From a Spare Room to The Smitten Society. Our Story

March 20, 2026

I want to tell you a story. Not a polished, corporate "about us" page story. A real one. The kind that starts in a spare room with a big idea, a lot of self-doubt and absolutely zero guarantees.

It Started With a Problem I Couldn't Ignore

Back in 2016 I found myself standing in a card shop staring at shelf after shelf of the same generic, beige, uninspired gifts. Birthday cards with forgettable rhymes. Mugs with motivational quotes nobody asked for. Gifts that said absolutely nothing about the person giving them or the person receiving them.

But it wasn't just the blandness that frustrated me. It was something deeper than that.

I wanted to find gifts that truly represented the LGBTQ+ community. Not a tokenistic rainbow slapped on a generic product once a year in June. Not a tick-box exercise from a corporate giant trying to appear inclusive. Real, authentic, genuinely funny and deeply personal gifts that made people in our community feel seen, celebrated and represented every single day of the year.

They didn't exist. So I decided to make them.

The Spare Room Years

NaughtyCard started in 2016 from a spare room. Just me, a laptop, a whole lot of determination and probably too many cups of tea.

There was no grand business plan. No investor meetings. No marketing budget. Just a genuine passion for creating gifts that meant something gifts that made people laugh out loud, gifts that celebrated identity unapologetically and gifts that said the things we sometimes struggle to say out loud.

The early days were slow. Really slow. Every order felt like a miracle. Every five star review felt like someone truly understood what I was trying to do. I packed every single order myself, checked every design personally and poured everything I had into making NaughtyCard something worth being proud of.

And slowly, very slowly, it started to grow.

Growing Into Something Bigger

NaughtyCard didn't explode overnight. It grew the way the best things do gradually, organically and built entirely on the loyalty of the most brilliant community of customers I could have ever hoped for.

Order by order. Review by review. Design by design.

Over the years we expanded our range from greeting cards into personalised mugs, wall clocks, money boxes, prank mail and our now legendary metal pride membership cards. Our studio grew. Our team grew. Our community grew.

And somewhere along the way something beautiful happened, NaughtyCard became more than just a gift shop. It became a place where people felt genuinely represented. A place where the LGBTQ+ community could find gifts that reflected their real lives, their real relationships and their real sense of humour. Not a watered down, focus-grouped, corporate-approved version of it. The real thing.

Why The Smitten Society?

By 2026 something had become clear to me. NaughtyCard the name I had poured ten years of my life into had outgrown itself.

The brand we had built was so much bigger than the name suggested. Yes we still loved a bit of naughty. Yes we were still proudly a little bit cheeky. But we had grown into something warmer, broader and more ambitious than "NaughtyCard" could really capture.

We weren't just a naughty card shop anymore. We were a community. A society of people who believed that gifts should mean something. That personalisation matters. That the LGBTQ+ community deserves year-round authentic representation. That a clock on your wall or a mug on your desk should make you smile every single time you look at it.

And so The Smitten Society was born.

What The Name Means To Me

Smitten. It's not a word we use enough. To be smitten is to be completely taken with something, overwhelmed by it, delighted by it, unable to imagine life without it.

That's how I feel about this community. That's how I feel about the gifts we create. That's how I feel about every single customer who has ever placed an order, left a review or sent us a message saying one of our designs made them cry laughing.

You have been the heart of this from day one. Every design we've ever created has been for you. Every upgrade we've ever made from plastic to metal pride cards, from ticking to silent sweep clocks, from a spare room to a proper studio has been because you deserved better.

And you always will.