100 Years of Finding Just the Right Words

Feb. 11, 2010 — -- In a conference room in Kansas City, greeting cards are born.

It's just before Valentine's Day, but the creative team at hand has already moved past the Feb. 14 holiday. On a recent morning, they were tackling birthdays.

"After a while birthdays are like mesh shirts on fat guys, nobody wants to see them," suggests one writer. "Sorry, happy birthday anyway?"

"Hope your day is as exciting as Larry King's visit to the suspender store," tries another.

The team members are former professors and waitresses and youth ministers and flight attendants... all hired to get laughs.

Ninety percent of their ideas won't cut it. But the few that do will wind up in your mailbox, with just the right words to mark some special occasion.

Welcome to Hallmark, where sentiment is mass-produced. The company turns 100 this year and, despite hard times and changing technology, shows no signs of slowing down.

Hallmark, it seems, has always had a harness on sentiment. Those famous TV ads? They reduced so many of us to tears.

And they're part of the reason we've become customers for life. They've trained us to buy cards when someone's born, and when someone dies, and for just about everything in between.

Diana Manning, a senior writer with three decades' experience, was composing a Christmas card. After 32 years of this, you'd think she'd run out of ideas.

"So far I've got, 'Besides all the jolly and the merry, this season is a time for reflecting, for feeling grateful, for embracing hope-filled new beginnings,'" Manning said. "'However you celebrate, hope this season will be just what you need it to be for you this year.' Now I'm not done with that, but that's my first version and I'm playing around with more versions of it."