We Are Here To Change Postcards & Help You Make Money
Why We're Reinventing The Postcard
Postcards are one of the best-selling souvenirs, and the category continues to grow, yet not many are posted. Most customers these days buy postcards to keep as art, to pin-up around their house, to add to their collection, and to preserve the cherished memories they made on holiday.
We think it’s about time postcards had a rebrand and redesign to reflect their role in the 21st Century. We want to inform people of what a postcard's real value is and to empower them to view it as art. Doing so unlocks a much broader market, raising sales, and people seeing them as art increases their perceived value dramatically.
So postcards need a complete reinvention, and we at The Modern Art Department are doing just that. We have a vision to change postcards forever, to bring joy to countless customers and to help NZ retailers flourish.
It’s the start of a very exciting journey and we hope to find retailers around New Zealand who want to join us on this journey.
Why You Should Trust Us
Founder and Artist, Harrison J. Newton, was formerly the Marketing Strategy Lead at Samsung NZ, then a Product Marketing Manager at Xero.
Driven by a desire to add some real value and brighten the world, he left to pursue his dreams, opening a summer pop-up shop on Waiheke selling his unique souvenirs for two years. He lost his shop after the landlord sold up, and the new owner wanted to put an ice cream shop there instead (fair enough, people love ice cream).
Thinking of his next move, he reflected on the two years at his shop, where he designed over 40 product ranges with hundreds of variations, slowly refining them, getting feedback from customers, and watching what stock actually moved. He realized his skills lay in wholesaling, so over the past year he has started selling in 5 retailers across Waiheke. It was an instant success, as he could confidently say what sold like hotcakes, and the retailers would soon agree.
After living the retail shop reality, he grew to truly respect the craft and talent it takes to run a shop, he learnt the pain points, priorities and headaches. So he promised for his next business, he would consider the needs of shop owners, just as much as the end customers.
The business model presented is his attempt at removing all the headaches and maximizing profit per inch in-store.
What Makes Our Postcards Different
Our core differentiation lies in pairing premium artwork with a custom, patented display rack that acts like a magnet, drawing shoppers directly across the floor the moment they step into your store.
- Beautiful Display Stand: Engineered with mid-century design principles, our patented stand combines warm curved wood, clear acrylic pockets, and a weighted floating metal base. It functions as an architectural centerpiece that instantly elevates your shop's visual aesthetic.
- Zero Clutter & Accelerated Sales: 12 lean-back pockets hold 50 cards each (600 total units, $2,100 total rrp value) in a minimal footprint. The lean-back mechanism keeps stock pristine, while the curated 12-slot capacity eliminates buyer choice fatigue to speed up impulse sales.
- Modern Photography: People have moved on from the hyper-edited, hyper-detailed photos popular in the 90s, people want photos that feel real, raw and have personality. We live in a vertical world these days, landscape postcards feel dated and off. Bordered with a crisp build in frame makes it feel like an instant frame and elevates it.
- Unique Design and Layout: Reimagined vertical back featuring clean typography, Kia Ora detailing, and official international postal sorting compliance.
- Archival Print Quality: Ultra Premium Arcoprint cardstock, printed in New Zealand on industry leading printers for colours with life and images that pop.
We Will Bring Tourist To Your Door
Our primary marketing mechanism is integrated directly into the product. Every Print features a discrete QR code on the reverse linking to an interactive map of all our stocking retailers across New Zealand.
As travelers journey around the country, the QR code lets them hunt down location-specific prints, turning every card sold anywhere in the network into a direct foot-traffic generator for your shop.With each store holding just 12 of the 48 prints, customers looking to collect them all will be excited to see the options available at the next stop.
Our Pricing Philsophy
The New Zealand postcard market has become an outlier compared to other markets, Europe (€1.5 to €3), America ($2 to $4) Australia ($2 - $4). In New Zealand they normally sit between $1 - $2, and that is before the currency conversion really blows out the numbers.
This means serious money is left on the table. Customers walk away feeling they got a deal because they did, while the shop owners make pennies. We think postcards should be optimized for profit, not turnover.
We also want our postcards to be slightly higher priced than other options, it all adds to that premium experience.
We also know price is always the key decision maker for a sale. We want to keep our postcards competitive and an impulse buy. In our experience, they start to blink when it is approaching $4-$5 RRP. So from our experiences, we believe we have found a perfect new sweet spot for postcards
To further support our stockists, we offer a low MOQ of just 50 units per variant, so stockists can trial them without financial risk and perfect the right combo on their rack. Once the stockist has found their winning postcards, we offer great bulk buying discounts to increase their take-home even more.
