Andrew Brownsword

Andrew Douglas Brownsword CBE DL (born 1947) is an English entrepreneur and philanthropist, developing his fortune through the greeting cards and gifts of Forever Friends. He has regularly featured on the Sunday Times Rich List, with an estimated fortune of £190 million.

Brownsword attended The Harvey Grammar School in Folkestone and then trained as a chef.

He started the Andrew Brownsword Collection, a publishing business founded in Bath in 1971. Brownsword started by selling greeting cards to retailers like WH Smith from boxes and the back of his car.

In 1987, he agreed to market artist Deborah Jones Teddy Bear design, developing the Forever Friends genre in a flat above a Chinese takeaway in Reading, Berkshire in the early 1980s:

"I wanted to develop a teddy bear that appealed to adults as well as children. I based Forever Friends specifically on the teddy bear that Sebastian Flyte carried around in Brideshead Revisited. It became the bear found in the attic."

The success created a financial income to develop the Andrew Brownsword Group, based on greetings cards and associated gifts with a peak turnover of £65 million. The Andrew Brownsword Collection, Andrew Brownsword Gifts and the Gordon Fraser Gallery (the latter acquired in 1989), were acquired by Hallmark Cards in 1994 for an estimated £195 million. Brownsword became Chief Executive of Hallmark in Europe, a position which he held for four and a half years before leaving to develop other business interests.

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