Hong Kong’s new digital custom greeting card platform wants to give users a dopamine hit

Lion Rock Press founder Claire Yates explains how its newly launched sister company, Roksaan, will support local artists and celebrate the city’s culture

Claire Yates is a Hong Konger with printing in her blood. Her great-grandfather started printing shipping dockets on Pottinger Street 130 years ago when that was harbourfront property. This start eventually led to a brick-and-mortar stationery store and a large-scale paper business.

In 2013, Yates continued the family tradition by founding Lion Rock Press, a stationery company specialising in gifts, books and stationery with a sustainable ethos and a deep love for Hong Kong embedded in its trendy designs. Eleven years on, Yates has decided it is time to evolve, moving into the online space with Roksaan, a new online greetings card platform.

Yates says, “People are moving away from paper towards digital. When I started this business, I wanted to continue the legacy of paper, but go in a new direction with it.”

The Hong Kong vibes are strong with Roksaan's cards (Photo: Roksaan)

Above Roksaan’s cards capture the spirit of Hong Kong (Photo: Roksaan)

Above The company‘s goal is to simplify the gifting process (Photo: Roksaan)

Roksaan allows customers to create and order custom greeting cards. Gifts from Lion Rock Press and Roksaan’s locally sourced partner brands can also be purchased or attached to a card order and directly dispatched to their intended recipient. The greeting cards are printed locally at a small printer located at Kwun Tong, with many of the designs on the website touching on distinctly local vibes.

“I saw a niche for affordable, interesting, well-designed greeting cards,” says Yates. “All I was seeing was that Hallmark-style traditional stuff. I didn’t think anything reflected what I wanted to say, what I wanted to send back to friends and family overseas or how I wanted Hong Kong to be represented. I wanted to show the humour, the East-meets-West vibe because Cantonese culture is very funny. It’s got a great sense of humour and a love of cute things, and I wanted to show that side of Hong Kong.”

To capture that local Hong Kong essence and not have the options feel like a tourist tat, Roksaan’s cards are designed by a pool of vetted artists. Anyone can apply to join and create material, but they’ll only be accepted if they not only have the talent but also have a connection to Hong Kong.

Yates explains the motivation for this creative pool: “I’ve been very keen on supporting new, local, emerging artists and those frustrated part-time artists who might have corporate day jobs. I want to give them an outlet to show their art to the world in a way that’s completely low-risk to them. With this card platform, we can bring on these creators who have a connection to Hong Kong and who get paid a royalty every time someone buys one. If a design doesn’t sell, it's nothing lost, they haven’t had to print, package or distribute anything.”

Claire Yates and the Roksaan team are busy reviewing submissions by local artists (Photo: Rick Boost)

Above For the design of its cards, the Roksaan team works with local artists, both full-time and part-time (Photo: Rick Boost)

As the output of artists is central to the success of the Roksaan platform, Yates is making the protection of original work paramount. When asked about how some graphics-dependent brands are being tempted by the relative ease and low cost of AI image generation, Yates responds that she is wary, that AI elements risk alienating the community of artists she wants to foster.

“Everybody in the creative world knows AI is an ongoing debate but we are committed to protecting artist IPs. We’re going to write that into our terms and conditions; we are consulting legal first because it's a minefield—deciding what elements we will allow and which elements we won’t.”

It’s an unsurprising sentiment since a lot of the reasoning behind Roksaan is how the act of receiving a physical greeting card, in comparison to an e-card or a WhatsApp message, can be a brief but meaningful relief from the digital content we are usually inundated with.

Yates describes the difference and appeal saying, “A greeting card is a literal physical manifestation of the feelings that another person is trying to send to you. There’s so much unique pleasure in both the giving and the receiving of a physical greeting card. If you have an amazing greeting card, you will put it on your mantelpiece or shelf and look at it all the time, getting a repeat dopamine hit every time you see it.”

Above Cards can be personalised with text and uploaded photos by users (Photo: Roksaan)

One advantage of Roksaan is its practicality for Hong Kongers. Being based locally means a card can be ordered anywhere and delivered to someone in Hong Kong within a couple of days, rather than weeks from overseas options. The fact that this is also more sustainable is a happy bonus, seeing as Roksaan maintains sustainability as one of its core values.

“There’s no wastage. We’re not using resources, whether ink or energy, to produce over and above what people are going to buy. One of our big motivations is to see whether we can eventually use the smart information we get from this to better control our Lion Rock inventory as well. I’m interested in cutting down on waste because I’m in the business of inventory. We make sure that all our paper is Forest Stewardship Council certified and don’t use any paper from non-sustainable forestry practices.”

So Roksaan is allowing greetings cards to feel personal, sustainable, and via a host of tools like text formatting and image uploads, highly customisable. But can they be cool? Especially as younger generations have had fewer needs to send greeting cards and may not be so inclined.

Yates thinks they’re game, saying “Young people are enjoying a lot of retro trends and nostalgia at the moment. It could be the same for greeting cards if we give them that kind of retro experience but with the latest tech behind it.”

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Roksaan, Hong Kong’s new digital custom greeting card platform, wants to give users a dopamine hit