2021 holiday cards can tell us how people feel about COVID

Holiday cards are a delightful seasonal indulgence. As a highly curated snapshot of your life, they’re a more traditional status update in an increasingly digital world. But one company that sells holiday cards has done something intriguingly modern with those lovingly decorated dispatches. 

Minted, a San Francisco-based company that prints holiday cards using crowdsourced art from creators, has analyzed millions of its customers’ orders in aggregate over the years. Minted doesn’t sell its data to third parties, including marketers, nor does it publicly share customers’ personal information, but its terms of service acknowledge that it may perform data analysis to improve its products and services, and there is no way for customers to opt out. The content, however, is anonymized before Minted uses a form of analysis known as structured query language to scan the text that appears on cards. That leads to insights like which type of family pet gets more mentions. Surprisingly, cats were the victors in 2021. The company also reviews sales numbers and conducts focus groups to learn more about choices like color combination, how photos are staged, and what people wear.

This year, Minted mined the aggregate text of 300,000 cards, produced by customers between October and December 2021. The massive sample yielded fascinating insights about the national American mood at a time when it’s easy to assume the worst thanks to pandemic confusion and polarization. Minted founder and co-CEO Mariam Naficy told me that by early December, prior to widespread Omicron outbreaks, the dominant mood for holiday cards felt lighter than last year.

Before digging into what Minted found, it’s worth pausing to consider how nearly every online experience — even your cherished holiday card — ultimately produces valuable corporate data. People know this intuitively. At some point, we thought about how Google shares aspects of our Gmail data with advertisers, or how Facebook’s algorithms know our browsing history, and decided it was worth trading away some privacy for the convenience of using the technology. Yet it’s also strange to think that the intimate note on the back of a holiday card, written for friends and family, could be digested by software looking for keywords like “peace” and “hope,” or, more specific to the pandemic era, “vaccinated” and “reunion.”

Naficy says that Minted analyzes cards because it yields data that helps the company identify emerging trends before they go mainstream as well as predict what customers will crave months before it reaches their consciousness. In general, Minted’s use of data analysis helped it anticipate the llama craze well before it showed up in the mass marketplace. When the company’s design competitions received artwork with the goofy-looking animal for which customers voted highly, Minted saw the trend coming.

What Minted found this year is indeed telling, if not unsurprising. Between October and December, largely before Omicron emerged, customers used the word “finally” 73 percent more than they did in 2020. Messages that referenced Netflix, masking, and social distancing decreased significantly. People couldn’t quite embrace typing “normal,” but at least they tried — mentions increased by 12 percent. Also on the upswing were mentions of “flight,” “plane,” “hotel,” and “airbnb,” as well as “reunion” and “reunited.” Minted read these verbal trends as evidence that people are less interested in acknowledging the COVID-19 lockdown on their cards compared to last year, even as the virus itself persists. In 2021, Minted found its customers gravitating back toward the traditional, complete with staged poses and matching outfits. It seems one holiday season of pandemic jokes and Zoom collages was all that most people could bear. 

Naficy says that it’s critical to understand the vocabulary people choose for their holiday cards. Customer preferences influence Minted’s decisions about what words to place prominently (imagine how “hope” and “peace” are featured on seasonal cards). “If you’re not keeping up with the way [customers] want to say things, or the way they want to greet each other, you could end up at best dated and at worst disrespectful,” says Naficy. 

An unpredictable pandemic also means that trends can shift rapidly. As Naficy and I spoke, a week before Christmas Eve and in the midst of a discouraging Omicron outbreak in New York City, Naficy noted the platform might need to feature more somber designs: “There are definitely waves of national moods that sweep through, and people really care about having text that captures their mood.” 

As for Naficy’s own holiday card, she chose a single family picture, published on foil-pressed recycled paper. The back featured a QR code for readers to scan and visit her personal holiday website with photos and videos. When asked to single out a word that Minted might consider trendy among customers, it came to Naficy quickly: grateful.