AG Forms Licensing Studio For Online, Phones, Among Other Uses

American Greetings, the world’s largest publicly traded greeting card company (which already has a mid-sized online mobile content division in AG Interactive and AG Mobile respectively) is launching of AG Properties, a subsidiary focused on developing new characters and other content that can be sold to toymakers, movie studios, clothing designers, online, mobile phone companies and others.

AG, which quietly has been working on characters for about a year, is hoping to build on the success of vintage characters such as Strawberry Shortcake, Care Bears and the beloved Holly Hobbie, born in 1967 and retired a decade later. The card company brought Holly and the other classics back about five years ago, gave them modern makeovers — “Cake” now has pink highlights in her red hair — and quickly earned $2.8 billion in revenue from royalties.