Near Modern What?

HELLO THERE!

I’m Sam Kramer - the one-lady operation behind Near Modern Disaster. I’ve been working under the name since 1999 - when I first came across the Near (modern) Disaster series by photographer Nic Nicosia. I loved the series - and obviously loved the title. A few years into my run, Nicosia got word that I was using the name. He approved of my remarkable taste in 2003 - let’s hope he still feels the same.

Near Modern Disaster has gone through many incarnations over the years. (It was a killer Geocities page back in the day.) Its current (and most memorable) form as a line of note cards has been around since January of 2009 when I posted my first set of Valentine's Day cards to Etsy. I initially touted the line as "cards for people you want to make out with" - a sentiment that still stands for most of my line.

While I'd been "in the game" for a while, 2014 marked Near Modern Disaster’s first big push into the wholesale market. We added lots of new designs to the line and we updated some old ones. We started outsourcing printing. We started talking in third person. We made our trade show debut at the National Stationery Show in New York City in May, 2014.

Since 2014, Near Modern Disaster has grown from a line of greeting cards to a small gift line - adding different items over the years like notepads, coffee mugs, enamel pins, and enclosure cards. You can now find our products in about 350 stores across the US - and a slew of stores across Canada and New Zealand, thanks to our international distributors.