Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 2, 1993 TAG: 9312020008
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE LENGTH: Medium
As this year's holiday season begins, Americans are gearing up to exchange a record 2.7 billion greeting cards, with the average household receiving 28.
Bearing images ranging from the Nativity to Snoopy, from Santa Claus to President Clinton, the cards will reflect our diversity and our outlook on life.
There are more environmentally oriented cards this year, for instance, and the number of humorous cards has jumped dramatically - perhaps indicating that people are feeling a little more light-hearted with the economy stabilizing at last.
Except for the post office, everybody seems to love holiday cards, and nobody more so than the companies that make them. Hallmark Cards Inc., a private company with $3.1 billion in annual sales, said 36 percent of all greeting cards celebrate the Christmas holiday season.
Hallmark, based in Kansas City, Mo., controls about 35 percent of the greeting-card market. Its biggest rival is American Greetings Corp. of Cleveland, with annual sales of $1.7 billion.
Technology has started to make its mark on this tradition-bound business. Hallmark store customers can create their own cards on Macintosh computers, or buy cards featuring voice chips that enable the sender to record a 10-second message. Hallmark also has teamed with Sprint to package greeting cards with coupons for free long-distance calls - presumably so the person who gets the card can call and say thanks.
Social trends also are reflected in card sales. Nonprofit organizations and environmentally oriented businesses from the Sierra Club to the Nature Company, for instance, are offering cards of their own. Not to be left out, Hallmark has a line of cards featuring endangered species.
All of this would seem fantastic to Cole, the aforementioned Londoner. In 1843, he commissioned the first Christmas card, a black-and-white sketch of Victorian holiday scenes. He sent 1,000 of them to friends, family and business associates.
Hallmark jumped into the market in 1915.
"The increasing mobility of our society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries created a new market for various kinds of printed greetings," said Kim Rich, curator of Hallmark's collection of more than 40,000 greeting cards.
Although Christmas continues to dominate the greeting card business, other major holidays also figure prominently in sales. Valentine's Day, naturally enough, is No. 2, accounting for sales of some 1 billion cards each year.
That's followed by Mother's Day, Easter, Father's Day, Graduation, and Thanksgiving, which rings up sales of 40 million cards.
Some 11 million cards are sold for Hanukkah, a Jewish holiday that falls in the same season as Christmas.
The leading card makers also are starting to concentrate more on blacks and Hispanics. Both Hallmark and American Greetings have cards in Spanish and other foreign languages. And Hallmark has a line of cards celebrating Kwanzaa, an African-American holiday that comes right after Christmas.
by CNB