Card Factory
chain of greeting card and gift stores in United Kingdom
Card Factory plc is a retailer of greeting cards and gifts in the United Kingdom founded in Wakefield by Dean Hoyle and his wife Janet. The first store opened in 1997, and by 2020 the company had over 1,000 stores. The company also operates two retail websites and has mobile apps for both iPhone and Android. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
History
Origins to 2009
Dean Hoyle left school with no qualifications, having a self confessed greater interest in football. With his wife Janet, from 1993 they began buying cards wholesale, and selling them from the back of their van at car boot sales and public open air events.
In 1997, they opened their first shop under within the holding company Sportswift Ltd, purposefully choosing secondary retail locations which were cheaper. After opening a few stores, whilst Janet founded and headed up the internal design and print function, Dean concentrated on expanding the business, with a nominal target of 500 retail outlets. This gave the company a profit margin advantage over rivals, including Clinton Cards.
The couple built a board to expand the business, including: Keith Pacey (chairman of Maplin); Richard Hayes (managing director, their ex bank manager); Chris Beck (commercial director, ex Grant Thornton); Darren Bryant (group finance director, ex PricewaterhouseCoopers).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Card Factory” as chain of greeting card and gift stores in United Kingdom. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5038192. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2020, 2009 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “Card Factory” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.