What 2025 has taught me about running a small greeting card business: An honest end-of-year review

It doesn’t seem possible, but we are at the end of 2025, and it's time for me to write my annual ‘year-in-review’ blog. This has become such an important ritual for me, and something I really look forward to. I am often so busy and in-the-moment, juggling running my small greeting card business, Jess A Little Creative, alongside working as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator, that I don’t regularly get a chance to stop and reflect on what’s gone well, and equally, what’s not gone well. 

So this blog is kind of like my own journal entry for my small business, a chance for me to stop and look back, reflect on what I’ve learnt, so I can go into next year knowing I’m focusing on the right things.

I was, in equal parts, excited and apprehensive for this year. 2024 had been a great year of growth for my small business (you can read my round-up of 2024 here where I talk about this in more detail). And so I came into 2025 feeling more confident that the business was doing better, but also hugely apprehensive that I wouldn’t be able to sustain the growth I’d had in 2024.

And big spoiler, I didn’t.

I started my greeting card business in 2020, and every year I have seen some level of growth, either in the amount of greeting cards I’ve sold, or the revenue I’ve made. But that didn’t happen this year. 2025 was the first year I didn’t ‘grow’.

If you’d told me that at the beginning of this year I would have felt like I’d failed, but at this moment I actually feel at complete peace with it. Despite not ‘growing’, I know I have still learnt and achieved so much this year. Success is not always about the numbers. 

So come with me as I explore some of the big moments of 2025, and what they have meant for my small business…

The greatest business gift to start 2025 off with a bang

In January 2025, I won a 3-month membership to The Better Business Collective, Jenny Pace’s wonderful community. I have followed Jenny's savvy business advice online for years, and taken part in many of her free workshops, and it was as a result of one of these free workshops, that I won a place. I was so excited, and knew that this level of support would be so good for me (there were two 90-minute calls a week, so plenty of time for help and feedback!)

As part of the community, Jenny sends every member a word star at the beginning of the year, and mine was ‘clarity’. I’d never picked a ‘word of the year’ before, as I’d always felt it was a lot of pressure to pick one thing to be a theme for a whole year. But having someone else pick it for me was incredibly helpful. And boy oh boy, it helped me so much to have clarity as a theme this year. I feel like I have gained so much clarity in so many different areas. It is such an important skill to have when running a small business. My word star lives on my desk, and will do into the future, as a reminder. 

I paid for an extra 3 months in The Better Business Collective after my gifted 3 months ended, as it was so wonderful. It gave me just what I needed for the first 6 months of the year, to help me get clearer on what I was trying to achieve, and how to get there.

New friendships and connections formed with local Cheltenham businesses

January was a great month, as after winning the membership to The Better Business Collective, I also gained a new local stockist. I found out about Art Union, a fairly new art gallery and gift shop in Cheltenham, and contacted them to see if they’d be interested in stocking my cards.

They were, and within a week I popped in with a load of stock for the owners Tracey and Tom. Little did I know then, but Tracey and Tom became not only business connections, but great friends, and some of my biggest cheerleaders.

I have longed for a home in Cheltenham for my cards, but it was a lot harder than I’d imagined to gain local stockists. Art Union has been exactly what I needed. It is somewhere to showcase my designs, get feedback about what’s working and what isn’t, and I am so grateful. It’s been a real happy place of mine this year, and I’m thrilled that I’ve had to pop in fairly regularly to top them up as my cards have been selling well! 

I also took a trip to London to visit other stockists from further afield; Know & Love and Deptford Does Art. It’s such a joy meeting shop owners in person and chatting about my designs. When you work from home by yourself, nothing beats a lovely in-person chat.

Letting go of some perfectionism (maybe?)

When I look back at 2025, it doesn’t look like I’ve done a whole lot of designing, there don’t seem to be many new greeting cards to show for all my hard work! But that is partly because one of my main tasks this year was to go back over some older designs and improve on them, now my illustration skills have evolved and improved. 

The cards I’m talking about are my typographic designs, which are probably the style I’m best known for. It really bugged me that some of the designs weren’t as good as I knew they could be, and so I went about updating them all. It was a huge task, and took a lot longer than I anticipated. 

But when I look at that collection of greeting cards now, I am so proud. In my gut, I feel I will be slowly moving away from that style, and trying out some different things in 2026, but I can look back on that collection fondly knowing that it is always there, and it is now as good as I can make it, with some of the designs from it remaining my bestsellers. I’m so proud of them.

After 5 years, I finally expanded my product offering

While I may not have designed as many new greeting cards as I’d hoped this year, I did finally expand out to a new product - gift wrap! I never wanted to rush into offering lots of different products, though I’ve had dreams and ideas for them for years. 

I had always wanted to do greeting cards ‘well’ first, ensuring I had a good range, and knew what I was doing (kinda) before expanding. And this year I finally took the plunge (in a very tiny, dip-my-toe-in way), with my new gift wrap designs.

I had mentioned to Tracey at Art Union that I had ideas for wrapping paper designs, and she was very keen to stock some in the lead up to Christmas, and so with that accountability, I had to crack on! 

I currently have two Christmas gift wrap designs, with ideas for another 20 designs for all sorts of occasions, that I am hoping to work through and produce in 2026. I may not be growing my small business quickly, but these small gradual steps feel really good and are taking me in the right direction.

Setting realistic goals

One thing I’ve got a lot better at over the years is setting realistic goals. In the first couple of years running the business, I got totally burnt out trying to do it all. I am now much more mindful with how many tasks I give myself, and am much stricter with the hours I work. 

I am finding I am really focusing on what works, and leaving behind what doesn’t. I made myself a little chart at the beginning of the year, to track my goals and ensure things were ticking along as they should. It didn’t always go to plan! But it was a great way to ensure I knew what my goals were, and I knew what I should be focusing on each month. 

I actually stopped filling the chart in after October. But that wasn’t because I’d given up, it was because I’d got in enough of a rhythm with it and implemented more ways of planning and tracking tasks, that I didn’t need it anymore. It had done its job!

This was mainly due to the fact that in August, I started planning my weeks differently.

At the start of every week, I make a Focus List, with what jobs have to be done that week, a Flow List, with what jobs need to be done but could slip to the following week, and a list celebrating my wins of the week. On the back, I have a Ta-Da list, rather than a To-Do list, where I write down everything I’ve done each day. My To-Do list is instead kept on my phone, which is more useful as it is forever chopping and changing so it makes more sense to be digital. I also write a monthly Focus List, so I can see the bigger picture of what needs to be done in any given month. 

I have implemented this since August 2025, and it has been amazing. Honestly, for the first time I really feel like I have a system that works for me. It keeps me organised, it keeps me accountable, and it keeps me productive. Maybe one day I will turn my scribbles into a properly designed planner and sell it so other small business owners can benefit from it? It’s not on the cards for right now, but maybe one day…

The juggle is a joy, and a struggle…

As well as running the greeting card business, I also work as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator, and I have been so lucky to work on some amazing projects in 2025. Packaging, illustration, branding, it’s been a real mix and a real joy. 

But it’s also been hard. 

Trying to juggle freelancing alongside the greeting card business, when both are busy, can feel like I’m being creatively and emotionally torn in two. But this year I do feel like I’ve learnt to be kinder to myself, and accept that I can’t do everything all at once. When client projects take priority, it’s ok for everything else to take a temporary back seat.

Another big juggle this year has involved house renovations. Although we had workmen in to do a lot of the big jobs, we were living in utter chaos, sleeping on an air bed for 4 months, all our furniture moved downstairs into two rooms where we ate, worked, relaxed and slept, while upstairs was completely refreshed. 

It was a lot. 

Even more when you work from home, and are surrounded by the chaos constantly. It took quite a toll on me, and I was so hard on myself at the time that I should be ‘dealing with it better’. It was a relief when the house went back to normality, and the juggle felt less intense. It’s very easy to be hard on yourself when you’re finding things tough, but the amount of juggling when you run a small business is something else. Couple that with living on a building site, and well, it’s not easy. But learning to be kinder to yourself is half the battle.

Increasing community and connection

As I don’t use social media at all (you can read why here), I rely on email marketing to spread the word about my greeting cards. In 2025, I swapped from Mailchimp to Shopify’s own email marketing platform, and it has been a breath of fresh air. The emails look better, it is easier to use, and I am enjoying it far more. I feel so much more connected to my community. It’s brought in more orders too, which has been a wonderful bonus, even if it wasn’t the reason for switching in the first place. 

I have actually started emailing more regularly (about once a week) and I love getting the chance to connect and showcase my small business in this way. I try to ensure my emails are always cosy, kind, and something lovely you can read with a cuppa. Do sign up if you fancy receiving them in your inbox - it’s the best way to hear from me as I’m not on social media!

I also started a monthly wholesale newsletter earlier this year, as a way for me to keep in contact with stockists, and shops who have shown interest in my greeting card designs. It’s a great way for me to stay connected with them, and I try to make them as valuable as possible, so if you’re a shop owner and fancy receiving my wholesale newsletter, do drop me an email and I’ll add you!

Diversifying income streams has really started to pay off during 2025

Being self-employed is scary when it comes to finances. It’s all on my shoulders to ensure I’m bringing enough money in. And at times I have been guilty of being way too reliant on one income stream, like Etsy. 

But over the years, I’ve diversified where my income comes from, and this year I’ve really noticed the benefit. I sell my greeting cards on Etsy, on my own website, via wholesale to shops, and at craft fairs and markets, so there are lots of different places that sales can come from. 

I also take on some freelance graphic design and illustration work as I previously mentioned, and in November 2025 I took on a temporary part-time job in Cheltenham to help bring in some extra income, as well as a better sense of community and teamwork - working from home all the time can be a lonely place! 

This mixing pot of different income sources means that if one goes quiet, I have other areas to fall back on. This is really useful, and something I will be leaning into even more during 2026.

……………

And that just about brings us up to where I’m at today! I had forgotten a lot of these things had happened this year, so I'm very pleased I took the time to look back and remember everything I accomplished. 

Although you could look at 2025 as a failure for my small business, as sales went down rather than up, I don't see it in that way at all. I feel like I have still had a successful year in business. I learned a lot, gained a lot of knowledge, and put some great systems and plans in place to stand me in good stead for 2026. I’m finishing the year feeling pretty good. 

I have absolutely no idea what 2026 will hold, but I know what I need to be focusing on, and I can’t wait to see some ideas come to life. The main things I'm going to be focusing on during 2026 are wholesale, email marketing, and creating new greeting card and gift wrap designs! I can't wait to get stuck in.

If you’d like to follow along on my journey, and see what 2026 has in store for me, please do sign up to my email list, as it’s where I share all the highs and lows of running the business, as well as new designs, and all the behind the scenes goings-on. 

Thank you so much for coming along with me on this reflective look back at 2025, and all the lessons and wisdom it gave me. I hope you've gained something from it, and perhaps it has even inspired you to write your own ‘year-in-review’. 

If you have any questions about anything I've shared today, please drop me an email as I love hearing from you and am always happy to help in any way I can. 

But for now, I'm off to have a little rest and recharge. I am wishing you a joyful and peaceful Christmas, and a wonderful New Year when it comes.

Sending lots of love, Jess x