Postcrossing Blog

Hurray, it’s Postcrossing’s birthday today!! 🎉 Sixteen years of postcards and friendly connections all over the world feels like a long, joyful adventure… one that we cherish immensely.

All these global ties have felt extra meaningful in the past year, and we’ve heard from so many of you, letting us know how much you appreciated having a happy hobby during these rough times. So our big thank you to all of you out there, feeding mailboxes with nice mail and spreading some joy in times of social distancing — you are what keeps Postcrossing going. We hope you’ll have a brilliant day, and treat yourself to an extra nice postcard, or a slice of cake! 🍰

The other good news of the day is that a new Postcrossing-themed stamp from Austria is being issued today! Designed by Theresa Radlingmaier, 165,000 of these have been printed (in sheets of 50) and they should be available in Austrian post offices and their online shop today.

If you’re in Austria and manage to find some of these shiny new stamps on your local post office, do share some photos of them with the rest of us on social media! We’d love to see how they look on your own postcards.

Today is the day the colorful new Postcrossing-themed stamp from Belarus makes its debut! 🎉

The new stamp, designed by Evgeniya Bedonik comes in a sheet with six stamps, and is the third about the project issued by Belpost. Unlike the last one, this one has perforations on it, which we appreciate! It is available from today onwards on post offices throughout Belarus, and hopefully soon on their webshop too.

We haven’t actually seen the physical stamp yet and are super curious about it… So if you’re in Belarus and can take some photos to share with the community, please do so and tag us on social media, so we can re-post them!

Update: Anna (aka ana_karp) posted some photos on the forum already!

We hope to see many of these stamps slowly making their way across the world to lots of happy mailboxes!

The day has finally arrived for this trio of colorful stamps to make their debut, and we couldn’t be more pleased about them! 😍 We got ours just yesterday, and here they are, in all their glory:

Pretty neat, right? The Chance Crab, Herm Puffin and Golden Guernsey Goat illustrations were made by Chris Griffiths from the local design studio Two Degrees North and the stamps look even better in person!

The three stamps, as well as FDCs, maxicards, normal postcards and presentation packs are available on Guernsey Post’s website, which ships internationally. I wish we could go to Guernsey to send a bunch of postcards… but we’ll settle for sending them to all our friends from here. We’ll probably have a few extra, so if you’d like to receive one, do leave a comment below — we’ll be happy to raffle a few postcards. 😊

We’re really looking forward to sending and seeing these fun stamps and postcards pop up in mailboxes all around the world!

Good news, everyone! We’ve been biting our tongues and holding our breaths, but now we can finally share the news with you all: there are 3 new Postcrossing-themed stamps coming in the next few months, and they’re all great! 😍

First up, Guernsey! The three colourful stamps feature animal species that can be found on the Bailiwick: the Golden Guernsey Goat, the Chancre Crab and the Herm Puffin, all mailing postcards around the islands on Guernsey’s blue mailboxes. Such a clever way to mix Postcrossing with their own national living treasures!

These will come out on June 10th, and feature a cool easter egg… if you look really closely, you’ll see they’re being mailed to some of us at the Postcrossing team: the UK stamp is heading out to Nicky (aka shanaqui), the European one is coming to Paulo and me, and the Rest of the World goes out to Vicki (aka mundoo) in Australia. Those are fictional addresses, by the way.

They’re coming out on June 10th, ahead of Postcrossing’s birthday, and they’ll be available for pre-order from Guernsey’s online shop from May 27th, along with maxicards and other fun philatelic collectibles.

Next up, Belarus is issuing this fun Happy Postcrossing stamp! Coincidentally, this is another stamp featuring animals mailing postcards around the world, and it will be issued on July 10th.

Belpochta doesn’t have an (international) online shop, but if you’re interested in the stamp you can get in touch with them following the instructions on this page. Turns out, Belpochta does have an international online shop, where they sell stamps and other products — you can find it here. Thank you Lunushka and Capricorn_Belarus for letting us know!

And last but not least, Austria is issuing a Postcrossing-themed stamp in July as well. They chose a more abstract approach to the theme, which aims to represent how the postcard exchanges happen in Postcrossing:

The Austrian stamp will be launched on July 14th, which is Postcrossing’s birthday, but should be available for pre-order on their online shop from July 2nd onwards.

And that’s all the good news for today! We look forward to seeing all these playful stamps in many postcards traveling all around the world, filling their recipients’ mailboxes with color and spreading the word about our beloved hobby. 📮

It’s been 15 years today since Paulo flipped the switch to turn Postcrossing on — 15 years! 🎉 Can you believe that?! We’re a little incredulous ourselves… but immensely happy and grateful for the opportunity to come on this journey that has delivered millions of postcards around the world. Who could have imagined such an unlikely adventure?!

Awhile back, we asked you guys to upload a selfie with your mailbox to our anniversary wall, and almost 1000 of you accepted the challenge and showed us your happy mailboxes. It’s such a joy to browse the gallery now, and see your smiles and the places where all the postcards land! Mailboxes and mail slots seem to come in all shapes, sizes and materials, and quite a few of you even receive your mail directly from your mail carrier’s hands at your doorstep or on your local post office. So much color and diversity of mailboxes and ways of receiving mail!

We wanted to do a little surprise with these nice photos, so we put together a video filled with smiles to share with you all:

Sorry that we couldn’t put all of the photos in without making the video too long — we tried to include as many as we could. You can see all the photos on the 15 Years of Happy Mailboxes page, and the submissions will be open until the end of the month.

A big thank you to every single one of you out there, sending postcards to strangers across the world and helping make this planet a happier place — you are the stars of this celebration! 🤩 Join us in a little celebratory dance and enjoy this special day!

Before I get all weepy, let me just share some more good news: we have been working with Brazil Post on a new Postcrossing-themed stamp that is being released today! It’s a beautiful stamp by São Paulo’s illustrator Daniel Lourenço, showing 2 people connected through postcards. It’s a big, beautiful stamp (click the image to see a bigger version), and we have no doubt Brazilian postcards will look extra nice with it.

We’re so proud of the Postcrossing community in Brazil, whose persistence and dedication to their hobby resulted in this gorgeous stamp coming to life. Sadly, they cannot yet get together to celebrate the stamp launch right now… but there will be an online launch event (on Instagram and Youtube), and we’re certain postcrossers will make up for lost time when it is safe to meet in person again. Enjoy your new stamp, and we look forward to seeing it on many future postcards from Brazil 🇧🇷!

PS – Postcrossers in China 🇨🇳, if you can’t see the video above, try here.