#053: Hallmark – When you care enough to send the very best.

It's rare to find a company founded in 1910 that is still owned by the family today. What's impressive is that they have achieved greater than 5 Billion in sales annually. Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it's us. But we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So here's one of those. [Armadura Ad] Dave Young: Dave Young here alongside Stephen Semple. We are loading up another episode of the Empire Builders podcast. And Stephen, you said that the topic today is Hallmark. There are so many things I think of when I think of Hallmark. There was a store in my hometown that was a Hallmark store, and there's the movies. Stephen Semple: There's the movies, yep. Dave Young: Christmas time. There are the ornaments. Where are we headed with this today? Stephen Semple: Well, we're going to go right back to the origin of course. Hallmark's a big deal. They do 5 billion in sales. They have 30,000 employees, and they are still privately owned. Dave Young: Oh, no kidding. Stephen Semple: We don't come across this very often where you've got a company that was started back in 1910 and has grown into this big thing and is still a privately held business. It's kind of special. Dave Young: That really is. Still in the same family? Stephen Semple: Yeah. Yep. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: Which is very cool. Dave Young: How did they get started? Stephen Semple: Well, they were founded in 1910 by Joyce Hall in Kansas City, Missouri. Today, they are the largest manufacturer of greeting cards in the United States. They also make, as you said, ornaments and party goods and a bunch of other things. They bought, in 1987 from Benny and Smith, they bought Crayola. Dave Young: I didn't even know that. Stephen Semple: Yeah. And on the TV things, they also, in the early days, did some joint ventures with Jim Henson. Dave Young: Okay. So the Muppets and all of that? Oh wow. Stephen Semple: Yeah. The business started out being postcards. So Joyce Hall and his older brothers, William and Rollie started a company called Norfolk postcard company in 1907. It operated out of a bookstore in Norfolk, Nebraska, where they worked. And within a year, Rollie bought out the store's non-family business partner and it became Hall brothers and the store became the Hall bookstore. The postcard business did really well and soon they outgrew the store and they moved to a bigger city. They moved to Kansas City in 1910. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: And by 1912, two years after the move, the postcard craze, it was a real craze. It was a massive thing, started to fade a little bit. And what they then started to do was sell Christmas letters and greeting cards. They changed the name to the Norfolk Card company. This became really interesting up until about 1917 because before this time, the Victorian class, the hoity toitys, would wrap their presents in this really fancy, heavy, expensive paper. The less wealthy couldn't afford this, and actually in many cases, less wealthy couldn't even afford presents. But what they would do is they would decorate the presents with less expensive colored tissue paper. That would be how people would decorate the presents. It's 1917, and the brothers were having a great Christmas season. So good, in fact, they ran out of tissue paper. Dave Young: Oh gosh. Stephen Semple: So searching through what they had, they came across this fancy French paper that they had, and this paper was used for the lining of envelopes if you remember.