BLUE MOUNTAIN

From Publishers Weekly
With spouse Stephen, Schutz founded Blue Mountain Arts, the company that eventually spun off into the multibillion-dollar bluemountain.com ad-driven e-greeting company. Already a book veteran with To My Daughter With Love and other titles, Schutz skillfully chronicles her own and the company's history, from the early days, when the couple drove around in a van asking college bookstores to display the silkscreen posters they'd designed, to their spectacular online expansion. The transition was occasionally bumpy. Inexperienced at negotiating, the couple made some disastrous hiring decisions and some unprofitable sales arrangements, all unflinchingly recounted. Overall, though, the Schutzes effectively combined their family and business life, choosing their compromises with care. A long and painful copyright battle with Hallmark ended in their favor. The book concludes with Schutz discussing her childhood, early marriage, family and other nonbusiness topics. Unpretentious and relatively forthcoming about her approach to her personal life generally, and overly painstaking in describing the Hallmark court case, Schutz spends less time on business mechanics than on the conversations she and Steve had in and around this business, which may be even more useful to small-business owners looking for vision. Photos.
Copyright ?Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Description
Blue Mountain is the story of how our publishing company, Blue Mountain Arts, and electronic greeting card website, bluemountain.com, were founded and developed. In this book, I write about some of the experiences my husband Steve and I had: from the time we silk-screened our first posters and lived in the back of our pickup-truck camper to when our poetry greeting cards became the number-one-selling card line in America.
Years later, we fought--in court--two of the largest corporations in the United States to save our companies. Because these lawsuits had such a strong impact on us, I describe them in detail. In the late 1990抯, our family was swept up in the insanity of the dot-com craze. I also chronicle our whirlwind entanglement into the fast-moving world of the Internet.

Many people have told us that our story is inspiring and that they admired the way Steve and I successfully pursued our personal and professional dreams. Over and over again, we were asked to write a book about how we did it. At first we wondered what could be learned from our story. Then we realized that the knowledge we gained might help others turn their dreams into reality and bypass some of the pitfalls we experienced.

If you can learn a single lesson from this book that helps you to avoid one of the hurtful mistakes Steve and I made, then this book serves a purpose. This is why, after years of living privately, we felt Blue Mountain should be written. We have managed to live our dreams--a life we designed for ourselves. I hope this book will encourage you to take a paintbrush and create your own mountain of dreams.