Sending Love Without the Stress
By Keri Luise
New locally founded business, Fluttr, has made sending love a whole lot easier. The internet-based personal greeting card service is dedicated to helping people stay connected and celebrate life’s most important moments through one-of-a-kind personalized greeting cards.
Founder and owner, Matt Sarro, started his new company to improve the experience of purchasing greeting cards. On Mother’s Day two years ago, Sarro’s wife was returning home from an annual girls trip to Florida and Sarro was panicking because he hadn’t bought her a Mother’s Day card yet.
“I grabbed my kids and we went to the local grocery store and predictably the selection was pretty picked over,” Sarro says. “I couldn’t find anything I liked so I went to the local pharmacy and had a similar experience. Alternatively I went down to a local nursery and bought her a plant and a blank card off a metal rack. I came home and just thought about it all day. I hated everything about this customer experience—I’m always forgetting or remembering last minute and I very rarely find something that I’m actually really excited to give her.”
From there, Sarro began planning a solution and built his business of Fluttr January 2021. After many beta tests and trials, Fluttr’s website will relaunch in the coming weeks.
Sarro’s focus on a positive customer experience stems from his past career of working with a digital agency on website design and development for four and a half years.
“While I was there I was very focused on working with our customers to help them create a great user experience,” Sarro says.
Fluttr is rooted in the idea of sending physical cards instead of digital e-cards. “We’ve always fundamentally believed that there’s real value in giving someone an actual, tangible, physical card that shows up in the mail or even handing it to them,” Sarro says.
Greeting cards from Fluttr feature unique personalization that cannot be bought from a grocery store. Customers have the ability to select, sign, schedule and send high quality physical cards. Customers browse through about 730 unique cards by occasion, choose the cover they fancy, then select from three messages or write their own.
“Right out of the gates you have options to personalize and customize,” Sarro says. “Any time you choose a message it drops it down into a field where you can then edit it, so if it’s something that’s almost right but not perfect you can personalize it.”
Fluttr also allows customers to send their cards right away or schedule them to be sent on a future date. “You have the ability to schedule cards for the year at which point you can kind of put it in autopilot and then we’ll send you reminders of cards that are supposed to go out,” Sarro says.
The artwork on Fluttr’s robust inventory of cards are designed by a creative network of 55 diverse independent artists contributing one-of-a-kind artwork. “When we started the business we felt like there was room to improve on the actual physical cards in terms of the artwork,” Sarro says. “So rather than go to traditional card artists we went to artists that we genuinely just like their artwork.”
According to Sarro, all Fluttr artists contribute between five and 20 card designs. They then have a dedicated page on the Fluttr website displaying all of their designs.
Fluttr is the second business to be awarded the Anne Arundel Economic Development Corporation VOLT Growth Loan of $50,000.
“The VOLT Growth Fund aims to help Maryland-based high-growth innovative and technology product companies, like Fluttr, implement a go-to-market strategy and accelerate sales—and subsequently create jobs and business growth in Anne Arundel County,” says Steve Primosch, AAEDC’s Vice President of Finance.
The loan was awarded to Fluttr on February 1. According to Primosch, Fluttr qualified since it “presents a creative solution that allows for a subscription model for custom greeting cards created by local artists. The company is led by a seasoned professional that has the skill set to facilitate growth and take the company to the next level.”
Sarro says the loan gives Fluttr the working capital needed to grow the business. “Assuming that it goes well and we continue to grow the company over the next year to five years then I imagine that’s just the beginning of a relationship that we’ll have with Anne Arundel … We can grow from what we established initially to potentially quite a bit more as we need to scale the business and grow it,” Sarro says.