One afternoon this spring, Paperless Post founder James Hirschfeld was in his company's lower Manhattan office researching mood boards for digital invitation designs. There you'll find materials for future motifs, including the New Victorian collection, which takes inspiration from 19th century decoration, and a line by Annie Atkins, a graphic designer known for her collaboration with director Wes Anderson. It was included.
Studying the collage-like board, Hirschfeld recalled a meeting about designing new children's invitations. “Someone said, 'Dinosaurs are out and owls are in,'” he said. “And I thought, this is my life.”
That's been the case for the past 15 years.
Hirschfeld, 38, and his sister Alexa Hirschfeld, 40, started Paperless Post in 2009 when they were 23 and 25. He was a senior at Harvard University, and she worked at CBS as anchor Katie Couric's second assistant. .
Since then, the company has sent out about 650 million invitations, by its own metrics, has grown to employ 110 full-time staff and last year produced a sketch for “Saturday Night Live.” He became an immortal being. Paperless Post has also found fans in the traditional stationery industry it was trying to disrupt, partnering with brands like Crane and Cherry Berry on digital products.
That approach, combining the flourishing of physical invitations with the ease of digital communication, has been adopted by several young companies: HiNote, a similar business started by Alexis Traina, the wife of a former U.S. ambassador to Austria, and Partiful, a platform with a faster, looser sensibility that has resonated with members of Gen Z.
But when paperless mail arrived, its arrival was seen by some in society less as the dawn of a new era and more as a step towards the end of civilization as some people knew it.
Author Pamela Fiori, then editor of Town & Country magazine in 2009, told The New York Times at the time that Paperless Post's digital stationery brand symbolized “an increasingly primitive world.” Fiori, now 80, said in an April interview that while he still prefers to use physical stationery, he can't deny the impact the company has had in the years since its founding.
“Now when you say paperless posting, people immediately understand what you're talking about,” she said. “They do it well.”
Marcy Blum, a Manhattan wedding and event planner who has worked with clients such as basketball player LeBron James and interior designer Nate Berkus, was among those who were quick to do away with paperless mailboxes at first.
“I was thinking, 'This is convenient, but it's not going to change much,'” Blum said. “I was completely wrong.” She added that her business has benefited from the service over the years as it has allowed her to plan more events in a short period of time.
“It's like Kleenex today, right?” Bloom said, noting that the name Paperless Post has become a common term for digital communications in the same way that Kleenex has become a common term for tissues. .
A whirlwind beginning at Harvard University
The Hirschfeld brothers began developing what would become Paperless Post in 2007. Mr. Hirschfeld was by then planning his 21st birthday party, starting his second year at Harvard after transferring from Brown University.
“Paper invitations were expensive and inefficient,” he said, adding that digital alternatives like Facebook and website Evite at the time were “totally unacceptable from a design perspective.”
A Harvard graduate who was starting out in television while living with her parents on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Hirschfeld said she was already beginning to have doubts about the path when he called her about the idea of starting an online business.
Neither of us had studied technology. Ms. Hirschfeld majored in classical and modern Greek studies, and Ms. Hirschfeld majored in English. But they were motivated in part by Hirschfeld's entrepreneurial spirit blossoming at Harvard after Mark Zuckerberg, a classmate of his, started Facebook with his college roommate. This was due to what was stated.
“That's what got me interested in starting a company with Alexa,” Hirschfeld said. “I felt like it was possible because I had people around me who taught me how to do it.”
The brothers and their younger brother, Nico Hirschfeld (who is not involved with Paperless Post), also grew up in an entrepreneurial family. Their maternal great-grandfather, Rafael Cavillis, came to America from Greece and opened several diners with his brother, including the now-closed Burger Heaven chain in New York. .
When they were teenagers, Ms. Hirschfeld was a waiter at Burger Heaven and Ms. Hirschfeld was a hostess. “We were used to being in and around small businesses,” he said.
The two brothers used their personal savings to develop an online business prototype. It always included a combination of free services to attract users and paid premium services such as customization. (These days, sending digital invitations to your girlfriend's 20 people with custom touches like special artwork and lined envelopes can cost around $70.)
Hirschfeld said that when the brothers started pitching the concept to investors in 2008, some balked at the idea that people would pay for a digital invitation, no matter how good it looked. But they persuaded Google's early investor Ram Shriram. Mousse Partners is the investment company of the Wertheimer family, which owns Chanel. and others donated nearly $1 million to the fledgling venture.
“They gave us a chance,” Hirschfeld said. Moose Her Partners provided the Hirschfelds with their first workplace. It's a row of spare cubicles in the New York office of Eres, the French lingerie and swimwear brand owned by Chanel.
When the Hirschfeld family started the business, it was called a paperless printing press. However, his web address with that name already existed, and its owners did not sell it to the brothers, so within a few months they switched to a new name: Paperless Post.
Guided by “guts and scum”
The Hirschfelds' mother, Meg Hirschfeld, said her children owe some of their success to the “grit and grit” they inherited from their ancestors. Mrs. Hirschfeld gave up her law career to raise her three children, and she is now the chief administrative officer of Paperless Post. Her husband, John Hirschfeld, is a real estate investor.
According to her, the Hirschfelds had been close since childhood, but they had different sensibilities. He was creative and artistic, and she was sociable and a computer expert. Mrs. Hirschfeld said that she visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art when her son was in kindergarten, and that she became “completely hooked” on Apple computers when her daughter was 7 years old. I remembered.
The brothers' yin-yang brains are reflected in their duties at Paperless Post. Ms. Hirschfeld oversees the operational and technical aspects of the business. Ms. Hirschfeld is responsible for business development, marketing and design, and she has used collaborators such as fashion brand Oscar de la Renta and merchant John Derian.
The Hirschfelds each serve on Paperless Post's seven-person board of directors and are still involved in running the business, as they were 15 years ago. However, both said they were not that enthusiastic. Ms. Hirschfeld, who lives in the East Village, is the mother of two young children. Mr. Hirschfeld, who lives on the Upper East Side, is also spending time restoring an 1895 home he recently purchased on Long Island.
In recent years, the company has not only had to battle new competitors, but also the turbulent economic climate caused by the pandemic. Hirschfeld described the period as “eye-watering” and explained that sales in several months of 2020 were down 50 to 80 percent compared to the same months in 2019. He added, “Except for Florida and Texas.” The company changed its marketing during that period to focus on regions with less restrictive lockdown policies.
Changes in the way people communicate (more texting, less email) are also posing challenges to the paperless post business model.
“In 2009, it was just paper and email,” Hirschfeld said. “Now it's DM, it's WhatsApp.” As a result, the company has introduced products such as his Flyer, a casual, text-message-friendly format of invitations that are typically cheaper than Paperless Post's traditional products. did.
Vogue.com editor Chloe Malle, 38, was also skeptical of Paperless Post when it first appeared. She said: “I loved the print invitations.” She said Ms. Mull was a classmate of Mr. Hirschfeld when they briefly attended Brown University.
She then started using the platform and recently started receiving wedding invitations by email via Paperless Post. “That wouldn't have happened before,” she said. Currently, Maru says she also receives digital invitations through competitors such as Partiful. But she thinks her paperless posts will always have fans, just like paper stationery.
“There's room for both,” she said.