joyce wan headshot
Joyce Wan

 

joyce wan governor michael dukakis

Joyce with then-Governor
of Massachusetts, Michael
Dukakis, in 1985 accepting an
award for winning greeting card design.

 

kiwi and pear
Original Kiwi and Pear
design

 It all started with a child’s love for art. Joyce Wan designed her first greeting card when she was in grade school for a city-wide greeting card design contest. The design won first place and was subsequently mass-produced and sold through a major department store chain. Twenty years later, that design would inspire a line of greeting cards and eventually a design studio called Wanart whose products featuring Joyce’s designs are now sold in thousands of boutiques, gift stores and museum shops throughout the world.

 

During the time that Joyce first started developing her greeting card collection, one of her first designs featured a pair of hugging monkeys (image at bottom left). Inspired by childhood memories of a plush toy that she adored, this design was clean, bold and irresistibly cute. Visually, the image was simple but the message powerful. The image of Kiwi and Pear represented love and friendship void of race, gender and age. It went on to become one of the most popular card designs in her collection and still is today.

 

Due to popular demand, Joyce released more greeting card designs featuring Kiwi and Pear. This time Kiwi and Pear were spreading love, friendship and happiness to places such as France, Egypt and Japan. The bold clean lines and fresh color palette combined with the playful imagery resulted in designs with wide market appeal.

 

Joyce went on to sign a deal with Madison Park Greetings, a leading designer, manufacturer, and distributor of specialty gift and stationery products to create a series of iPop Clicks Magnets featuring Kiwi and Pear. These illustrations also caught the eye of Blue Apple Books, a leading publisher of innovative children’s books, who published Joyce’s debut picture book featuring these monkeys titled “Greetings from Kiwi and Pear” in 2009. The greeting cards themselves continue to be best sellers – consumers cannot get enough of these charming monkeys.

 

With its soaring popularity and remarkable ability to capture the hearts of consumers around the globe, Kiwi and Pear is perfect for a variety of consumer products and surface design.

 

For more information about Kiwi and Pear please call 201.683.8813 or email love@kiwiandpear.com.