Hi there, and welcome to the bright new world of Whamoosh! You’ve made a great choice and once you’ve checked out our fantastic personalised cards and gifts we’re sure you’ll come back again and again. More about how all this works later, but you may be interested in how Whamoosh! came to be.

Okay, so this is the bit where we tell you about who we are and how we got this thing started. Let’s just go back a few years and give you a little background info.

Alan Oliver, that’s me folks, founded Kamrok Greetings in 1991. Kamrok was a very successful card publisher who supplied Birthdays, Clinton’s and many independent retailers in the U.K. and worldwide. After selling the company in 2006 I worked as a freelance copywriter for many major card publishers, but the urge to create a new kind of online publishing company was proving irresistible and this is where my co-founder John comes in.

John Bickley, a former executive in the music, film and video industry actually happened to be a golfing buddy. John, by this time had set up a seriously cool technology company called Facetec Ltd., which owned the licence to a very sophisticated facial recognition platform. He was looking for a really good outlet for this technology, one which would be able to take full advantage of all it had to offer.
Also, John has a wealth of experience in business management, although it has to be said his putting is useless for a 7 handicapper.

So, one balmy September evening in 2008, after a few too many glasses of Merlot, the idea of Whamoosh was conceived. Yes, this is a familiar story, two people drinking far too much and losing their inhibitions, and the next thing you know - Whamoosh!, there’s a baby on the way. Undaunted by this prospect, in fact rather excited by it, we figured that by combining my greeting card knowledge and John’s facial recognition technology, surely the ultimate in personalised cards could be created, hence our strapline “Personalised Just Got Better!”

Fortified by the bravado inducing effects of however many glasses we polished off that night, we decided there and then let’s do it, and we did. Okay, the gestation period has been a few months longer than the norm but the baby Whamoosh! has now been safely delivered to the world.

Our emphasis is definitely on fun, and we knew we were on to something when some of our competitors started showing a lot of interest, but we weren’t the kind of parents to put our baby up for adoption. So here we are, just over a year later, and we believe we have created something that will actually change the whole perception of greeting cards, online or otherwise, forever.

Along the way we have acquired the services of some very talented people, such as Warren our Art Director, whose passion and belief in our dream led him to pack in a great job and pledge his future to Whamoosh! – what a clever chap. We also have a great team on board in terms of website building, technical support, public relations and marketing, and obviously printing. A big thank you to all these guys, the aunties and uncles of Whamoosh!, without whom this would have just been a phantom pregnancy.

So how does all this work? Well hopefully, the homepage demo provides a great insight into this, however, in a nutshell, with Whamoosh! you’ll be able to instantly (and that’s the key) upload a friend’s or relative’s (or even your own) photo and embed that face into a variety of very funny or even flattering scenes. Wherever you see the “Face-it!” symbol on a design you’ll be able to do this. The potential for stitching people up, and we all love doing that, is endless and as you go through our different ranges you’ll be able to select something that’s just perfect for whoever you have in mind. In fact I guarantee you’ll be spoiled for choice.

Whamoosh! has exclusive access to this technology which means you can only get these great cards from us. However, we also have a wonderful selection of cards not requiring “Face-it!”, some are really cool photo upload cards but we also offer several alternative ranges either created by us or licensed from our partner publishers, so if you want a cute card or a verse card for example, no problem. These designs will still offer full text personalisation. Although it’s just cards for now we plan to introduce a range of gifts such as mugs, posters, calendars etc. at the earliest opportunity, so watch this space.

So that’s just a little bit about us and our new baby, and hopefully over the next few years we’ll all get to know each other better. By the way, we welcome your feedback about absolutely anything so please tell us the good, the bad and the ugly. We’ve tried really hard to make our website as user friendly as possible so that your whole buying experience is an enjoyable one, but if our child misbehaves we need to have words.

We’re confident that before too long more and more people will be saying the words “You’ve/I’ve Been Whamooshed!” Thanks again for visiting us, and we hope to see you many more times in the future!

Have fun with Whamoosh!