University Daily Kansan, December 8, 1981
Page 3
Christmas
Some of the many Christmas cards produced at Hallmark Cards' Lawrence plant, the largest card-producing plant in the world. The Lawrence plant prints about 4 million cards each day.
From page 2
EACH CHRISTMAS, the Hallmark creative department, the largest creative department in the world, produces 2,000 separate card designs.
Each card goes through hundreds of steps, including departmental review meetings where artists and writers go through every card perhaps a dozen times.
"That's just from the design point, not production." Morgenstern said.
During production, the cards meet with several more steps which, more than likely, are supervised by Roger Hill, plant manager for the Lawrence Hallmark plant, just south of the west exit of the Kansas Turnip.
Striding through 800,000 square feet of cards, ribbons, puzzles, bows and machinery, Hill pointed to just a few of the cards that he drew: chickies and duckies and football fields, embossing and die-cutting floral birthday cards, cutting and folding next year's Christmas thank-you notes and melting cookies. He will invite invitations by a process called "verko."
The plant also produces three-quarters of a million bows a week and a yearly amount of ribbon. Some bows are made and still have enough left to make up a bow 150 miles across."
SOARING OVERHEAD in torrents of SOAR, scarlet, emerald, violet and every other color known to man, the Hallesen ribbon flashed, spun and cacaded into a maelstrom of cutters, silcers, stretches and pumice shells or poof -deliess pools or -poof -deliess bowls, magically sucked into pipes crisscrossing the ceiling.
"We wanted to use clear pipes to see the bows," Hill hooded cheerfully, but static rolled up. "We had to get them off."
None of that dust ever got onto the bows,
however.
"That's quality " Hill said
Quality is inherent in Hallmark. From the plant's cafeteria, the Crown Room, to the company slogan, "When you care enough to send the very best," quality is emphasized and re-emphasized every day, so much so that the word crops up frequently in the normal conversation of Hallmark employees.
"Hallmark likes to be in towns with highquality people and Lawrence is a town with highquality people."
Hill, who like Morgenstern is a KU graduate (the plant is the only Hallmark plant with a blue front door), explained that each of his 1,000 employees conferred on his or her specialty. Hill for instance isn't concerned with the design of the card.
"I tend to be a traditionalist, and I wouldn't send me the cards we make. They're so hard to look at."
Morgenstern weaved through the
creative department's maze of office cubicles in Kansas City and, laughing, explained that the company was exasperated with the need for a department of "Moves and Relocations."
NO CAMERAS are allowed in Hallmark plants, he said, stopping in front of a wall covered with hundreds of Christmas cards, each attached to a computer rated IPS.
He plucked a card from the stack. On the card, Mickey Mouse rode a Christmas train, which grew longer as the card unfolded. Slots pointed the train, to be filled with dimes and Quarters for some lucky grandchild.
"Let's see," he said, checking the back of the card. He nodded with approval.
"this card rated a 3.7. That's very good." He explained that a 1 was an average card and the highest ranking the computer gave was a 4.
The Halimark computer does more than
rank Mickey Mouse cards, however. It also keeps track of practically everything else, from what Christmas cards were top picks to what they are not. You buy the little bunnies for Easter.
"It knows if your store has done really well with selling this certain birthday card"—he waved an imaginary card in his hands—"chances are it will do well with selling these three Christmas cards." He pointed at random to three cards showing Santa engaging in various Santa-like activities.
REGARDLESS of the years of planning it takes to put out more than 10 million cards a day in 10 languages to more than 100 countries, the success of the cards, posters, gift wrap, ribbons, puzzles, albums and ornaments—and the success of Hallmark—rests on the whim of the customer.
"We're totally a demand-oriented industry. If people don't want Santa on their Christmas card, they won't buy it," Morgenstein said.
According to Hallmark estimates, 83 percent of its customers are women, and they are the people the company is trying to reach during the Christmas season.
"Christmas makes the retailing year," Morgenstern said.
That axiom is true throughout the industry, from Hallmark's billion-dollar Crown Center complex in Kansas City to the small, family-owned specialty shops, such as Arbuthnot's Hallmark Card and Gift Shop, 2012 W. 23rd St.
we do about 25 percent of our yearly business during the month of December," said Sandy Arbuthnot, the store's manager.
Although she picked the cards she sold through the company catalog, she said that she found Hallmark's yearly prediction of trends to be fairly accurate.