Postcrossing is a project that allows anyone to receive postcards from interesting places all over the world.
Founder Paulo Magalhães originally introduced the idea in Portugal; his goal was to connect people across the world through postcards, independent of their location, age, gender, race or beliefs. The motivation behind the project was simply the fact that he liked to receive mail, especially postcards.
The project started initially as a hobby for Magalhães and he developed the original idea by creating an online platform to support this offline pastime, launching the Postcrossing website on July 14, 2005. Its unexpected success swiftly demonstrated that the idea was in fact much more popular than he had predicted.
On the 11th of April 2008, Postcrossing reached it's first million of exchanged postcards, surpassing all expectations. To date over 35,687,093 postcards have been received because of this project.
The Postcrossing process is actually quite simple, if you send a postcard, you will receive one back from another Postcrosser from somewhere in the world. Plus the element of surprise of exactly where the postcard has come from is an added bonus!
The Postcrossing project celebrates its eleventh birthday this July and to mark the occasion Guernsey Post has produced two very special stamps.
Guernsey Post has been delighted to support this project since 2014 when the first Guernsey Post Postcrossing stamp was issued. Since then Postcrossing has become a global phenomenon, bringing together many people across the world. Via this postal project new freindships have been made, new languages learned and numerous cultural facts about other countries and people understood.
