Dark & Somber Greetings is a black metal greeting card company based in Los Angeles, CA. We asked co-owner Courtney Frystak to give us a little background on their dark entries in the world of Hallmark.
Farron and I (Courtney) comprise this small but mighty metal endeavor Dark & Somber Greetings. Between the two of us we’re always trying to think of new things to make (which i can’t tell you because hopefully we’ll make them). Farron is an artist and black metal musician, and I’ve worked in a record store for eleven years in advertising/marketing, so combined we have a really good knowledge of how to make something like black metal greeting cards. While Farron is really good at the images and art aspect, I am good at knowing what will sell, how to package, market, and get the cards into stores. Part of Farron’s incredible imagination is all of the ideas, but then it’s my job to sort of bring him down to earth, as far as what’s realistic to manufacture, or what we can really afford. It’s hard taking a chance when you don’t have a huge budget.
The best part of making our cards for me is just sitting around, coming up with the actual greetings. It’s so funny, Farron always wants to put really grotesque images of abortions and stuff or use “fuck” in every card. I’m like, “babe, we have to actually want people to be able to put these in their retail stores, and we’re smarter than ‘fuck’.” I was really surprised Amoeba was cool with our “Congratulations”, burning cross card. I mean, that could potentially alienate some customers, haha.
Record stores like Vacation Vinyl and Amoeba have been down with us since the very beginning and have always carried all of our cards without question. They welcomed every design, no matter how offensive. There’s a chain of stores in Utah (Graywhale) that just bought every design of our cards for all 6 of their stores. Who knew people would be into Dark & Somber in Utah? It’s pretty cool. Honestly, when i read the email, the first image that flashed into my mind were a group of Mormons gathered around a burning pile of our cards, laughing and rejoicing. We have realized that there are people like us everywhere.
We started making cards pretty much because we were restless and knew we had a good idea that didn’t exist yet even on a small scale. Farron would make digital images for our friends for their birthdays, or photoshop funny pictures of animals in corpse paint. There was a serious lack of cards for our demographic that didn’t have a hipster mustache or a little bird on it. So we decided to make cards we would buy and knew other people would buy them too.
Our best ideas just really come from things we say to each other all the time. Farron would constantly say to me “I hate everyone, except for you,” and I was like “we need to put that on a card!!!!” We are really sarcastic people with minds that can be very dark. Many things i think about I have to hold back from saying out loud. I don’t think that’s normal, is it? “If I can’t have you no one will” and “It feels great to hate you” were just ideas that came into my mind because I’ve said them jokingly. Putting a black metal image to dark thoughts isn’t hard, you can pretty much choose anything.
We’re not sure what the future hold for us as far as Dark & Somber Greetings goes. We’ll definitely be creating some more cards and we also talk about making other things, so we’ll see. It’s all fun for now, and every time I meet someone who loves our cards it reinforces why we did this in the first place - to offend people’s moms.
http://darkandsombergreetings.com/
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