I am not what you might call a “stationery person,” and that’s not some cute way of saying I move a lot. It’s that I’m mystified by entire shops dedicated to things like fancy notepads, greeting cards and envelopes. But I recently learned about a paper goods company called Party Sally that turned my paper goods universe, such as it is, upside down.
I’ll let Party Sally speak for herself, to wit, from the section of the website titled “Who Is Party Sally?”
“Party Sally is really more of a state of mind. Unless you think that sounds pretentious, because Party Sally isn’t pretentious. Eh, maybe a little. Party Sally is an amalgam of ideas that sometimes turn into drawings, and sometimes further turn into things for sale. Like cards. And art! Party Sally likes to create. Party sally likes to encourage. Party Sally gives a shit.”
Party Sally makes people who don't send their friends greeting cards want to send their friends greeting cards. Party Sally cards are drawn or watercolored by hand and impart messages that feel exceedingly current in the way of a recursive social media meta inside joke. For a generation that grew up in a more analog world but has, for decades, been trained to send emails, text messages, instatweetfeedsnaps or whatever etc., Party Sally makes the old school card feel not so old fashioned. If Justin Timberlake brought sexy back in the mid-aughts, Party Sally is bringing paper back in the late 2000-teens. In short, Party Sally is real AF, whimsical, timely and frequently hilarious.
Again, I’ll let Party Sally speak for herself—here are a few messages you can send through a Party Sally card: “Happy Rihannakkah”; “Can’t Quit You” (feat. cans of La Croix); “congrats on your HUMAN baby”; “You used to call me on your see-through phone” (feat. a watercolor of that landline phone from the 90s with clear plastic casing and colorful innards on Clarissa Explains It All).
We send each other more messages than ever before but fewer of them on actual paper. We all know how nice it is to get a handwritten note from someone you like, love or tolerate and I have a feeling the second half of that last sentence is about to change.