How TheWitBureau gets every new card onto Pinterest

TheWitBureau is an independent family studio in York, and it runs like a small government department with a sense of humour. Orders are requisitions. Buyers hear that the Clerks are preparing their acquisition for dispatch, and the thank-you note is signed "By order of the Clerks."

The cards themselves are personal in a very literal way. Many spell the recipient's name in tall letters, each one filled with little scenes from what they love: cricket, golf, birdwatching, steam trains, hill walking. Any design can be changed, so a birthday card can become an anniversary card. Every card is printed on 300gsm FSC certified card, comes with free UK delivery and goes out by Royal Mail 1st Class. A card sent straight to the recipient never includes the price. The studio belongs to the UK Greeting Card Association, and the shop has nearly 700 listings and a 4.98 star rating from more than 1,500 reviews.

New cards rarely arrive one at a time. The catalogue grows in runs: a set of city-break cards for Madrid, Vienna, Athens and Prague, a set for jobs like vet, bus driver and Royal Navy, a set of Christmas cards starring dogs who hate sprouts. Each run adds a handful of listings at once.

Plenty of people plan gifts on Pinterest, saving ideas for a dad who golfs or a friend who's just back from Ibiza. But every pin needs a photo, a title, a description and a board. With a catalogue this size, making them by hand would mean Pinterest only ever saw a fraction of the cards.

TheWitBureau connected its Pinterest account to Alura and switched on both Pinterest automations.

Pin New Listings handles the new cards. A daily job picks up every listing that went live in the past day and turns it into a pin. When the studio publishes a run of new travel cards, each one gets its own pin without anyone opening Pinterest. The pins land in the Pin Queue and post on a schedule the shop sets: how many a day, on which days and at what times. A seasonal card that should go out first can be moved up the queue.

Smart Pins covers the rest of the catalogue. Once a day it checks the queue and, when there's room, adds pins made from the shop's active listings, ranked mostly by their Etsy listing views. It won't reuse a photo pinned in the last week, so cards from further back in the catalogue come back around without the same photo showing up again and again.

Every pin goes to a single board called Cards. Each pin uses the listing's main photo, the mock-up of the card standing on a table, in the tall shape that fits a Pinterest feed.

The words come from "Optimized for Pinterest with AI". Rather than copying the long Etsy title, the AI writes a shorter pin title, a description and alt text from the listing, so details like the personalisation and the FSC card make it onto the pin. Anything in the queue can be edited or deleted before it posts.

Each pin title says what the card is and, where it fits, who it's for, so it reads at a glance. A few that went out as new cards were published:

"Madrid Birthday Card | Personalised Typographic Travel Gift." "Personalised Golf Birthday Card with Name in Ball Trail." "York Greeting Card with Blue Hour Illustration | Yorkshire Travel." "Santorini Birthday Card | Greek Island Travel Gift." "Personalised Pickleball Birthday Card for Sports Fans."

The Madrid pin's description reads: "Celebrate with a personalised Madrid birthday card, printed on premium 300gsm FSC® card. Customise names, messages, and more for a special touch." Every pin links back to its Etsy listing, where the buyer picks A5 or square, then types the name for the front and the message for inside.

Show the personalisation in the photo. TheWitBureau's mock-ups carry a real name on the front, HARRY or PETER or DAVID, so a shopper can picture their own person's name there straight away. Then make ordering easy. Each listing explains exactly what to type in each box, what to write if you want no name, and how to leave the inside blank.