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Butlers at the finest homes used to deliver them on a silver tray to their lords and ladies who would pronounce on their merits with a sniffy nod or a curt kiss-off. The calling card was, by societal whim, the only way past the transom for chancers seeking “face time” when it still meant that.
It was a simple notice of intention, status and credentials, a must-have accessory for everyone from the travelling salesman to the shopworn private detective — think of Raymond Chandler’s PI Philip Marlowe “calling on four million dollars” at the Sternwood mansion.
Alongside the Rolodex, the fax machine and the attaché case, the calling (or business), card became a small paper acknowledgment that the aspiring executive was edging closer to the corner office.
But as physical wallets and purses give way to apps and QR codes, a poll in the U.K. has suggested its days are numbered, or certainly dog-eared.
An Ipsos survey conducted earlier this year revealed a steep fall-off in their use, with more than half of those surveyed reporting they had given up using them since the beginning of the pandemic, which discouraged handshakes and the handling of germ-ridden bits of paper.
Unsurprisingly, younger generations were even less likely to pack bits of cardboard embossed with their name and number; the data revealed fewer than 15 per cent of those under 34 have ever announced their arrival with one. Of those who have previously doled them out, more than half (52 per cent), said they had not used them in more than four years, and more than two-thirds (65 per cent), said they were very or fairly unlikely to use them in two years’ time.
“For now, business cards still have their place,” Jeremy Rees, the chief executive of Excel London, one of the British capital’s largest conference venues, told CityAM newspaper. “But delegates are finding smarter, more personal ways to meet and stay connected.” Organizers are now “matchmaking” conference-goers based on their mutual personal and business interests long before they attend events.
The decline has coincided with the rise of hybrid working and virtual meetings, and the gradual decline of after-work socializing.
Before COVID, business cards were produced in staggering numbers — an estimated 27 million per day, or more than seven billion each year. Sadly for the environment, it’s reckoned 88 per cent are tossed out within three to five days of being received.
Vistaprint, one of the world’s biggest makers of business cards, was clobbered by the pandemic. “Second half of March 2020 and early April, we saw some really severe impacts,” its global president, Florian Baumgartner, told the BBC. He said sales have recovered, especially in North America, but customers are now embracing QR codes on their cards that link to contact details in digital form. “Business cards are definitely not dead,” he insisted.
They remain popular in Asia. “There is a lot of importance to it,” Shireena Shroff Manchharam, an etiquette coach based in Singapore, told the broadcaster. “Especially in countries like South Korea, China and Japan. I think that in Southeast Asia, it’s definitely almost ceremonial. It’s a ritual. It’s really a chance to see the hierarchy, the position of somebody. It sets the tone for a meeting.”
Calling cards — also known as visiting tickets, visiting cards or compliment cards — first emerged in China in the 15th century, but their paper-and-ink form is mostly closely associated with 18th century France, where they were known, delightfully, as the carte de visite.
From the salons of Paris they spread across Europe and Britain and to the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
They became de rigueur for the upper classes, with the Victorians taking their design to new heights of frippery and ornamentation through the advent of chromolithography, which allowed for colour photos and other embellishments. Nostalgia and romanticism ruled, and pastel-hued cards bloomed with images of kittens, doves, hearts and delicate hands.
Soon gilded edges, decorative ribbon borders and cloth fringes appeared, and some cards even featured paper flaps that concealed hidden messages or names.
Calling card design may have grown unwieldy, but the rules of play were positively weed-choked. Complicated etiquette dictated what time and in what manner cards could be delivered, how they were to be left and by whom. A married woman, for instance, had to leave two cards if she was calling on a bachelor — one of her own and one of her husband’s.
In the U.S., where card use peaked in the late 19th century, different sizes were used to denote marital status and sex, with married couples boasting the biggest of the lot at two-and-a-half inches by three-and-a-half (6. 35 cm by 8.8). Any untutored caller who offended the Victorian etiquette manual risked social ostracism.
If the recipient was not at home, a card could be left at a mansion’s entrance hall on a silver tray known as a salver. For the influencers of the day, it was a point of pride to have a groaning platter, with the most influential ducat carefully arranged on top to impress visitors — the “likes” of the day, if you like.
Coded messages became the rage for a time; folding the corner of a card a certain way could announce a social call or an intention to leave town, and express congratulations or condolences. Mark Twain mocked the process in his novel The Gilded Age, writing of one of his characters that she best “get the corners right” or she might “unintentionally condole with a friend on a wedding or congratulate her upon her funeral.”
Discussing business or occupations on a social call was considered déclassé, and the notion that one would produce a card listing what one did for a living was beyond the pale.
However, the “trade card” of the late 17th and early 18th century — handed out at public squares and markets rather than foisted on Jeeves the butler — was an effective way for companies to spread their name, and an early forerunner of the business card. When signed, it even doubled as a legally binding contract.
The calling card didn’t really stand a chance in the age of the postcard, the landline and then the digital revolution, but their remnants still retain a sense of the personal touch. Whether that’s enough to prevent business cards becoming another paper dinosaur, however, is anyone’s call.