If you are in a profession that is related to Business-to-Business marketing then you might very well have come across rubber band powered automatic pop-up products. You know the type of thing – an interesting-looking pack arrives in the morning’s business post, you open it with a certain amount of curiosity and then you get a surprise when out of the pack jumps a pop-up cube. Everyone seems to agree that the product is great at achieving its aim of capturing your attention and of putting a smile on your face, so why have you never seen these products on sale in the greeting card shops?

 The answer lies in long-term storage. You see, in order to achieve its objective, a rubber band powered pop-up must be presented with the product compressed to a flat position ready to pop-up with a lively action as soon as the pack is opened. However, when the product is in that compressed state, the rubber band is stored at full stretch and that presents a problem. Rubber bands are a natural product and do not retain their full elasticity if stored at full stretch for longer than a few days. Think of a rubber balloon – it is a good, round, bouncy thing when it is first inflated but after a while, it goes limp and floppy.

 A greeting card may sit in a box in a warehouse and then on the shelf of a greeting card shop for months before someone buys it and so you can see that the typical retail scenario just does not suit automatic pop-up products. So, how would an ordinary person go about finding such a product to send to a friend as, say, a birthday greeting?

 One answer would be to make it yourself but where would you start? There are numerous internet websites, chat rooms, forums, and blogs where paper crafts enthusiasts swap ideas and suggestions but there doesn’t seem to be a central source. However, that is about to change providing that the card making and scrapbooking crafts community joins in!

 Quite a number of companies in the UK have been producing automatic 3-D pop-up products for the B2B marketplace for years and they all are aware of the drawbacks of trying to put the product in a retail environment. We are looking to change that by making die-cut blanks available to the paper crafts fraternity through a new website called Pop up Crafts - but we acknowledge that we don’t know enough about the market to be able to do the job with 100% confidence. However, we do have the good sense to invite ideas and suggestions from the vast army of paper craft enthusiasts with skills such as card making, scrapbooking, rubber stamping and in decoupage. If the paper crafts fans have anything to do with it, you might yet receive one of these terrific pop-up products in the form of a handsome handmade greeting.