Postcards from Norfolk, Nebraska, to Kansas City.

Hallmark began as a postcard business run by brothers. English Wikipedia says Joyce Clyde Hall and his older brothers William and Rollie started the Norfolk Post Card Company in 1907, working out of the bookstore in Norfolk, Nebraska, where they were employed, and that the business took the name Hall Brothers the following year, after Rollie bought out the store’s partner from outside the family. Wikipedia’s biography of J. C. Hall, who was born in David City, Nebraska, says the brothers had begun buying picture postcards to sell to shopkeepers and other dealers in 1905.

The move that the company treats as its founding came in 1910. Hallmark’s history page says that on 10 January 1910 Hall stepped off a train in Kansas City, Missouri, with two shoeboxes of picture postcards; Wikipedia says he moved the postcard business there because it had outgrown the store. By 1912 the postcard craze had faded and the company had begun selling “Christmas letters” and greeting cards, Wikipedia says. Hall’s biography adds that the brothers were running a store in Kansas City by 1913, that it burned in 1915, and that a year later Hall bought an engraving business and began printing the company’s own cards.

Wrapping paper followed. Wikipedia says that in 1917, when the Halls’ stationery store ran out of the coloured tissue paper customers used for presents, Joyce and Rollie sold decorative French envelope-lining paper instead, and that after selling it again the following year the brothers began printing wrapping paper of their own design. By 1922, Wikipedia says, the company was selling across the country, and its range had grown from holiday cards to everyday greeting cards.

The name arrived in 1928. According to Wikipedia, that year the company introduced the brand name Hallmark, after the hallmark used by London goldsmiths from the fourteenth century, and began printing it on the back of every card. The same year it advertised nationally, with an advertisement in Ladies’ Home Journal written by J. C. Hall himself. The company kept the Hall Brothers name for another quarter of a century: Wikipedia says it changed its corporate name to Hallmark in 1954.

Cards, ornaments, crayons and television.

Hallmark grew through affiliates and new lines. Wikipedia says the Canadian card maker William E. Coutts Company became an affiliate of Hall Brothers in 1931 and was acquired in 1958, and that Hallmark’s Canadian branch was known as Coutts Hallmark until the 1990s. In 1973 the company began making Christmas ornaments. Its Keepsake Ornament collection is dated and sold for a single year, and a collectors’ club for it was launched nationally on 1 June 1987, according to Wikipedia.

Acquisitions took the business beyond cards. Wikipedia says Hallmark bought the Dundee picture-postcard publisher Valentine & Sons in 1980 and the British greeting card maker W. N. Sharpe Holdings in 1984. The same year it bought Binney & Smith, the crayon maker that later renamed itself Crayola LLC after its Crayola brand of crayons, markers and coloured pencils; Hallmark has owned it since 1984, as our Crayola guide sets out. Wikipedia adds that Hallmark bought the Forever Friends card line from the English entrepreneur Andrew Brownsword in 1994, and in 1998 added Creative Publishing in Britain and InterArt in the United States.

Within the card range Hallmark built sub-brands. Shoebox, its humour line, grew out of “studio cards,” Wikipedia says, and the character Maxine, an irascible older woman drawn by the in-house artist John Wagner and often seen with her bull terrier Floyd, appeared on Shoebox cards in 1986, the year that alternative line was launched. She later appeared on mugs, T-shirts and ornaments and starred in an animated special, Maxine’s Christmas Carol, in 1999. Wikipedia also names hoops&yoyo among the company’s card lines, and says Hallmark has offered card-making software, including Hallmark Card Studio with Nova Development.

Television has carried the name since 1951, when Hall sponsored an NBC programme that gave rise to the Hallmark Hall of Fame. Wikipedia says the anthology began as Hallmark Television Playhouse, has broadcast its productions in colour since 1954 and aired on network television until 2014. The Hallmark Channel launched in 2001, replacing the Odyssey Network, an earlier venture with The Jim Henson Company. Wikipedia’s list of former subsidiaries includes the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, dated 1986 to 1992, and Hallmark Entertainment, a producer of television films and miniseries that Robert Halmi acquired in 2006. In August 2022 Deadline reported that the television business, Crown Media Family Networks, had been renamed Hallmark Media to align it more closely with its parent; Wikipedia lists Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Mystery, Hallmark Family and the streaming service Hallmark+ among its businesses.

Design and documentation.

Greeting cards, tape and notebooks are everyday objects that most people buy without much thought, and that is exactly why their packaging and covers have to work hard. A card is usually chosen in a few seconds at a rack, so the back of the card, where the publisher’s name and mark sit, becomes a quiet signature that travels with every one sold. A roll of tape is often bought from a peg or a shelf beside dozens of similar rolls, and the core, the label and the colour of the roll itself carry much of the name.

A notebook brand works differently again: its cover is handled every day for months, so a name printed on that cover is carried in bags, on desks and in classrooms long after it was bought. Across all three categories, the companies behind familiar names may have been bought, merged or renamed several times, and the products may be made far from where the name began.

Each guide in this group separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family company in Kansas City.

Hallmark is privately held and family-owned, with its headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri; the company’s own FAQ says it is privately owned and that its stock cannot be bought, and its history page says the third generation of the Hall family is at the helm. J. C. Hall retired in 1966 and his son Donald J. Hall succeeded him as chief executive, Wikipedia says. Hall spent his retirement on efforts to revive downtown Kansas City, which produced Crown Center, the business and shopping district around the headquarters that Hallmark manages. In June 2019 the company announced that Mike Perry would serve as president and chief executive, with Donald J. Hall Jr. as executive chairman and David E. Hall as executive vice-chairman, according to Wikipedia.

On manufacturing, the company says Hallmark greeting cards sold in the United States are mainly produced at its greeting card production centre in Lawrence, Kansas, and that its wrapping paper, ribbons and bows are mainly made at its plant in Leavenworth, Kansas. Wikipedia says it also owns the lithographer Litho-Krome Co., and that the Hallmark Visitors Center at the headquarters shows historic cards and postcards, Christmas ornaments, works from the company’s art collection and displays about the Hall of Fame programmes. Wikipedia says The Paper Store, an independently owned group of Hallmark Gold Crown stores, began its partnership with Hallmark in 1972. A business-to-business unit, Hallmark Business Connections, formed in August 1995, was sold in June 2019 to the Atlanta payments company InComm, Wikipedia says.

The company has also supported the arts. The National Endowment for the Arts lists Hallmark Cards, Inc. as a 1985 recipient of the National Medal of Arts, as a corporate arts patron. In 2006 Hallmark donated the Hallmark Photographic Collection, which includes work by Todd Webb, to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, according to Wikipedia.

For a design guide, Hallmark shows how a family name, a goldsmith’s term and a line printed on the back of a card can grow into the identity of a whole company, from ornaments to a television channel. Compare Crayola, which Hallmark has owned since 1984, and American Greetings, the Cleveland card company founded in 1906. For this guide we use a deep purple, foil gold and card white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hallmark’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.