Laverne Ward, the founder and owner of Ella’s Daughter Card Collection, started her home-based independent greeting card business. Now that she is retired from law enforcement, she decided it was time to unshelve her long-standing dream of being an entrepreneur. One of her fulfilled dreams was earning her BBA in Business Administration at Adelphi University in Garden City, NY, back in January of 1981.
Ward’s friend has lupus and she inspired the entrepreneur to produce a card line. Every month her friend invites senior citizen women to her home for breakfast and gives each attendee a basket of toiletries, laundry and cleaning products. One day during lunch, her friend said, “I may have lupus but it doesn’t have me. If I don’t find something to do with myself, I get depressed.” At that moment, Ward realized that she wanted to start a business to help people with serious illness and grief.
Ward tends to takes notes in her journal during church service and bible study, and when ideas come to her mind, she jots them down. As she was writing notes, suddenly the light bulb came on. She decided that she would write greeting cards from her notes in her journal. She believes that people give greeting cards to express caring, love, sympathy, admiration, regrets, hospitality and faith in God.
The first cards Ward produced were empathy cards. With Empathy Cards, she wants to help people to understand, share, connect to each other with honest relationships, and to support both physical and emotional health (during a serious illness or grief).
Ward’s weak area is graphic art. She hired a freelance graphic artist that is an expert at interpreting her designs. Ward writes and designs because those are what she considers her best skills, and she delegates the rest. With the two of them collaborating, within the next five years, she envisions her cards will be sold throughout the U.S.
“There are nights when I can’t sleep because I’m bursting with ideas on design or strategy,” Ward says. She keeps a notepad and pen by her bed stand now for last-minute ideas she has. “I wasn’t stretching or reaching when I was retired. I was just existing. Now I feel as if I’m flying. I am helping people make a change, one card at a time.” Visit http://www.zazzle.com/ellasdaughter1.
