The short answer
For Zazzle Christmas cards, buy from Orabella Prints for the widest range, Coffee and Paper co. for minimal designs at the lowest price, Kat Fusinski Design for calligraphy and foil, and Moodthology Papery for hand-painted illustration. All four are independent designers. Two of the busiest stores on Zazzle's own Popular pages belong to Zazzle.
The most popular designer on the page is Zazzle
Open Zazzle's Christmas card category and it looks like a crowd of independent artists. Count who made the cards and a different picture comes out.
We read the store behind each of the first 180 cards in the Popular order on 26 October. The single largest share, 24 cards, came from studioZ, which describes itself on its own About page as Zazzle's in-house design studio. Another 21 slots went to Zazzle's blank "create your own" templates. Neither is labelled as Zazzle on the category page.
That is a quarter of the most visible shelf, and it is the house.
There is nothing wrong with a studioZ card. But if you came to Zazzle for a designer rather than a template, the Popular order is not the list to trust, and the four shops below are where the independent work actually sits.
How we picked four shops from the Popular pages
Zazzle publishes no rating for a shop. The star count under a card is pooled across every card of that product type, so the 10,102 reviews on one Orabella design describe Zazzle's printing, not Orabella. We did not use it.
What we used instead:
- Presence. How many of the first 180 Popular cards each independent shop holds. Popular reflects sales, so this is the nearest public stand-in for a track record. It moves a little every time the page loads, so read the counts as a ranking, not a census.
- Designer tier. Zazzle's Pro programme ranks creators by monthly earnings, from Pro up to Diamond, and shows the badge on the store. In 2009 Zazzle put Diamond at an average of $25,000 a month. It no longer publishes the thresholds.
- Range and price. Whether the shop covers photo and non-photo cards, foil, folded and matching extras, and what its cards list at. Every price here is the Comp. value of a standard 5x7 flat card on 26 October, before the sale that was running on cards that day.
We compared the shops' published ranges. We did not order from them, and print quality is Zazzle's for all four, since Zazzle prints every card. Our general approach is on how we rate.
Best overall: Orabella Prints
Best overall: Orabella Prints, because no other independent shop covers as much of the Christmas category or turns up as often in it.
Orabella held 23 of the first 180 Popular cards, one fewer than Zazzle's own studio and nine more than the next independent shop. The range runs from a $1.40 postcard to multi-photo collage cards, botanical wreaths, scalloped frames and a letterpress collection of 23 items. Many of its Christmas collections add matching stickers and photo ornaments, so a card, an envelope seal and a tree decoration can share one look.
Prices sit in the middle: a standard photo card lists at $2.51 a card. Tracey Khalei, the designer in Florida behind the shop, says on the store page that she takes custom design requests, which is rare enough to matter if a layout is nearly right.
The catch is the size of the range. Orabella has so many near-variants of one card that finding the version with your number of photos takes some filtering.
Best minimalist and best value: Coffee and Paper co.
Best minimalist: Coffee and Paper co., because it has the cleanest designs among the busy shops and the lowest typical price.
Its median card lists at $2.40, the cheapest of the eight independent shops we looked at. The style is consistent: watercolour trees, a single line of gold script, plenty of white space. Several designs have a foil version, which costs $2.80 and, on 26 October, was discounted by 15 percent rather than the 40 percent on standard cards.
That gap matters more than the list price. On sale, a flat card from this shop came to $1.44 and the foil one to $2.38.
The shop is run by a graphic designer in the United Kingdom. It shows no Pro badge, so its sales history is the one thing here we could not read from the badge, only from the 14 Popular slots it holds.
Best elegant and foil: Kat Fusinski Design
Best for elegant and foil cards: Kat Fusinski Design, because it holds the top Diamond tier and its range leans on calligraphy, monograms and real foil.
Kat Fusinski has sold on Zazzle since 2009. Her Christmas range is built on script lettering, buffalo and tartan plaids, berry wreaths with a monogram, and a run of foil photo cards in green, red and black plaid. There are pet photo cards too, which is not what the elegant label suggests.
It is the dearest of the four. The median card lists at $2.95, and the calligraphy photo card that reaches the Popular pages lists at $3.21. Across 100 cards, that is $55 more than the same order from Coffee and Paper co. at list price.
Best hand-painted: Moodthology Papery
Best hand-painted: Moodthology Papery, because its illustrations are painted by the two designers who run it rather than assembled from stock graphics.
The shop is run by twins in Canada, Lisa and Melanie, and also holds the Diamond tier. The cards have a story in them: a cat in a snow scene, a dachshund in a Christmas jumper, a vintage truck at a tree farm, a family recipe card. There are tri-fold cards with room for a year's worth of photos, and foil versions of many designs.
Its Popular cards list at $2.67 to $3.19. It held only five of the first 180 Popular slots, the fewest of the four, which is the price of a style that suits fewer people than a plain wreath does.
Also considered
NB Paper Co. is a Diamond shop in New York with bold, colourful, type-led cards and nine Popular slots. It missed the four because its style overlaps with Orabella's brighter designs at the same price.
Sycamore & Blossom, in New Zealand, also held nine slots with striped and houndstooth photo cards at $2.51. The range is narrower than Orabella's, and narrower is the opposite of what a best overall pick needs.
What no shop can fix for you
The designer gives you the layout. Everything after that is Zazzle's, and three things catch people out.
A typo is yours. Zazzle's standard 30-day promise covers its own mistakes. It does not cover a misspelt name or a wrong year you typed into the template. Only the paid Worry-Free option at checkout covers "not happy for any reason", and Zazzle does not publish its price. Read the proof twice. Our Zazzle review covers the return rules in full.
The saving is measured against another site. The 40 percent off is calculated from Zazzle's Comp. value, which its own policy describes as prices on other websites, and which is set largely by the designer's royalty. That royalty is why the same card size costs $2.40 at one shop and $3.21 at another. We explain how the Comp. value works in the review.
The calendar is tighter than it looks. Zazzle says cards typically arrive in one to two weeks depending on the shipping method, and an order of 50 or more of one product can add two to three business days of production. For a mailing list of 80, order by the end of November, so the cards arrive with a week left to post them.