This is the moment Shutterfly has been working on all year: the holiday season. The November and December timeframe accounts for the majority of revenue for the personalized gift and card brand.

In fact, Shuterfly is already planning for its 2026 holiday campaign, said Chief Marketing Officer Bree Casart. 

But first things first: Shutterfly’s marketing team is out to remind shoppers that despite uncertain economic times, they should still spend money on their beloved holiday traditions, like sending greetings cards. 

“While some consumers may be looking to spend less this season, they still intend to spend on holiday traditions and gifts with meaning,” Casart said. 

Enter Shutterfly’s holiday campaign tagline: Make something that means something. The tagline encompasses cards and gifts, which are both key to its business. In fact, 66% of U.S. consumers have received a Shutterfly or Snapfish-made card during the holiday season since 2019.(Shutterfly acquired personalization products brand Snapfish in 2019.) 

A New Jingle For its Old Tagline

Consumers can hear the tagline in the retailer’s first-ever jingle that it’s using in video ads to create a direct-response element, Casart said.  

“There’s a lot of power in that stickiness, which we’ve actually seen through testing of the concept,” she said. “We know it created both a stronger intent to buy and brand awareness — having a jingle in the spot,” she said.  

“Make something that means something” was Shutterfly’s tagline for the 2024 holiday season as well. The brand had a “good” season last year and found that this tagline resonated with shoppers and would likely again this year, Casart said.  

“We prepare for this moment all year long, and we have been doing a lot of incrementality testing across our paid digital channels,” Casart said. “We have found some very strong results, particularly in search engine marketing; We see value in CTV, YouTube and of course, our paid social channels.” 

From an incrementality perspective, its ads on YouTube and connected TV are a highlight, she said.  

Shutterfly Prepares for Shift to AI Search

While the search landscape is changing with the increased adoption of artificial intelligence-based search platforms, Shutterfly is “well positioned” for this shift, she said.  

Part of how Shutterfly has prepared is ensuring its product titles, product descriptions and product detail pages are optimized, such as with detailed descriptions and metadata, to capitalize on consumers searching with long-tail keywords.  

“Maybe five years ago you might have simply searched ‘Best holiday cards,” Casart said. “Now, customers are searching, ‘Modern holiday cards with an evergreen tree.’ So with much more specificity. And we don’t only want to bid on those terms and paid search, but we want to make sure that we’re showing up in those organic searches as well. So we’ve been optimizing our website content to make sure that whatever a customer is looking for, if we have it, we show up in those search results.” 

Another arm of preparing for the shift to AI search is ensuring it has relevant content not only on its website but everywhere shoppers look for information by working with public relations firms, partnering with content creators and having robust product reviews.  

Attracting New and Maintaining Old Customers

In that vein, Shutterfly has expanded the number of collaborations it has this holiday season to two, including an exclusive card and ornament line with influencer brand “Chris Loves Julia.” It also is working with children’s pajama brand Little Sleepies with a collection of cards and ornaments that match the brand’s patterns of holiday pajamas.   

These help give Shutterfly more exposure to different audiences and acquire more customers beyond its typical base of millennial moms, the brand said.  

Casart said Shutterfly has a “significant base of loyal customers” who come to the brand each year to create their cards. One of the factors that is key for retention in this category is the customer’s address book, or allowing shoppers to store their contacts’ addresses within Shutterfly. This makes it easy to have envelopes printed with addresses, saving shoppers time. Because of this factor, the brand has invested more in this tool, such as allowing shoppers to send a link to their friends and families to collect their addresses to automatically populate into that consumer’s Shutterfly account.  

When Shoppers Buy

While it’s still the start of the season, the current signal indicate a good holiday season, she said. 

Typically, Shutterfly’s peak in holiday cards sales is mid-November to early December. Shoppers visit Shutterfly.com before this to select their photo and card design, and gather their addresses. But the actually purchase occurs right around Thanksgiving.  

The brand has also noticed an increase in shoppers sending Year in Review and Happy New Year cards, which extends the season longer.

For personalized gifts, the peak is slightly later than cards, she said.  

Shutterfly Embraces AI

Looking ahead to 2026, Casart has her focus on AI and how to use the transformative technology even more at the retailer.

Right now, it’s using AI for photo curation by allowing the tool to analyze the thousands of photos a consumer might have and to select the best photos to put in a photobook. This process takes consumers hours, but takes minutes with AI.  

In the future, Shutterfly plans to create its own conversational AI chatbot for commerce.  

“Our goal is to use these transformative technologies — AI machine learning, et cetera — to help them make the cards and gifts that we know they’re going to love as fast and as easy as possible,” Casart said.