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August 16, 2014


Vintage Valentine
VIDEO: The biggest card company celebrates centennial.Hallmark Holiday "Hope your day is as exciting as Larry King's visit to the suspender store, " tries another.

The team members are former professors and waitresses and youth ministers and flight attendants... all hired to get laughs.

SLIDESHOW: Hallmark Cards Through the Years

Hallmark, it seems, has always had a harness on sentiment. Those famous TV ads? They reduced so many of us to tears.

And they're part of the reason we've become customers for life. They've trained us to buy cards when someone's born, and when someone dies, and for just about everything in between.

Diana Manning, a senior writer with three decades' experience, was composing a Christmas card. After 32 years of this, you'd think she'd run out of ideas.

"So far I've got, 'Besides all the jolly and the merry, this season is a time for reflecting, for feeling grateful, for embracing hope-filled new beginnings, '" Manning said. "'However you celebrate, hope this season will be just what you need it to be for you this year.' Now I'm not done with that, but that's my first version and I'm playing around with more versions of it."

'It's Mostly Happening in Your Head'

We asked Manning if she ever gets writer's block.

"Oh, absolutely, " Manning said. "I mean, every day I think I have writer's block. You sit there with the blank pad of paper or the blank computer screen and you just think, 'Oh, what is there new to say that somebody wants to say to another person?' So that's when we have to tap into our inspirational - our resources, and I've learned how to tap into those, whether it's e-mailing a friend and asking them about their relationships, which I do quite frequently. Going to our creative library, looking at magazine articles with people in their relationships ... or looking at some of the ads and new language."

From that, Manning and her colleagues - all the painters and calligraphers and creative types running around Hallmark's headquarters - become the authors of your emotions. It's tricky work.

"This is not really a very visual job, " said Dan Taylor, whose title is writing stylist. "People think it sounds like fun, and it is fun, but there's not much to see because it's mostly happening in your head."

Fact is, Hallmark probably deserves its own "Congratulations" card, for surviving in an industry that, just a few years ago, was all but pronounced dead. It was predicted that e-cards, and cards you can print yourself at home, would kill the business. But Hallmark made it.

"The greeting card industry is very vibrant, " said Don Hall, Jr., Hallmark CEO. "People are still sending about 6 billion greeting cards in the U.S. alone."

Hall pays close attention to those numbers, just as father did before him, and his father before him. Joyce Clyde "J.C." Hall started the card business that would become Hallmark 100 years ago.

"My grandfather stepped off a train from Norfolk, Neb., and came to Kansas City because he saw this was a great opportunity to start a business, and began selling picture postcards, " Hall said.

J.C. Hall's intuition, as we now know, was right. Hallmark became an empire. The company owns Crayola. It employs 14, 000 people around the world. And those 6 billion cards sold every year? Hallmark sells more than half. Thanks, in part, to the company's stranglehold on what some critics call entirely fake holidays: Boss's Day, Mother's Day and Father's Day, and, of course, Valentine's Day.

Source: abcnews.go.com

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