Just as life was hectic enough – I had just had our third baby –my husband came home one night with an idea. He had had an epiphany. He hailed the merits of Moonpig.com and the fact that it had stormed the greetings cards industry with its incessant jingle on the television but was convinced that the offering it had was not for everyone.

There had to be a way of creating an alternative to Moonpig.com and that is what we set out to do.

Why does personalised have to mean someone’s face shoved on Hello magazine? Surely the difficulty we had in getting my parent’s a 40th wedding anniversary card that was truly relevant and personal, based around their special date of the 8th August 1964, was evidence itself for the concept my over-ambitious husband had conjured up to be the next best thing in the greetings card world: memory marketing.

So, after much discussion, and not much market research ( a tad naive from two people with vast marketing experience and CIM qualifications), we embarked on a year long project to create an online greetings card website that would offer people an alternative to Moonpig.com, and a new definition of “personalised”.

The concept was simple – send a card and evoke a memory – using well known/retro British brands that the UK public know and love. Unknown as we were brands such as The Official Charts Company, Haynes Manuals and DC Thompson – behind famous heritage brands such as Beano, Jackie, Bunty and Dandy – embraced the idea. In theory, we had begun. All we needed was to build the platform and work out how to get the cards printed and posted out. Easy I thought. How wrong can you be?

Suzy Burnip is the founder of Timecarpet.com - a website with a range of greetings cards that hark back to all of our yesterdays.