One spring afternoon, James Hirschfeld, founder of Paperless Post, was in the company’s offices in Lower Manhattan, reviewing mood boards for digital invitation designs. They included materials for upcoming designs like New Victorian, a collection inspired by 19th-century decor, and a line from Annie Atkins, a graphic designer known for her collaborations with director Wes Anderson.
As Mr. Hirschfeld examined the collage-like panels, he remembered a meeting about designing new children’s invitations. “Someone said, ‘The dinosaurs are out, the owls are in,’” he said. “And I thought: Is this my life?”
This has been the case for 15 years.
Mr. Hirschfeld, 38, and his older sister, Alexa Hirschfeld, 40, started Paperless Post in 2009, when they were 23 and 25. He was a senior at Harvard and she worked at CBS as second assistant to anchor Katie Couric. .
Since then, the company has sent out some 650 million invitations, by its own measurements, grown to employ a full-time staff of 110 people and, as of last year, been immortalized in a “Saturday Night Live» sketch. Paperless Post also gained fans in the heritage stationery companies it sought to disrupt, collaborating with brands like Crane and Cheree Berry on digital products.
His approach of combining the flourish of physical invitations with the ease of digital correspondence has been adopted by several younger companies, among them Electragram, a digital stationery company developed by publisher Graydon Carter and his wife, Anna Carter; HiNote, a similar company started by Alexis Traina, wife of a former U.S. ambassador to Austria; and Partiful, a platform with a faster, more flexible sensibility that has resonated with members of Gen Z.
But when paperless post debuted, in some sections of society its arrival was seen less as the dawn of a new era than as a step toward the end of civilization as some knew it.
Pamela Fiori, an author who was editor-in-chief of Town & Country magazine in 2009, told the New York Times at the time that Paperless Post’s digital stationery brand was representative of an “increasingly uncivilized world “. Ms. Fiori, now 80, said in an interview in April that while she still preferred to use physical stationery, she could not deny the impact the company has had in the years since followed its creation.
“If you talk about paperless mail now, people immediately know what you’re talking about,” she said. “They do it well.”
Marcy Blum, a wedding and event planner in Manhattan who has worked with clients like basketball player LeBron James and interior designer Nate Berkus, was also among those who initially quickly wrote off Paperless Post.
“We thought, ‘It’s convenient, but it won’t make much difference,'” Ms. Blum said. “We were absolutely wrong.” She added that her business had benefited from the service over the years as it allowed her to plan more events on short notice.
“It’s like Kleenex now, isn’t it?” Ms. Blum said, referring to how the name Paperless Post became a general term for digital correspondence, the same way Kleenex became a general term for tissues.
Heady start at Harvard
The Hirschfeld siblings began developing what would become Paperless Post in 2007. Mr. Hirschfeld had then started his second year at Harvard after leaving Brown and was planning his 21st birthday party.
“Paper invitations were expensive and inefficient,” he said, adding that at the time digital alternatives like Facebook or the Evite website were “simply unacceptable from a design perspective.”
Ms. Hirschfeld, a Harvard graduate, lived with their parents in the family home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side while she began her television career. She had already begun to question that path, she said, when Mr. Hirschfeld called her to suggest starting an online business.
Neither had studied technology; Ms. Hirschfeld majored in classical and modern Greek studies, and Mr. Hirschfeld majored in English. But they were motivated in part by what Mr. Hirschfeld described as a thriving entrepreneurial spirit at Harvard in the wake of Mark Zuckerberg — a classmate of Ms. Hirschfeld — who started Facebook with his college roommates.
“That’s what inspired me to start a business with Alexa,” Mr. Hirschfeld said. “I felt like it was possible because there were people around me who showed me it.”
The siblings and their younger brother, Nico Hirschfeld, who does not work in the paperless post office, also grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. Their maternal great-grandfather, Raphael Caviris, after arriving in America from Greece, opened several restaurants with his brother, including the now-closed Burger Heaven chain in New York.
When they were teenagers, Mr. Hirschfeld was a waiter at Burger Heaven and Ms. Hirschfeld was a hostess. “We were used to being in and near small businesses,” he said.
The two siblings used their personal savings to develop a prototype of their online business, which has always involved a combination of free offerings, to attract users, and premium paid services like personalization. (These days, sending digital invitations with personalized touches like special artwork and lined envelopes to 20 people can cost up to about $70.)
When the siblings began pitching the concept to investors in 2008, some balked at the idea that people would pay for digital invitations, no matter how pretty they were, Mr. Hirschfeld said. But they convinced Ram Shriram, one of Google’s first investors; Mousse Partners, an investment company of the Wertheimer family, owners of Chanel; and others to contribute nearly a million dollars to their brand new business.
“They took a chance on us,” Ms. Hirschfeld said. Mousse Partners even furnished the Hirschfelds with their first workspace: a row of spare cubicles in the New York office of Eres, the French lingerie and swimwear brand owned by Chanel.
When the Hirschfelds started their business, it was called Paperless Press. But a web address with that name already existed, and its owner didn’t want to sell it to the siblings. In a few months, they changed their name: Paperless Post.
Guided by “Guts and Scrappiness”
Meg Hirschfeld, the Hirschfelds’ mother, attributed her children’s success in part to “grit and courage,” qualities they inherited from their ancestors, she said. Ms. Hirschfeld, who left her career as a lawyer to raise her three children, is now executive director of Paperless Post. Her husband, John Hirschfeld, is a real estate investor.
She said Mr. and Mrs. Hirschfeld were close siblings who grew up but had different sensibilities: he was creative and artistic, and she was outgoing and a computer whiz. Ms. Hirschfeld remembers visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her son when he was in preschool and her daughter becoming “absolutely addicted” to an Apple computer when she was 7 years old.
The siblings’ yin-yang brainpower is reflected in their roles at Paperless Post. Ms. Hirschfeld oversees the operations and technology aspects of the company. Mr. Hirschfeld is in charge of business development, marketing and design, a role in which he has brought in collaborators including fashion brand Oscar de la Renta and retailer John Derian.
The Hirschfelds, who each serve on Paperless Post’s seven-member board of directors, are no less involved in running their company today than they were 15 years ago. But both describe themselves as less frenetic. Ms. Hirschfeld, who lives in the East Village, is the mother of two young children. Mr. Hirschfeld, who lives on the Upper East Side, is also spending time on Long Island restoring an 1895 house he recently purchased.
In recent years, their company has had to face not only new competitors, but also the tumultuous economic climate caused by the pandemic. Mr. Hirschfeld called this period “tearful,” explaining that sales were down 50 to 80% in several months of 2020 compared to the same months of 2019. “Except in Florida and Texas,” he said. added, noting that the company shifted its marketing during this period to focus on locations where lockdown policies were less restrictive.
Changes in the way people communicate (more texting, less email) have also posed challenges to Paperless Post’s business model.
“In 2009, it was all paper and email,” Mr. Hirschfeld said. “Now it’s DM, WhatsApp.” As a result, the company has introduced products like Flyer, a form of SMS-friendly invitation that is typically less expensive than Paperless Post’s traditional offerings.
Chloé Malle, 38, editor-in-chief of Vogue.com, was another skeptic of Paperless Post when it started. “I loved printed invitations,” said Ms. Malle, who was a classmate of Mr. Hirschfeld when he briefly attended Brown.
Then she started using the platform and, more recently, started receiving wedding invitations by email through Paperless Post. “This just wouldn’t have happened before,” she said. Now Ms. Malle also receives digital invitations through competitors like Partiful. But she believes paperless publishing, like printed stationery, will always have its fans.
“There’s room for both,” she says.
