Yesterday, I told you about the fate of Egreeting cards. Today, I want to shed light on how the now defunct company Excite@Home paid $780 million for a digital greeting card business, bluemountain.com, when they really could have started one on their own for a tenth of the price.

That’s the story of my former client, Susan Polis Schutz, when Excite@Home came prancing by in 1999 and handed her and her family a whopper check for the digital part of their business that was just a few years old.

Susan and her husband Steve Schutz originally started Blue Mountain Arts in 1970 as a greeting card, poster, and gift book publisher. Twenty-five years later, their son Jared suggested they enter the digital world by offering e-cards. At the time, Blue Mountain was generating around $35 million in printed greeting cards. I am sure you have seen or even bought their cards. Susan was the poet who wrote the flowery words and they were designed with lots of pastel colors. Blue Mountain usually had its own display rack and the cards were sold in a wide variety of stores.

Steve Schutz, who had a doctorate in physics from Princeton, and son Jared worked together to build one of the first e-card sites. It was fortunate that they did. The timing was perfect. As I mentioned before, the family sold the digital division of Blue Mountain Arts in 1999 for $780 million. It wasn’t long after that, in 2001, that Excite@Home went bust and American Greetings grabbed up whatever was left for just $35 million in cash.

Today, Susan is a documentary maker, Steve runs an educational website, and Jared Polis is a United States Representative from Colorado and the first openly gay man elected to Congress as a freshman. The Schutz’s have two other adult children besides Jared.

I met Susan in 2004 and helped her promote Blue Mountain: Turning Dreams Into Reality, the story of how her publishing company, Blue Mountain Arts, and electronic greeting card website bluemountain.com were founded and developed. In the book, she describes some of the experiences she and Steve had from the time they silk-screened their first posters and lived in the back of their pickup-truck camper to when their poetry greeting cards became the number-one-selling card line in America.

I can remember sitting across the table from Susan at one of our meetings thinking about all that money in her bank account. It didn’t change her and her family very much. By the time they had gotten that big check, their print business had already bought them everything they desired.

A lot of the new money has been donated to good causes and helping those they love.