Helping Hallmark Greet Season After Season

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Christmas hasn’t come yet but Hallmark, like a fashion house, is already hard at work on next year’s line. There will be fewer cards with generic sayings like “happy holidays” and “seasons greetings,” continuing the backtracking from a much-criticized faith-neutral trend.

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

Mary Hamilton, 74, who is one of the few Hallmark greeting card artists whose work bears her name, is known as “Hallmark’s Cher.”

Penguins will replace polar bears as the animal illustration of choice. Reds will be more cherry than scarlet and greens more emerald than moss. Pet lovers will find a wider range of options, as will people who want to explain why they aren’t able to afford a gift. And many cards — like this year — will feature less ebullient messages.

“We’re calling it a hopeful season,” said Cheryl Gaines, the editorial director for individual-sale Christmas cards at Hallmark. “We’re seeing a lot of the word ‘merry,’ but we’re making sure there’s some hope in there because not everyone has a merry Christmas.”

Employees at Hallmark, the family-owned greeting card giant based here, tailor next year’s line based on the sales data, trend analysis and consumer research that the company obsessively collects.

But with Christmas in particular, the tinkering is done with great caution. So among the evergreen cards destined for mantels and mailboxes, there will be, as has been for more than a half century, a handful of cards featuring the sweet watercolor portraits of animals and angels signed simply, “Mary.”

The designs were created by Mary Hamilton, whose desk last week was covered with paint, brushes and a drying study of a teddy bear dressed as Santa Claus. Like the company she works for, Ms. Hamilton is celebrating — and in the greeting card world, celebrations are serious business — a significant anniversary this year.

“She is our rock star,” said Teri Ann Drake, who runs the company’s creative division, referring to the woman who is one of the few artists here to be known as a master artist, and who is allowed to sign her name on her work. She gets regular fan mail.

Her slight stature and shy manner belie her reputation among her colleagues, who say Ms. Hamilton has groupies and — noting her use of a single name — describe her as “Hallmark’s Cher.”

The company has been selling cards for 100 years now and for more than half that time — 55 years to be exact — the works of Ms. Hamilton have been among them. Now 74 and widowed, she continues to work four days a week designing cards. She said she was the longest tenured of Hallmark’s 13,400 employees — except for the chairman, Donald J. Hall — and had produced more than 3,000 designs.

Christmas is the most lucrative holiday of the year for the card industry, with an estimated 1.5 billion Christmas cards — about half of them from Hallmark — sent last year alone, a spokeswoman for the company said. It has been Christmas for months here, and even after gifts are unwrapped and shedding trees are hauled away, artists and copywriters will spend months more poring over data and feedback on this year’s work in order to complete next year’s offerings.

But the holidays arrive at a time of uncertainty for Hallmark, which has struggled with declining revenue and layoffs in recent years. The company is in the midst of a branding effort intended to encourage consumers to make cards an everyday purchase rather than just for special occasions.

The company is also working on a deal with the United States Postal Service that would allow the sale of cards with prepaid postage that can be dropped directly in the mail. And it is continuing to press uneasily into the market for digital e-cards that so many have predicted will make the company’s core business irrelevant.

Ms. Hamilton, though, does not worry about the future of the company she joined at age 19 after deciding to forgo a secretarial career. But she acknowledges that she has seen a lot of change. When she started, the current chief executive had not been born and computers were decades away from transforming the company.

But those changes are not apparent at her desk. Though her color palette has brightened over the years and animal heads have shrunk a bit from cartoonish proportions of earlier years, her distinctive style (soft paintings she calls “cutes”) and her choice of subject (small animals, angels, sprites and, most frequently, teddy bears) remain much the same.

She does not enjoy sarcasm. And she mostly ignores the computer behind her desk. She thinks cards are going to be around for a while. “I think people like something they can save,” she said.

Tag:Christmas Cards,Hallmark Season,Ms. Hamilton,NY Times