In a partnership with Japan Post, Nestlé Kit Kat and advertising agency JWT have come up with a clever and innovative concept: the Kit Kat postcards!

As the name suggests, these are small boxes of Kit Kat, that can be mailed as if they were a postcard. The product launch was timed with the university exams season, so that friends and relatives could wish students good luck in their studies with a chocolate break :)

Here's the product presentation:

The Kit Kat postcards won the Media Grand Prix this year at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, so we wonder... how long until it is available at other postal services around the world? *hint hint* :)

Have you been in a Postcrossing meetup before? How about an International Postcrossing meetup? If not, here's your chance!

Like all Postcrossing meetups, this one is also organized by the users themselves and it's been in the works for quite some time. Now that the details are pretty much decided, it's time to spread the word. This International Postcrossing meetup is going to be in Helsinki (Finland) in the 28th, 29th and 30th of August.

If you are interested, here's a summary of what's currently planned:

Friday, 28th August:

A small pre-meeting in the afternoon for chat and coffee in a cafeteria.

Saturday, 29th August - the official meeting day

The official meeting day starts at 10am with a guided tour around city center and a trip to the Suomenlinna Island, an UNESCO World Heritage place. On the Island it's possible to do a small picnic or have a cup of coffee. Of course, the city tour will have plenty of stops in many postcard shops!
Later in the day everyone can enjoy a meal together in a restaurant followed by plenty of time to write some more postcards.

Sunday, 30th August

A visit to the biggest flea market in Helsinki, Valtterin Kirpputori, and continue to the amusement park Linnanmäki which has an unique atmosphere. The last stop on Sunday will be the Olympic Stadium Tower in Helsinki.

Many users are already arranging to go, some from abroad with plans to visit the country for the first time!

To know more details about this meetup, just check the Postcrossing Forum where you can find more updated information about it.

On the last post, some of you wondered what kind of objects can be sent through mail. Well, here's a cool project that tests the limits of postal services (and their patience too!): To Mr. Cheng.

Artist Eric Ericson, from Sweden, spent a few years sending all kinds of unwrapped objects through the mail: food, a skeleton, a baby doll, books, vinyl records, a pair of glasses, individual playing cards... you name it.

The result is a fascinating minimalist website and book (published in Sweden but we hope they make it available in Amazon soon!).

Here's what the artist had to say on a recent interview with Wired magazine:

Wired.com: You have previously published books of letters, for example one where you sent letters with odd ideas to authorities, like asking a Swedish municipality if it could host a North American Indian tribe. Why are you so fascinated by letters?
Ericson: Sending things is a fun way to communicate, and I love the seriousness in letters. I mean, you would never receive a lawsuit by e-mail. There is something about letters, especially nowadays when they are getting more and more rare, and we’re communicating in other ways instead.

Once in a while, many of us love to receive some cheesy-looking and colorful postcards.

Our friends from Australia have made a fun and interesting set of new postcards called Bendy Friends. These postcards are not your regular postcards. They are colorful, thicker, shiny, and obviously bendy!

According to the Bendy Friends’ official website, these flexible postcards are made to be durable. You do not need to put them in an envelope nor worry too much about them being lost in the mail. They are extremely noticeable with their colorful designs. Moreover, Bendy Friends postcards are made from strong, flexible, and colorful foam.

You can choose your own Bendy Friends character from a wide variety of choices—from Disney’s most-loved cartoon characters to Australia’s adorable endemic animals.

The Bendy Friends can also end up on your recipient’s fridge. The makers attached a small magnet on the back of each Bendy Friends postcard for easy fridge attachment.

If you’d like to check out their whole inventory, simply visit their website.

You can also order your very own Bendy Friends postcards from the site. They ship everywhere! Just download the order form and either mail, fax, or email it to them.

Many people are saying that these postcards are made for children. Sure, why not? However, the Bendy Friends postcards cater to everyone who like durable, bendy, and colorful postcards—both children and the child-at-heart.

Some people love receiving postcards that show beautiful scenes or pleasant paintings while others prefer those that have some kind of personal touch. Not surprisingly, many people love getting postcards that are witty... that make them think... that tease their brain... and at the same time, make them laugh.

Introducing... Indexed Postcards by Jessica Hagy.

Thanks to fellow Postcrosser, Addis R. Perez (username: rainmelonpie) from Puerto Rico, who shared with us the info about Ms. Hagy’s unique set of postcards. Now many of you will know about these witty postcards and may love them, too.

Indexed postcards started as simple, weekday-morning blog entries back in 2006. On pieces of 3x5 index cards, Jessica Hagy would connect a number of words and phrases wittingly with charts and diagrams that look like those figures that you encountered in your high school geometry or algebra class.

Some of the cards comment about controversial topics such as immigration, religion, politics, and the media while most are based on real life experiences and observations of the author—all written in such a way that makes you realize how real the connections are!

Here are some of Jessica’s most famous and most controversial Indexed creations:

Zip it back up. There are secrets in there.


All mixed up

These Indexed cards and many more have been featured in various media outlets such as Time Magazine, GOOD Magazine, BBC Magazine Online, NY Times Freakonomics, PC Mag, Yahoo, and Guardian UK. You can check out more of Jessica’s work here: Indexed.

Good news for many Postcrossers who love or will love Jessica’s brilliant creations: Jessica Hagy has teamed up with Chronicle Books and published an Indexed Postcard Book. Just follow this link to check it out: Indexed Book on Amazon.com, .ca, .co.uk, or .de.

What do you think of them? Do share!

We like to see Postcrossing has a hobby for the whole family. It might sound strange, but it's true that very few hobbies can be done by such a wide age group. We have Postcrossers of all ages and we believe it's quite special that Postcrossing can reach everyone, independently of it's age, gender and, of course, geographic location.

Today we have learned from a Postcrosser and its use for the postcard exchanges: Postcrossing as a school project. She is a teacher in a school which used Postcrossing as a tool for teaching geography and history to the students. We couldn't be happier about this so we asked if we could share the story with everyone. Here's the transcript of what she told us:

In my second grade classroom, we have been Postcrossing for most of our school year. Recently, our 100th postcard arrived! Each student, myself (teacher), and 3 adult helpers prepared reports about an assigned country from which we received a postcard. Projects from my class of 7 - 9 year olds included powerpoint presentations, dioramas, posters, travel guides, fact books, and more. Each student took turns sharing and teaching the other students about their assigned country.

Then last Friday, with help from parents, we had our party. We sampled food from different parts of the world, match Moomin and Miffy on-line, revisited our projects, and played a geography trivia game.

I want to thank everyone who may have sent us a card! This has been such a fun and exciting project. My class has not only learned about their world, they have learned that different cultures, languages, thoughts, and ideas are what makes our world more FUN! This project was also a very unexpected lesson in history. Other Postcrossers who sent us cards did an EXCELLENT job of providing information about where they live. Because of your information, my second graders know a wealth of information from all over the world. It helped sharpen their problem solving and research skills.

For the last day of school, my students will each take home a few cards from different countries and US states. They are already starting to pick out their favorites.

I will, without a doubt, do this again with next year's class, and every year after that! THANK YOU POSTCROSSING for being the best geography-teaching tool a teacher can have!

And all we can say is thank you! And thank you for sharing this story with us all.

If you know of other interesting uses of Postcrossing, we would love to hear from you!

Don’t you find it amusing to find odd mailboxes while driving down an unfamiliar neighborhood? Most of the time, these interesting mailboxes provide a hint of the owner’s personality and values.

Owning a quirky mailbox can be so much fun as well. What else can complete the whole excitement of the mailing process than getting your mail from a fun and quirky mailbox?

Thanks to Rilda from South Australia who sent us this wonderful blog suggestion about quirky mailboxes. Here are a few examples from her local collection:

Fun, isn’t it?

Most people’s mailboxes are the traditional mail slots that are built-in into their doors or the curbside Joroleman mailboxes that are usually seen in American suburbs. However, several creative individuals have thought of a peculiar way to excite their postman (and themselves) by installing odd-shaped letterboxes.

How do you feel about a letterbox shaped like a mermaid or a fisherman? What about one that looks like a mushroom? Here are a few we found on Flickr that may cause a few giggles and laugh to unsuspecting passersby:

Click on any of these for a full size picture, and to discover who took that picture and where it was taken. There are many more of these on Flickr, just search for funny mailboxes!

Do you have a quirky mailbox too? If so, how quirky is it? Share your quirky mailbox story with your fellow postcrossers!

With the summer stretching it's arms and warming up more and more countries, the Postcrossing meetups are also on the rise. April was a particularly active month with at least 5 meetups that we know of and May seems to be following the same steps.

Finland on its own had 3 of them just in April, all in different cities throughout the country. Russia followed, and Taiwan had its first meetup in Taipei which gathered quite a few Postcrossers.

Here's a quick run down of all the meetups that happened since the last update with links to photos of the events:

4th April

Finland, Jyväskylä (photos, photos)

12th April

Finland, Kalajoki (photos)

18th April

Taiwan, Taipei (photos, photos)

25th April

Russia, Moscow (photos)

Finland, Joensuu

6th&7th May

Finland, Helsinki (photos)

9th May

England, Ipswich

Finland, Jyväskylä (photos)

But it doesn't stop here. There's quite a few coming up soon! Here's the agenda for the upcoming meetups:

17th May

Brazil, São Paulo

31st May

Portugal, Coimbra

27th June

Canada, Ontario

As usual, for the most updated list of the upcoming meetups, be sure to check the forum.

And because it's much easier to describe the meetups with photos, here are some taken by Headstandguy on the Taipei meetup:

For more photos of this meetup, check this slideshow.

PS: By the way, soon we will be publishing details here about the upcoming International Postcrossing Meetup 2009 so keep tuned!

It's in days like today that the power of a simple postcard becomes obvious. The World Lupus Day is celebrated today across the world, and thanks to many Postcrossers who kindly joined our LupusCrossing project, many smiles are being lit right now and many more will be created!

An impressive total of 251 butterfly postcards have flown from Postcrossers to the hands of Lupus patients, coming from many different countries. LupusCrossing has been a great success and we couldn't be more thankful for everyone that participated on this project. The messages sent from all over the world were overwhelmingly kind and full of hope, as you can check yourself in the German Lupus Association website where all the postcards are displayed. We are very proud to have contributed to make the Lupus patients days into happier ones. The world is a better place to live thanks to Postcrossers.

Simone from the German Lupus Association has reassured us that Lupus Patients will have access to the butterfly postcards and their nice messages, plus they will make their best to show them throughout their 80 regional groups in Germany. Moreover, and as promised, they will send thank-you postcards to 3 randomly chosen senders of each country that participated, plus to a few hand-picked ones. So, if you have sent a butterfly postcard and wrote your address in it, a postcard might be heading your way soon!

And if you wonder how all the butterflies look together, here are some photos of them:

(click to enlarge)


(click to enlarge)

We are certainly looking forward for similar opportunities to make someone's day a brighter one, if you have some ideas, please let us know!

Happy LupusCrossing!

Päivää and God dag Postcrossers!

Many of you are already avid fans of Moomins/MuminTroll/Muumi. The Moomins are the major characters in the series of comic strips and books illustrated and written by renowned Finnish artist Tove Jansson, who declared that his characters are partially based on many of her family and friends.

The main appearance of Moomins is very similar to hippopotamuses but they are actually a family of trolls who live in Moominvalley. The Moomins interact with their friends such as Hemulens, Sniff, The Snork maiden, Snufkin and Little My. The major premise of most Moomin stories revolves around the idea of accepting the differences of others and accommodating their specific needs.

The first book was released in 1945 and soon more books, a comic strip series, and a television adaptation followed. There are even a number of movies based on Jansson's lovable family of trolls. Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Russia, Poland, Britain, Austria, Germany, and Japan all made TV and movie adaptations of the Moomins.

It was not long after the success of Moomins (called the Moomin Boom) reached its peak as operas, Moomin products, playrooms, museums, albums, and even a Moomin theme park emerged in many parts of Finland and Japan.

If you have any other interesting information about Moomins, just comment and share!