Greetings Today
Greetings Today is a London-based trade magazine for the United Kingdom greeting card industry, published by Lema Publishing. Launched in 1989, it reports on the publishers, designers, retailers, wholesalers and suppliers who make and sell greeting cards and gift wrap, and it describes itself through its trade listings as the United Kingdom's largest-circulation and widest-read greetings trade magazine. In a country that sends more cards per person than almost any other, the magazine serves a creative, seasonal and surprisingly resilient industry, mixing product news and design trends with the commercial realities of independent card shops, national retailers and the licensing business.
Launched in 1989 by Lema Publishing
Media records state that Greetings Today was launched in 1989 as a trade journal reporting on the greetings card industry, with regular features including a look at artwork and seasonal buys. It is part of the Lema Publishing family of business-to-business magazines, a stable that has included Gifts Today, Toys 'n' Playthings, Tableware International, Nursery Today, Party titles and Licensing Today Worldwide. Toys 'n' Playthings, founded by Malcolm Naish in 1981 and described as the United Kingdom's longest-established toy trade magazine, is the group's flagship in its own sector, and Greetings Today has played an equivalent role for cards within the same publishing house, sharing the group's experience of serving independent retailers and the brands that supply them.
Frequency and readership
Greetings Today has been published eleven times a year, with a joint November and December issue, and listed historically with ABC circulation certification under Lema Publishing Ltd before ceasing ABC registration. Its audience is the trade itself: greeting card retailers first, and around them card publishers, artists and designers, licensing agents, wholesalers, printers and suppliers of wrap, envelopes and display equipment. The magazine is also published online at its greetings today media site, where news stories, awards coverage and features appear between print editions. That combination suits a highly seasonal industry: Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Easter and the exam and wedding seasons each require ranging decisions months ahead, and retailers use the magazine to plan buying long before consumers see the cards on display.
What an issue covers
Editorial in Greetings Today spans the whole life of a card, from artwork to till point. Product coverage introduces new ranges across humour, cute, contemporary, traditional, photographic, art, children's, relations and occasions cards, alongside gift wrap, gift bags and stationery. Trade Talk features interview retailers and industry figures about the issues and challenges facing the sector, while news stories report company launches, brand growth, licensing deals, charity initiatives and retail openings. Seasonal sections look ahead to events such as Christmas well in advance, showing retailers the ranges they will be ordering, and reports from trade shows including Autumn Fair and Spring Fair and licensing exhibitions connect the magazine's pages to the industry's buying calendar.
The Henries Awards
The magazine is a close chronicler of the Henries, the greeting card industry's own awards, named after Sir Henry Cole, who is credited with commissioning the first commercial Christmas card. Its coverage of the 2026 Henries, held at London's Royal Lancaster Hotel, records a sector celebrating creativity and innovation across categories from humour, diversity and inclusion and contemporary design to Christmas, children's cards, licensing and wholesale, with a best newcomer-style honour in the Lynn Tait Most Promising Young Designer award. Winning ranges reported by Greetings Today ranged from humorous and cute collections to art, photographic, three-dimensional and hand-finished cards, published by companies from Hallmark and UK Greetings scale down to small independent studios. For publishers, a Henries win reported in the trade press is a powerful signal to retail buyers, and the magazine's winners coverage is read accordingly.
Sustainability and the changing card
Few themes now run through Greetings Today as consistently as sustainability. The magazine has reported exclusively on card industry executives joining forces at Brand Licensing Europe for a sustainability activation run with Products of Change, with senior figures from the Greeting Card Association, Danilo, Carousel Calendars and UK Greetings discussing the sector's environmental responsibilities. Its pages feature brands built around reducing waste, such as cards designed to be reframed as art, plastic-free packaging, responsibly sourced board and smaller, smarter formats. For retailers, this coverage is practical as much as ethical: customers increasingly ask what a card is made from and whether it can be recycled, and the magazine helps buyers identify publishers whose environmental claims and products will stand up on the shop floor.
Diversity, inclusion and Cards For All
Greetings Today has also followed the industry's effort to make cards that reflect the whole of modern Britain. It reported the launch of Cards For All, a not-for-profit initiative founded by Adriana Lovesy of Greetings Lab with a committee of industry leaders, whose mission is to champion authentic representation in greeting cards by educating on the importance of diversity, so that people of all backgrounds, identities and experiences see themselves reflected in cards marking life's most meaningful moments. Its founding board drew members from card retail, publishing and design, including representatives of cardfactory, AfroTouch Designs, The Letter Arty and The London Studio. The Henries' diversity and inclusion category, including a Pride in London collection produced through the Greeting Card Association with many publishers contributing designs, shows the same movement recognised in awards, and the magazine reports both as significant industry news.
Editors and the Lema team
The magazine's recent editorial history illustrates Lema's close-knit team. Naomi MacKay, a journalist with more than thirty years of print and digital experience in consumer and business publishing, took over as editor after working with Lema for several years, mostly on Toys 'n' Playthings, saying she looked forward to immersion in the world of greeting cards and wrap at a time when sustainability and diversity were coming to the fore and consumer spending on cards was strong. Lema managing director Mark Naish welcomed her alongside publisher Mark Horsnell and advertising manager Marian McNamara. More recently Lema announced that Rachel Redhead had rejoined the company as editor of Greetings Today, returning to a publisher she had worked for earlier in her career, with a brief to strengthen the title's connections with the industry and provide a platform for the people, businesses, products and issues that matter to the sector, starting by meeting retailers and exhibitors at Autumn Fair.
The industry it serves
To understand Greetings Today, it helps to understand its market. The United Kingdom greeting card industry is represented by the Greeting Card Association, the trade organisation owned by its members and bringing together publishers, retailers, suppliers and individuals, and British consumers are famously loyal card senders, sustaining thousands of independent card and gift shops alongside specialists such as cardfactory and the card departments of supermarkets and high-street chains. Cards are low-priced but high-margin, design-led and constantly refreshed, which makes timely trade information valuable: a retailer who spots a winning humour range, licensed property or contemporary sentiment early gains a real advantage. Greetings Today exists to provide that early sight, in print eleven times a year and online continuously.
Licensing, brands and characters
Licensed ranges are a major part of the modern card market, and the magazine covers them closely, from heritage art and lifestyle licences to entertainment and character properties. Award-winning licensed ranges reported in its Henries coverage have included collections based on classic children's illustration and on museum and gallery art, showing the breadth from pre-school characters to fine-art cards for adults. Its reporting from Brand Licensing Europe, the industry's main licensing exhibition at ExCeL London, reflects how central licensing negotiations have become to card publishers' ranges. Alongside licences, the magazine champions original British design studios, many of them one or two-person businesses whose ranges are launched, reviewed and celebrated in its pages before reaching national distribution.
Print, digital and the road ahead
Like every trade title, Greetings Today now lives in two forms. The print magazine, with its large-format glossy presentation shared across the Lema family, remains the showcase in which new ranges are displayed to buyers, while its website carries breaking news, awards results and features, and its issues are also circulated digitally, as when a featured brand shared the January and February 2026 edition hosted online. Under Rachel Redhead's editorship Lema has promised positive changes in both print and online. Launched in 1989 and still published by the same independent house, Greetings Today has outlasted predictions that email and social media would kill the greeting card; instead it reports an industry adapting through design, licensing, sustainability and inclusion, and it remains the trade's own record of itself.
