Hallmark Cards and the Business Joyce Hall Built

Joyce Clyde Hall arrived in Kansas City in January of nineteen ten, eighteen years old, carrying two shoeboxes full of picture postcards he intended to sell to drugstores and bookshops. He had come from Norfolk, Nebraska, because Kansas City was the regional distribution center for a twelve-state area, and he had calculated that a wholesale postcard operation based there could reach the whole Missouri River corridor. He was not wrong.

The postcard business became a greeting card business within a few years. In nineteen fifteen, Hall added envelope manufacturing. In nineteen seventeen, he began printing his own cards rather than distributing other publishers' products. He incorporated the business as Hall Brothers in nineteen ten; it became Hallmark Cards in nineteen fifty-four, taking the name from the hallmark system used by goldsmiths to certify the quality of precious metals.

The company grew into one of the largest private employers in Kansas City and the dominant American greeting card company, a position it has held for most of the twentieth century. The Crown Center complex, the headquarters campus and mixed-use development Hall built adjacent to the company's main facility, opened in the nineteen seventies and represented a significant private investment in a part of the city that public investment had bypassed.

Hallmark remains privately held by the Hall family. In an era when most companies of comparable size and age have gone public or been acquired, Hallmark's continued family ownership is itself a Kansas City story: the company that Joyce Hall built with two shoeboxes of postcards is still run by the people who inherited it from him.