. Driven by an early 20th-century
postcard craze, Joyce Clyde Hall and his older brothers, William and Rollie, began the Norfolk Post Card Company in 1907, initially headquartered in the
Norfolk, Nebraska, bookstore at which they worked. The next year, Rollie bought out the store's non-family business partner and it became "Hall Brothers", doing business as the Hall Book Store. The postcard business soon outgrew the store's resources, and Joyce moved it to Kansas City in 1910. By 1912, the postcard craze had faded and the company had begun selling "Christmas letters" and greeting cards, shortening its name a few years later to the Norfolk Card Company. In 1917, Hall and his brother Rollie "invented" modern
wrapping paper when they ran out of traditional colored tissue paper at the stationery store and substituted fancy French envelope lining paper. After selling the lining paper again the next year, the Hall Brothers started printing their own specifically designed wrapping paper. In 1922, the company expanded throughout the country. The staff grew from 4 to 120 people, and the line increased from holiday cards to include everyday greeting cards. In 1928, the company introduced the brand name
Hallmark, after the
hallmark symbol used by
goldsmiths in
London in the 14th century, and began printing the name on the back of every card. That same year, the company became the first in the greeting card industry to advertise their product nationally. Their first advertisement appeared in ''
Ladies' Home Journal and was written by J.C. Hall himself. The card is on display at the company headquarters. In 1951, Hall sponsored a television program for NBC that gave rise to the Hallmark Hall of Fame'', which has won 80
Emmy Awards. Hallmark now has its own
cable television channel, the
Hallmark Channel which was established in 2001. For a period of about 15 years, Hallmark owned a stake in the
Spanish language network
Univision. In 1954, the company name was changed from Hall Brothers to Hallmark. In 1958, William E. Coutts Company, Ltd. was acquired by Hallmark. Until the 1990s, Hallmark's Canadian branch was known as
Coutts Hallmark. In 1973, Hallmark Cards started manufacturing Christmas ornaments. The first collection included 18 ornaments, including six glass ball ornaments. The Hallmark Keepsake Ornament collection is dated and available for just one year. By 1998, 11 million American households collected Hallmark ornaments, and 250,000 people were members of the Keepsake Ornament Collector's Club. The Collector's Club was launched nationally on June 1, 1987. One noted Christmas ornament authority was
Clara Johnson Scroggins who wrote extensively about Keepsake Ornaments and had one of the largest private collections of Christmas ornaments. In 1980, Hallmark Cards acquired
Valentine & Sons of Dundee, Scotland, one of the world's oldest publishers of picture postcards. In 1984, it acquired W. N. Sharpe Holdings, a 114–year old British greeting card manufacturer for $52 million. The same year, it acquired
Binney & Smith (later Crayola), a manufacturer of crayons for $204 million. In 1998, Hallmark made a number of acquisitions, including Britain-based Creative Publishing (a recent spinoff of
Fine Art Developments), and American-based InterArt. As of 2014,
The Paper Store LLC is one of the largest independently owned groups of Hallmark Gold Crown stores in the United States. This partnership began in the year 1972. ==Employees==