Hallmark

Hallmark as much of its main productions centralized geographically in Lawrence Kansas. Here the cards arrive already printed by a third party and are cut and decorated. Shearing presses cut the cards out of the 3 foot by 4 foot sheets they arrive in on and per design are either directly folded or sent to have surface treatments performed on them. A couple of the treatments are flitter and flock, flitter or as we might call it glitter uses ink that is jet sprayed onto the card to hold the glitter in place when it is water fall poured onto the card. After this it goes through a oven to back it dry then onto the folding machines. Flock is a process that applies a finished substance that feels like felt to the card. It goes through the same sort of process as flitter but instead of just a water fall pour Hallmark also makes use of a static field to get it to stand on end and feel more like felt. These are just two surface treats that are used. There are several others such holograms and plasticizing. After the surface treatments are applied the cards are send through a folding machine that looks like its running at the speed of sound when its on. the cards zoom through starting flat and going through a series of arms and rollers that fold the card around flat. Some cards through are too complex for this and still require hand folding. With the advent of robotics and the technological revolution Hallmark as seen a significant drop on their demand so they have had to diversify; moving into many fields such as packing materials and wrapping paper.