Blue Mountain Arts was founded in Boulder, Colo., in 1971 by an idealistic young couple named Stephen and Susan Schutz. Stephen created the artwork pastel, relentlessly mellow birds-and-trees that would eventually be marketed under the name AireBrush Feelings while Susan was in charge of the text. While traditional greeting card companies just focused on holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, Stephen and Susan's all-occasion cards found a devoted audience. In 1986, Blue Mountain's cards were so popular Hallmark copied some of their ideas. Blue Mountain promptly filed a lawsuit against the greeting card giant, and after two years of legal battles, Hallmark Cards agreed to stop selling its line of imitation AireBrush Feelings cards.

Over the years, Blue Mountain prospered, but nonetheless remained a niche-market entity, however, the company has annual sales of around $60 million. In the early 90’s, Stephen and Susan’s son Jared, then a Princeton University undergrad, saw the Internet for the first time. This was before the nice, neat browsers we have today, and nobody was really interested in having their own website. So Jared basically just called his father and asked his dad if he could set a Website up for Blue Mountain. Eventually, Jared wrote an applet that allowed users to personalize Web- based greeting cards with his or her name, the recipient's name, and a personal message. So, each Blue Mountain card sender is also a Blue Mountain marketer, urging people to use the service. And each recipient is a potential recruit, because when you go to the Website to retrieve a card, there is a button on the bottom of the page where your card appears asks if you'd like to send a card to someone, too.

Today, Blue Mountain features more than 2,500 e-cards for occasions as diverse as Banker's Day, Step-Parents Week, and Beautician's Day.

Every month, one out of six Web users visits Blue Mountain Arts either to send or retrieve a card. Blue Mountain receives nearly 10 million hits per month. For a company with so much traffic, Blue Mountain has kept a remarkably low profile. And like many Web "successes," it's still trying to figure out the answer to the billion-dollar question: How can it convert all those visitors into a viable revenue stream?

Jared Schutz, the executive director of Blue Mountain Arts, and so far he has said no to almost every would-be partner. Profit is not the top priority for Blue Mountain, unlike other web companies, which have shareholders and are publicly held. Instead, Blue Mountain is a small, family-owned greeting card publisher, with a history of showing more interest in communication lines than bottom lines.

Jared, who started two successful Internet companies while still in college, couldn't help being intrigued by the immense business potential of the rapidly growing site. Jared felt that Blue Mountain was missing a out on an opportunity to make a lot of money by having paid banner advertisements on the site. Jared’s father however disagreed and did not want banner ads. Because the site was still growing and becoming more expensive to maintain, Jared’s father Stephen finally agreed to put banners on every hundreth page of the site.

By proving the audience-building efficiencies of free electronic greeting cards, Blue Mountain inspired substantial competition. Egreetings Network has switched to a completely free model, and Amazon.com recently entered the market as well. Hallmark Cards have substantial resources that they can deploy in their efforts to build an online presence. (Earlier this year, Blue Mountain sued Microsoft, claiming that Microsoft had deliberately designed Outlook Express 5.0, the email program it bundles with Internet Explorer 5.0, to block Blue Mountain's card-notification messages. While Microsoft says the blocking was a nonintentional effect of Outlook's optional junk-mail filter, the judge hearing the case deemed the blocking "beyond coincidence" and ruled in favor of Blue Mountain.)

To keep pace in this increasingly competitive environment, the Schutzes decided that, after almost three decades, it was time for Blue Mountain to move beyond its family origins. Due to the unprecedented growth, Blue Mountain realized that they needed a professional management structure and a world-class CEO.

In the winter of 1998, the site started featuring banner ads from Proflowers.com and other advertisers such as Mrs. Field's Original Cookies, Sprint, Qwest Communications International, and Discover Card on a limited basis. Stephen held his breath, waiting for irate missives to be sent. When no backlash materialized, perspectives about Blue Mountain's commercial prospects began to change.

Instead of becoming a page-view retailer, Blue Mountain wants to capitalize on the context it can provide to advertisers. That includes long-term sponsorships with major brands that make sense in the context of the card-giving environment: For example, a long-distance provider might sponsor the "Thinking of You" section; a health-related advertiser might sponsor the "Get Well" section.

Blue Mountain’s Website has evolved into a unique space. It boasts the kind of tightly integrated content, commerce, and community ,the three C's that lead to e-riches , that is rarely found on the Web. Indeed, plenty of companies have implemented these components on their sites, but only a few, such as Amazon and eBay, actually manage to combine them all in one seamless interface. Blue Mountain has done it as well. Its cards and other gift-related items are its content, and these items also become objects of commerce and the building blocks of its community Blue Mountain users interact with each other almost exclusively through the gifts (cards and other items) that they send to one another.

By offering their customers free greeting cards, and by making it more convenient than ever to send a card (no more trips to the card shop or post office, no more licking stamps), Blue Mountain inspires users to send more cards. And now that it has won a loyal user base as a result of such virtual efficiencies, Blue Mountain will begin presenting users with a chance to purchase gift-related items in addition to the electronic greeting cards.

Blue Mountain is going to create a shopping area that will eventually include a wide range of gift-related products, including brands and items that Blue Mountain won't produce itself. There are products that Blue Mountain users want, but they cannot produce all the products users want. To add value for their users, they are going to develop partnerships that will give the users access to those products from Blue Mountain. By doing these things, Blue Mountain not only increase revenue, they also add content that the customers want.