Fueling Creative Spirit Hallmark Goes To Lengths To Encourage Inventiveness

In a large studio at the headquarters of Hallmark Cards Inc., Robert Hurlburt bent over a potter’s wheel. His fingers stained with clay, his face clenched in concentration, Hurlburt was completely out of his element.

And in his 17 years at Hallmark, he had never been happier.

A metal engraver by trade, Hurlburt was in the midst of a three-month rotation into an artist’s heaven - carte blanche to do whatever he wanted to regenerate his creative spirit.

After three weeks in the ceramics shop, Hurlburt was producing pots and vases that looked like the work of a professional. His work likely will only end up on a shelf at his home, but if Hurlburt’s mood is any indication, Hallmark is likely to see a payoff when he returns to his regular duties.

“It’s given me an opportunity to get back to thinking wild, crazy things,” he said.

Keeping its artists and writers happy and creative is a top priority at Hallmark, the nation’s largest greeting card seller with $3.4 billion in sales last year. For this Father’s Day, Americans will snap up some 99 million cards; Hallmark traditionally captures about 42 percent of the market.

Sabbaticals like Hurlburt’s are only one way Hallmark tries to help workers be creative.

Staffers can desert Hallmark’s midtown Kansas City headquarters for a downtown loft, where teams of writers and artists get away from phones to exchange ideas. They may spend days in retreat at a farm in nearby Kearney, Mo., taking part in fun exercises like building birdhouses.

Some go farther afield, sent by the company on trips overseas to soak up atmosphere and culture. Not all the methods are high-budget; for the creators of the irreverent Shoebox line, there are free movie passes and daily screenings of the hippest television shows.

Hallmark isn’t the only greeting company that makes a special effort to tweak and coax and nourish its creative staff. Its biggest competitor, American Greetings Inc. of Cleveland, operates similar programs.

No companies, especially ones that rely on ideas, can afford to do otherwise, said Calvin Moyer, executive director of the American Creative Association, a non-profit group in Hockessin, Del., founded six years ago to encourage creativity throughout society.

Hiring talented people isn’t enough, Moyer said.

“It’s like planting blueberries or apple trees in your backyard,” Moyer said. “It’ll probably grow and produce fruit but if you fertilize it and prune it, you’ll have not just fruit but great fruit.”

Massaging Hallmark’s creative staff of about 700 is the responsibility of Marita Wesley-Clough, a 20-year company veteran who was named director of creative strategy about a year ago. Wesley-Clough sounded like the philosophy major she was in college as she tried to explain her job, describing herself alternately as a shepherd, a midwife and a water bearer.

“It’s sort of like catching the wind,” she said. “The road to creative strategy isn’t a clear one.”

About 5,800 of Hallmark’s 19,600 full-time employees work at the company’s huge corporate headquarters. Tucked away in thousands of cubicles, they seem to have their own methods of working.

“Right now I’m trying to think like a cat,” said Barbara Loots, a writer in the traditional cards section who’s also a well-known local poet.

A few cubicles away, Linda Staton describes herself as a poetry pack rat, saving poems she likes and trying to distill their essence for a card with broad appeal. She reads children’s books in search of a writing meter that can pep up a card. Her best work comes when she’s daydreaming.

“I stare out that window for an inordinate amount of time,” she said. “Some of my best ideas have turned up in my head at the end of the day when all defenses are down.”

Nurturing the creative spirit reaches its wackiest heights at the Shoebox Cards division, where a team of seven writers and four editors usually starts its day by watching a tape of the previous night’s David Letterman show. They flip through magazines, even work out in the middle of the workday.

Sounds like fun, but there are deadlines. The group is expected to turn out 70 cards a week. To do that, they’ll generate an average of 150 pieces of writing a day.

“This is a pretty good marriage of art and commerce,” said writer Dan Taylor, 36, a former Bible school youth minister who applied to Hallmark by sending 10 jokes to an address in a Rolling Stone ad. “I have pictures of my kids in my booth to remind me they need to eat. So I can’t come home and say, ‘Sorry, kids, my muse just didn’t speak to me tonight.”’

At the end of the day, the staff’s efforts are sifted at a raucous conference led by chief editor Steve Finken. With a practiced ear for the staff’s reaction, Finken reads each card aloud and swiftly separates them into two piles.

The reject pile is much larger than the save pile.

Finken, 47, is a 20-year Hallmarker who studied creative writing at the University of Iowa. Though the writers are trained to have thick skins, he said their confidence is a delicate thing that can wane from day to day.

“They just have to get up and write every day,” Finken said. “I know the talent’s there, but sometimes they hit a slump.”

Hallmark perennially ranks high on lists of the best U.S. companies to work for, and despite a massive restructuring announced last year to improve efficiency, writers and artists still seem to be having a great time.

But there’s the same pressure as in any other business. Each card’s success is rated through surveys and information gathered by electronic cash registers, and the staff knows exactly how well their work is doing.

The appetite for new products must be fed, and the need to be thoughtful, witty, caring, wise and a dozen other things every day is unceasing. It can be a grind. Hurlburt said he felt his artistic impulses narrowing after 17 years.

When he gets back to work after a few more weeks of puttering, he said, “I don’t know if I’ll be a better engraver, but I’ll be more creatively applied.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: An occasion to give The top 10 card-giving occasions in the United States, according to research by Hallmark Cards Inc., with expected industrywide card sales for 1996: 1. Christmas 2.65 billion cards 2. Valentine’s Day 925 million 3. Mother’s Day 154 million 4. Easter 133 million 5. Father’s Day 99 million 6. Graduation 67 million 7. Thanksgiving 34 million 8. Halloween 26 million 9. St. Patrick’s Day 15 million 10. Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur 12 million