people globally with its uplifting content.[4]
Susan Polis Schutz, a committed feminist and writer who began composing poetry at age seven, and Stephen Schutz, a physicist with a PhD from Princeton who pursued art alongside his solar energy research, met and married in 1969, moving to Colorado's mountains.[1][4] There, they silk-screened Susan's free-form poems onto Stephen's watercolor paintings of mountains and silhouettes in their basement, initially as a hobby to foster togetherness amid the 1970s hippie culture, producing posters on life, love, and nature.[1][4] Demand surged after selling at stores and trade shows from their pickup truck; by 1971, they formalized BlueMountain Arts, renting out their home's main floor to fund it while living in the basement, achieving $7 million in sales by 1976 with expanded lines including 120 card designs and distribution in 12,000 outlets.[1]
Pivotal moments included their first book *Come Into the Mountains, Dear Friend* in 1972 and inventing e-greetings in 1996, with Stephen and son Jared building bluemountain.com—featuring singing, dancing animated animals—which exploded in popularity by the holidays.[1][2][4] Susan's illustrated books, like *To My Daughter with Love on the Important Things in Life* (over 1.5 million copies sold), cemented their status as the world's bestselling poet-artist team.[2][4]
BlueMountain Arts rode the 1970s counterculture wave of personal expression and the 1990s internet boom, inventing e-greetings at a time when online communication was nascent, proving digital formats could humanize tech with emotional artistry.[1][2] This timing capitalized on rising email adoption and demand for non-physical connection, influencing the digital media ecosystem by popularizing interactive web content—paving the way for modern e-cards, social sharing, and animated social media greetings.[1][4] Market forces like globalization and gifting personalization favored its scalable, multilingual model, while its $1B exit highlighted early internet monetization potential, inspiring content-tech hybrids; today, extensions like Starfall align with edtech and positivity trends amid digital fatigue.[2][4]
BlueMountain Arts endures as a creative powerhouse, evolving from basement posters to global digital innovator, with its core mission of heartfelt connection intact. Next steps likely involve expanding interactive experiences like Starfall's kindness exhibits into AI-personalized greetings or VR emotional sharing, riding trends in mental wellness apps, nostalgic analog-digital blends, and global positivity content.[4] As consumers seek authentic expression amid AI-generated noise, its influence could grow through family-led innovation, potentially reacquiring digital arms or partnering in Web3 gifting—reinforcing that true togetherness, born in the mountains, scales eternally.
