Hallmark: Success is In the Cards
With high hopes and two shoeboxes stuffed with postcards, 18-year-old Joyce Clyde Hall hopped off a train in Kansas City, Missouri, and made his way downtown to a room at the YMCA. The year was 1910, and Hall’s spirits were buoyed by the advice of a traveling salesman who convinced him he could earn his fortune by selling picture postcards — a hot new trend for keeping in touch that was capturing the hearts of the American public.
Little did he realize what a fortune he’d make. Hall grew his little venture far beyond his humble room at the ‘Y’ to become Hallmark Cards, with more than 16,000 employees worldwide. Today, one out of every two greeting cards sold is a Hallmark card, and the brand is synonymous with the highest quality personal greetings and gifts.
A Technological Transformation
Like Joyce C. Hall, when Senior VP of Creative Paul Barker joined Hallmark as a graphic artist in 1979, he couldn’t have envisioned the vast and exciting changes that lay ahead. During his 28 years with the company, Barker, along with colleagues including Barbara Roscher, Hallmark’s IT Business Development Manager for Creative, were integral in shifting the company’s creative department to 100% digital workflow. “It’s invisible to the consumer, but technology has truly transformed our creative product development process, from the concept all the way to prepress and entry into mass production,” says Barker.
Throughout this evolution, Macs have provided the technological foundation for Hallmark’s creative department, which today numbers more than 1400 workers. “We go back 20 years with our first Mac,” says Roscher. “Twenty years and 10,000 Macs, that’s how many we’ve brought in over those years,” Barker recalls.
Guide to the Galaxy. Using a Wacom Tablet, Hallmark Master Artist Bob Kolar creates additions to the universe of characters he calls ‘Big Boom.’
According to Barker, these tools have made an enormous difference, not just in a supporting role, but also in helping to enable and inspire the creative process itself. “It’s been an explosion of creativity, a speed-to-market breakthrough of ideas and unique combinations of them,” he says.
How to WOW
Along with the essential role technology plays in Hallmark’s creative process, it’s also becoming a fresh and sometimes unexpected ingredient in new products. In a recently introduced series of paper greeting cards called “Project WOW,” card recipients hear part of a song or a recorded sound bite when they open the cover. The technology built into the card — yet invisible to consumers — includes a computer chip, a battery, and a high-quality miniature loudspeaker. “We call it Project WOW because when someone opens the card, they say, ‘Wow! How did they do that!’ or ‘Wow, that’s so clever.’ It surprises them,” says Barker.
The first step in Project WOW was the discovery of a chip that held a lot of promise — as well as 27 seconds of sound. “The chip was something our Advancing Technologies group had researched,” says Creative Technology Manager Ken Hagenback. “They found a vendor whose chips used the card as a woofer to generate a bit more depth to the sound.” The designers and art directors used the iTunes Music Store to screen and pick selections for the audio component of the cards, downloading the most promising candidates as finalists. “It was an easy and quick way to gather all we needed right from one place,” says Hagenback. Once the rights were obtained for the music and any licensed images, the IT technicians used Final Cut Pro to edit the samples to an appropriate length to provide to the chip vendor. The creative group designed and produced the paper parts of the card using products from Adobe Creative Suite, including Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign.
It’s a novel way to integrate multimedia into what’s traditionally been considered a static medium, says Hagenback. “Part of the beauty of this is that the tools we had on the desktop allowed us to do something we’ve never done before, almost intuitively,” he adds. “We didn’t know if this was going to be a business that was successful or sustainable, we just wanted to give it a try, so we were able to sit down with very little training and do the work with only the tools that existed. It was very exciting because we want to do other formats, other media, other experimental things, and this enabled us to move forward in that direction.”
Shared Values, Strong Partnership
At Hallmark, relationships and empathetic communication are the foundation of its business, and those beliefs and values transcend all the things they do, according to Roscher. “You see it between departments here, and it carries out in the way we work with other companies, including Apple,” says Roscher.
During the transition to Mac OS X, for instance, Apple and Hallmark employees worked together to form a SWAT team to facilitate the transition of 2,200 computers to Mac OS X — without any business interruption. “We did this with zero impact, zero disruption to our business,” says Barker. “That was a pretty big undertaking given the size and scale and complexity of what we’re doing. We can’t imagine doing what we need to do for our consumers without the incredible tools and support we’ve gotten from Apple.”
”We have such an incredible talent pool that is very schooled in technology, specifically in the Macintosh,” Roscher adds. “We’re starting to see people develop concepts for new products on their own that might include mobile devices, or podcasts, or that could allow you to create an online greeting card. We’re seeing those opportunities grow right in front of our eyes.”
