Hallmark Cards

Hallmark Cards is a Kansas City greeting-card and consumer-products company founded in 1910 by 18-year-old Joyce C. Hall. It grew into the largest greeting-card maker in the United States, produced the long-running Hallmark Hall of Fame television series, and developed the Crown Center district beside Union Station. Privately held and still controlled by the Hall family after more than a century, it remains the most recognizable corporate institution rooted in Kansas City.

Summary

Hallmark Cards, Inc. traces to January 1910, when Joyce Clyde “J.C.” Hall (1891–1982), a Nebraska-born postcard seller, moved to Kansas City and began mailing postcard samples to retailers from a room at the YMCA near Union Station. Joined by his brothers, Hall organized the business as Hall Brothers, shifted from reselling postcards to manufacturing its own greeting cards in the mid-1910s, and by the late 1920s ranked among the largest greeting-card publishers in the country. The company adopted the “Hallmark” brand name in 1928 and changed its corporate name to Hallmark Cards, Inc. in 1954.

Today Hallmark operates in greeting cards and related consumer products, owns the Crayola brand (acquired in 1984), and manages the Crown Center complex that serves as its global headquarters. The company employs roughly 30,000 people worldwide ¹ and is consistently ranked among the largest privately held companies in the United States.

Founding & Joyce Hall

Joyce Clyde Hall was born in 1891 in David City, Nebraska, the youngest of three brothers in a family of modest means. He began working as a child, and by his teens was selling picture postcards wholesale to retailers from his brothers’ bookstore in Norfolk, Nebraska.

In January 1910, at age 18, Hall arrived in Kansas City with two shoeboxes of postcards and a small amount of capital. He rented a room at the YMCA near Union Station and mailed postcard samples to retailers across the country, offering wholesale lots on consignment. Kansas City was a deliberate choice: as a major rail hub with strong postal connections, it allowed a mail-order distributor to reach the national market efficiently. ²

Hall’s brothers Rollie and William soon joined him, and the venture was organized as Hall Brothers. The company added greeting cards to its line in the early 1910s as the market broadened from seasonal valentines and Christmas cards into a year-round category. After a 1915 fire destroyed its inventory, Hall borrowed locally and rebuilt, and the company began manufacturing its own cards rather than reselling other publishers’ products. ²

Growth & the Hallmark brand

By the late 1920s Hall Brothers was one of the largest greeting-card publishers in the United States. In 1928 the company introduced the “Hallmark” brand name for its cards, chosen for its echo of the British “hallmark” tradition — the official stamps struck on precious metals to certify quality. The implied promise was a quality guarantee on every card. ²

The brand soon eclipsed the corporate name, and the company formally became Hallmark Cards, Inc. in 1954. ²³ Its enduring slogan, “When you care enough to send the very best,” was written by sales executive C.E. Goodman in 1944 and has anchored Hallmark advertising for decades. ²

Under Donald J. Hall Sr., who served as chief executive from the mid-1960s, Hallmark diversified well beyond cards: it acquired Binney & Smith — maker of Crayola crayons and Liquitex art materials — in 1984 ³¹, launched the Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments line in 1973 (an initial run of 18 ornaments that grew into a major collectible franchise) ⁴, expanded greeting-card operations internationally, and entered cable television, launching the Hallmark Channel in 2001. Its cable/streaming arm — publicly traded as Crown Media Holdings until Hallmark took it fully private in March 2016 — was renamed Hallmark Media in August 2022, and its streaming service was rebranded Hallmark+ in September 2024. As of 2026, Hallmark Media remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hallmark Cards; no sale of the unit has occurred.⁵ (An earlier draft of this page stated the division had been sold to private investors — that claim was unverified and is contradicted by the sources; it has been corrected.)

Crown Center

By the mid-1960s the district immediately south of Union Station — a working-class area known informally as “Signboard Hill” for the billboards lining Pershing Road — had fallen into decline. Joyce Hall, who viewed the area daily from his office windows, resolved that Hallmark would buy and redevelop it. ⁶

The Crown Center project began with land acquisition in the late 1960s and major construction around 1968. ⁶ Conceived and carried forward by Joyce Hall and his son Don, the development eventually comprised:

• The Crown Center shops and dining complex built around a central atrium
• The Hallmark world headquarters office buildings
• The Hyatt Regency Kansas City hotel (opened 1980), site of the 1981 walkway collapse, now the Sheraton Kansas City Hotel at Crown Center
• The Westin Crown Center hotel (opened 1973)
• Crown Center Square, a public plaza with seasonal programming
• Apartment and condominium towers, retail tenants, and integrated green space

Hallmark owns the development through the Crown Center Redevelopment Corporation, and Hall framed the project as a long-term civic legacy rather than a profit-maximizing real-estate play. ⁶ Announced in 1967, with its first buildings opening in 1971, Crown Center today is an 85-acre mixed-use district that draws roughly 5 million visitors a year.⁷ Crown Center is often cited in urban-planning literature as a leading example of single-developer corporate urban redevelopment — large in scale, mixed in use, and held intact under one owner rather than sold off and broken up. ⁸

On July 17, 1981, two suspended walkways in the Hyatt Regency atrium collapsed during a tea dance, killing 114 people and injuring more than 200. ⁸ The hotel was Hyatt-operated under franchise, but the building and surrounding district were Hallmark’s. The hotel reopened within months, and the disaster is covered in full on the dedicated Hyatt Regency walkway collapse page.

Hallmark Hall of Fame

In 1951 Hallmark launched the Hallmark Hall of Fame, a dramatic anthology series that began as a Sunday-afternoon program on NBC. ² The series committed to prestige drama — stage plays, original teleplays, literary adaptations, and historical subjects — produced to a higher standard than typical 1950s television, with fewer commercial interruptions than commercial programming of the era. Over its history nearly every major American and British stage and screen actor has appeared in at least one production. ²

The Hall of Fame has won more than 80 Primetime Emmy Awards, more than any other television program, and it became a defining element of Hallmark’s public identity. ¹ Hallmark treated the series less as conventional advertising than as a corporate cultural contribution.

Family ownership & today

Joyce Hall stepped back from daily management in the 1960s, and his son Donald J. Hall Sr. (1928–2024) took the lead, guiding the company through its strongest growth and overseeing Crown Center and the Crayola acquisition. ³ Joyce Hall died on October 29, 1982, in Kansas City at age 91. ² Don Hall Sr. later became chairman and a leading Kansas City philanthropist; he died in 2024 at age 96. ³

His son Donald J. “Don” Hall Jr. serves as executive chairman, while day-to-day leadership has passed to non-family executives — Mike Perry has been president and CEO since 2019. ¹ The founding Hall family still controls about two-thirds of the company’s stock, and Hallmark has never been publicly traded. ¹

Private ownership has shaped Hallmark’s strategy: free of quarterly-earnings pressure, the company has made long-term commitments such as Crown Center and the Hall of Fame and has guarded its brand on terms a public company might not. Family philanthropy through the Hall Family Foundation has been a major funder of Kansas City arts, education, civic, and parks programs since the 1960s. ³

Like other legacy card makers, Hallmark has faced pressure from declining physical-card volume as digital messaging spread, along with periodic workforce reductions — including a company-wide restructuring in August 2025 and the January 2024 removal of four Hallmark Media executives.⁹ Demand has held up better in occasion-specific categories — weddings, graduations, and milestone celebrations — where physical cards retain cultural weight, and Crayola remains a strong separately branded business. ¹ “ for a current company-wide headcount (the ~30,000 figure dates to about 2020).

Legacy

Hallmark has been the dominant American greeting-card company for most of the past century, with American Greetings of Cleveland as its principal rival. ¹ Its market leadership has helped shape the conventions, occasions, and sentiments of American card-giving itself.

For Kansas City, Hallmark is the most recognizable corporate institution rooted in the city. Its presence at Crown Center, its workforce, its philanthropy, and its national visibility through the Hall of Fame have tied the company to the city’s identity. The Hall family’s continued residence and civic engagement — and the work of the Hall Family Foundation — have left a lasting mark on the downtown and midtown landscape, from museum and parks support to the Crown Center district that reclaimed a blighted hillside beside Union Station. ³⁶

Sites associated with Hallmark

• Crown Center — global headquarters; 2501 McGee Street
• Hallmark Visitors Center within Crown Center — institutional museum and history exhibit
• Crown Center Square — public plaza
• Sheraton Kansas City Hotel at Crown Center — the original Hyatt Regency; site of the 1981 collapse
• Westin Crown Center hotel
• Kaleidoscope — Hallmark’s free children’s creative-art studio at Crown Center; began as a traveling exhibit in 1969, permanent at Crown Center since 1975, remodeled and reopened in 2022 ¹⁰
• Liberty Memorial — adjacent; Hallmark has supported preservation
• Original Hall Brothers location near Union Station — building gone; commemorative marker

Sources

Footnotes

1. “Hallmark Cards,” Wikipedia, and Forbes/Fortune private-company rankings — ownership (~two-thirds Hall family), ~30,000 employees (2020), Crayola/Binney & Smith 1984, Mike Perry CEO since 2019, 80+ Emmys. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. Hallmark Cards Inc. — official corporate history, “Founding: 1910s,” corporate.hallmark.com. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. Hall Family Foundation and Hallmark Corporate obituaries — Donald J. Hall Sr. (1928–2024); see also KCUR and KCTV5 coverage, Oct. 2024. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. Antique Trader, “Celebrating 50 Years of Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments.” https://www.antiquetrader.com/collectibles/hallmark-keepsake-ornaments-fifty — Confirms: Keepsake Ornaments line launched 1973 with an initial 18 ornaments (12 yarn + 6 glass ball); 50th anniversary 2023. ↩

5. Hallmark Corporate, “Crown Media transitions corporate name to Hallmark Media” (Aug. 2022) — https://corporate.hallmark.com/news-article/crown-media-transitions-corporate-name-to-hallmark-media/; Wikipedia, “Hallmark Media” (retrieved 2026-07). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallmark_Media — Confirms: March 2016 take-private of Crown Media Holdings; Aug 2022 rename to Hallmark Media; Sept 2024 Hallmark+ streaming rebrand; unit remains a wholly-owned Hallmark subsidiary (no sale). Corrects the prior unsourced “sold to private investors” claim. ↩

6. Crown Center Redevelopment Corporation — historical development materials. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Visit KC, “Crown Center” (https://news.visitkc.com/facts/crown-center) and Crown Center, “About” (https://www.crowncenter.com/about-crown-center). — Confirms: 85-acre mixed-use district; ~5 million visitors/year; announced 1967, first buildings opened 1971. ↩

8. Kansas City Public Library, Missouri Valley Special Collections — Hallmark and Crown Center archives; Hyatt walkway collapse records. ↩ ↩²

9. TheWrap, “Hallmark Eliminates 30 Roles Amid Company-Wide Restructuring” (Aug. 2025). https://www.thewrap.com/hallmark-layoffs-company-restructuring/ — Confirms: Aug 2025 company-wide restructuring (30 roles eliminated); Jan 2024 removal of four Hallmark Media executives. ↩

10. Visit KC, “Kaleidoscope.” https://news.visitkc.com/facts/kaleidoscope — Confirms: founded as a traveling exhibit in 1969, permanent at Crown Center since 1975; free children’s art studio; remodeled and reopened summer 2022; currently operating. ↩