Like Rabbits: Audra Ricketts of RabbitRabbit Cards

The rabbits of RabbitRabbit Cards look as if they were drawn by a child; they have large, circular heads, comically undersized ears and uneven eyes. But their messages, if not exactly adult, are distinctly unchildlike: “F*** the economy,” reads a popular one – “Let’s f***!” (Spelled out, of course.) The cards are cute, but raggedly so – like the stuffed animal you come across out by the railroad tracks.

RabbitRabbit’s creator, manager and salesperson (it’s a one-woman show) is Audra Ricketts. She is dark-featured and slim, and her eyes flash with a feral quality. An Emily Carr painting dropout, Ricketts went on to a bit role on The L Word, the Vancouver-produced Sapphic drama. The idea of greeting cards came about four years ago, when Ricketts was 32. “In those early days,” she says, “what I did was sit around my apartment drinking wine and writing one-liners.” The cards drew breath when Ricketts first put the prose (often caustic) beside her doodlings of rabbits (goofily cute). “One of the first to catch fire was ‘I’m absolutely fine with us just being friends,’” remembers Ricketts. And the inside of the card? She smirks: “‘Who needs blowjobs?’”

This spirit of RabbitRabbit – equal parts risqué and romantic – is well captured in the company motto: “Sex, sap and sarcasm.” The great challenge of the card market, says Ricketts, is men’s near-total absence from it. “Women account for, like, 95 per cent of sales,” she says. Appropriate, then, than she writes her zingers with women in mind. (There’s a “You’re So Much Better Than My Last Boyfriend” card, for example, but no “Girlfriend” one.)

As befits a painter, Ricketts’s production methods are low-tech. She draws and letters her cards by hand, scans them and does final colour corrections in Photoshop. She estimates that each card costs 70 cents to make, with retailers paying her $2.50 (the cards sell for $5). While the cards haven’t yet made Ricketts rich – in 2009 she expects to clear about $10,000 – they sell briskly at a few boutiques around town and on Vancouver Island. Most importantly, for an artist getting her legs as an entrepreneur, she’s able to subsist on the income they provide.

As she grows her business, Ricketts faces difficult questions. How to