Postcrossing Blog

Has it really been 20 years? The mind boggles at the number… that’s two whole decades spent thinking about this wild idea of connecting the world through postcards. 7,671 days of postcards, stamps, addresses, smiles, and stories. No one could have predicted this adventure would last this long… and yet, here we are. We’re so grateful for all these years, and especially grateful to the over 800,000 of you who joined us for the ride! THANK YOU! 💙

When I reflect on this milestone, I think a lot about creation versus maintenance. Putting something new in the world — whether it’s a project, a community, or even a child — is one thing. But caring for it and keeping it going year after year takes a very different kind of energy. There are countless hours behind the scenes (and the screens) filled with routine, repetition, and sometimes quite a bit of drudgery, just to keep things running smoothly.

But then, there are the stories. The unexpected postcards that bring someone to tears. The joy of discovering a new place or culture. The child learning geography from a map full of colorful cards. The grandma feeling less alone because someone, somewhere, thought of them. All these small and simple connections often make a very big difference in someone’s day, in their understanding of the world, or sometimes even in their sense of belonging. They’re the quiet proof that connection, even through something as analog as a postcard, still matters very much today — perhaps even more.

To everyone who has helped Postcrossing thrive, a very special thank you. Whether you’ve spread the word, hosted a meetup, helped out on the forum, sent feedback or helped support the project financially: you’ve helped keep this idea alive. ❤️ Your enthusiasm and generosity make all the difference.

Now it’s time for celebrations, and you guys have really come through! Our anniversary gallery is also brimming with nice photos of postcrossers and their 20 postcards, which is just a delight to see! If you haven’t posted your photo yet, we invite you to do so today. We’re all a community here, and seeing other people from all over the world who have this one thing in common with us feels really special.

There are an astonishing 179 meetups happening around the world marking the occasion, and so we hope many of you will have (or had) the chance to join to meet old friends or make new ones. 😍 In Germany, in the USA and in Poland (at the Warsaw Post Office 1's Philatelic Shop), special cancellation postmarks have been made for the occasion, so look out for those!

And if you didn’t get the chance to join a meetup, we invite you to join us in the Postcard Lounge today, for a relaxing moment of postcard writing! It’s a silent streaming room and an experiment in connection — a place where we sit down to write postcards together (but apart). Put some music on, grab your favorite drink and some postcards, and take a seat at our virtual table! ☺️

And last but not least, we also have exciting news for postcrossers in the Netherlands: PostNL is launching a celebratory stamp for this very special occasion! Hoera! 🎉

They should be available on PostNL’s shop from today, and we’re going to tell you more about this stamp in an upcoming interview with its designer… but for now, we leave you with a small introduction to the stamp:

"The Postcrossing stamp sheet, designed by Sandra Smulders, visualises the global exchange of postcards through bold geometric shapes and zigzagging lines. Inspired by the idea of connection and reciprocity, the design features triangles and rectangles symbolising people, postcards, and the world.

A red-white-blue colour scheme subtly forms the Dutch flag, while dynamic lines represent the movement of mail across borders. The central layout and repeating elements create balance and unity, capturing the spirit of Postcrossing—sharing, receiving, and connecting through mail."

So that’s it! Whether you’re joining a meetup, writing a card, or just quietly smiling at your mailbox, we hope you’ll find a little moment to celebrate this milestone in your own way. Eat some cake, raise a glass, dig into your postcard stash, or do a little happy dance — whatever feels most festive to you! And if you do something special to mark the occasion, we’d love to see it: feel free to share your celebration with us and the community on the forum or on social media, using the hashtag #postcrossing20.

Thanks for being part of this journey. Here’s to postcards, to people, and to the power of small things. And here’s to the next 20 years, come what may! 🎉

Some of you might have seen a picture of PT-1, the very first postcard ever sent through Postcrossing — the one that started it all! It’s a blue-skied postcard featuring three majestic lighthouses, sent by Paulo to Ana (that’s me!). As you can imagine, it’s always been a special postcard for us, but the publisher that made them has long closed and so they haven’t been available for many years. We always wished they would come back though…

So, especially for Postcrossing’s 20th anniversary, we took matters into our own hands: we worked out the legal bits, tracked down the original photographer, licensed the photos, and made it happen! 💪

The front of the card is true to the original one, and the back is designed to celebrate this milestone. And to make it even more special, we added something new too: a sheet of fun cinderella stamps! These aren’t real postage stamps, but they’re great for decorating your postcards on this special year. They feature Postcrossing’s iconic red “P” and a yellow “20”, the anniversary we’re celebrating.

Since it’s the 20th anniversary, each bundle has 20 postcards and a stampsheet with 20 decorative cinderella stamps, all wrapped up with a paper band.

We did a small batch of these, and they have just been added to the Postcrossing shop — so if you’d like to grab one, now’s your chance! Purchases will be limited to one pack per person, and we might print a few more if there’s enough interest. These will all be shipped from Europe.

This is our first time making a physical product from beginning to end (working with printers and suppliers, looking at different papers, thinking about packaging, etc.), and we’re eager to put all this knowledge into new fun things in the future. We hope you like the special anniversary bundle, and that we’ll see a few of these postcards pop up on the postcard walls over the coming months!

Last month, we invited everyone to join or organize a meetup in celebration of the website’s upcoming 20th anniversary, and since then, dozens of them have popped up all around the world! 😍 It’s been a joy to see all of these meetings being organized, and that so many of you are planning to attend. The celebrations don’t stop there though!

To mark this special milestone, we want YOU to be part of the celebration — with a photo challenge!

Your mission: grab 20 postcards and take a photo with them! You can hold them up, fan them out like a giant deck of cards, arrange them into a big “20”, or take them to your favorite spot in town, a sunny postbox, your local post office, or anywhere that brings a smile to your face. Be creative, be playful, and above all, be part of the party!

We’ve set up a special gallery to collect all your happy pictures from around the world. Just like in past years, it’s a way to celebrate together, even if we’re all in different places.

📮 Upload your photo and join the celebration! ✨

We can’t wait to see your smiling faces, your postcards, and the beautiful ways you choose to celebrate this special milestone with us. 📮 Let’s make this a birthday to remember — go go go!

Can you believe it? Postcrossing is turning 20 years old in just under two months, on July 14! We’re not quite sure how that happened either… Time flies when you’re sending postcards! Over the years, we’ve heard from postcrossers who joined back in high school, took a break during university and early adulthood, and then found their way back to the project years later to introduce it to their own children. It’s been quite the journey, and we’re happy every single one of you is here to share it with us.

But we’ll save the emotional stuff for later — right now, it’s time to get ready to celebrate! 🎉 And what’s a celebration without friends? So your first mission is to join or organize a Postcrossing meetup around July 14 to mark this big milestone. Whether you’ve been around since the early days or just joined recently, this is a good opportunity to meet fellow postcrossers, share stories, and enjoy some quality postcard-writing time together.

Since the anniversary falls on a Monday, we know it might not be the easiest day for everyone to meet. So feel free to plan your meetup for the weekend before or after! A casual get-together at a coffee shop, a sunny picnic in the park, or even a group trip to a local museum — anything goes, as long as it brings people together in the spirit of Postcrossing. There are a few planned already, but we hope to see lots more pop up in the coming weeks!

To help make these meetups feel extra special (and a bit more connected), we’ve created a special postcard template just for the occasion. You can download it from the 20 Years page and customize it with a photo — for bonus points, we suggest using a picture of a local postbox, if possible! Then just update the details with your meetup location, date, and image credit information, and you’re ready to go. With many meetups around the world using the same design template, we’ll have a shared visual celebration: one postcard, many places!

We hope you’ll join in the fun, wherever you are. Let’s make this a anniversary to remember, filled with laughter, postcards, and lots of new connections! And stay tuned for more anniversary activities coming soon… 😊

Hurray! It’s our birthday! 🥳 Postcrossing celebrates 19 years of joy and connections today, and we’re marking the date with chocolate cookies… and a surprise!

But before that, a big thank you to all postcrossers for being part of this community and for helping make Postcrossing what it is today. It’s been 19 years of stories from around the world, 19 years of learning and sharing… and about one postcard received every 6 seconds — it feels unbelievable, doesn’t it?

Our gratitude goes also to the team and all the volunteers that make Postcrossing run smoothly — and to all of you who have supported the project financially over the years. We wouldn’t have made it this far without your help.

So we hope you can take a moment today to celebrate this anniversary with a little dance, and maybe a cookie or three! And, of course, with postcards too!

Now, about that surprise…

If you were in Postcrossing over a decade ago, you might remember we used to have a small shop… which didn’t see much action, and ended up closing. In recent years though, more and more people have been asking us where they could get Postcrossing merchandising, and we ourselves have long felt that it would be nice to have a platform for the fun stuff we’ve always wanted to make.

Setting up the logistics of a global shop is not an easy feat, but after we found a partner with sustainable production practices and warehouses on a few different continents, the challenge became much simpler. Once we designed the products for our first collection, it still took us quite a while to work through all the (seemingly endless) bureaucracy, but today we’re finally ready to re-launch it.

So, welcome to the new Postcrossing shop!

We’re super excited about the shop relaunch, and we hope you are too — we can’t wait to see all the Postcrossing merch being worn by real postcrossers!! 😍

Now that the shop is in place, every purchase will help support the project and make room for even more postal awesomeness in the future. We have lots of ideas for cool products we want to make and look forward to working with designers to bring them to life. If you have suggestions of things you’d like to see in the shop (other than postcards), let us know in the comments below!

PS: This is a new adventure for us, as we are new to the whole e-commerce thing. Please be patient with us while we iron out all the kinks. 🙏