Create a Home Business Making Greeting Cards

Naoto and Berri Inoue share their story of creating a home business making greeting cards.

There’s a young couple in New Hampshire who — in their
own small way — are devoting much more than lip service to
the future welfare of mankind. Naoto and Berri Inoue
(carpenter and craft kit designer, respectively) decided
early this year that the time had come for them to actively
involve themselves in working for a better world by creating a home business making greeting cards. Here, in
their own words (extracted from a letter they wrote to
MOTHER), is what they did.

“Our main objective for the past five years has been to
achieve self-sufficiency. We’ve been lucky to have had much
success with our projects, but we must admit that there are
no free lunches . . . we’ve put a lot of sweat and love into
them. But the point of this letter is not to show off what
fortunate situations we’ve fallen into. It’s to explain how
we felt that — in order to completely achieve our life
goals — we couldn’t just look towards our land, our two
geodesic domes, our woodshop, and our reputations as
skilled workers.”

“We realize that there are countless causes to be worked
on . . . and we also know that we can’t get much done with all
our energy dipped into many pots. So the cause that we’ve
chosen is the elimination of nuclear pollution.”

“We had lots of thoughts on how to bring forth action, or
at least education. But unfortunately all of them required
money (for stickers, literature, etc.). Need we say that
money for such projects is not easily come by?”

“Still, Berri has studied art and had recently taken a
course in calligraphy, so she decided to try her hand at
designing some greeting cards. We chose quotations that
were not just sharp ‘no nuke’ slogans, since we know that
there are a lot of people out there who’d like to see the
end of nuclear power and war but who for various reasons
don’t want to have bumper stickers or T-shirts that say so.”