Work History: 2016 to 2019 Hallmark Baby

The subtext of this entry should be: Even though some things feel new, little things never change.

Hallmark Baby was a unique opportunity with a small team of hand-picked people, inside a giant Kansas City corporation. My team was created from an employee pool inside Hallmark with financing from outside by two career managers who reported directly only to Don Hall. During the final interview, everything looked great because it removed two of the biggest headaches I experienced in my previous go-around with the company back in the late 1990's:

• Layer upon layer of middle managers who didn't work with you specifically, so didn't know your workflow or have your best interests in mind
• Interdepartmental competition favoring outdated models of retail 

I was ready to go and since the team had looked for someone with my particular skill set for nearly nine months, they had me set up in the office in less than 36 hours. I had to get them back on schedule as quickly as possible, using a content management system I was unfamiliar with, without any time set aside for official training sessions. It was stressful from the first day, but I quickly began figuring out how everything worked, much to my surprise.

As the guy who built out the website and prepped all incoming products to sell, I was never bored because things were always changing - prices, colors, sales, images, descriptions and even job duties. It was a small team with big dreams. Don Hall asked us to re-imagine the Hallmark digital customer experience for the better, then teach the other departments how to make theirs better. This had to happen while we were asked to build a high-quality product line that appealed to a much younger demographic than the traditional Hallmark consumer group. Hall wanted women in their 20's who shopped at upscale retailers, who looked for unique experiences and authentic goods that seemed personally made for their child. All this while spending the kind of money necessary to make untapped consumer demos aware of a new brand. It was a lot of money.

Between August 2016 and August 2017, Hallmark Baby grew in traffic by about 150% and in sales by 120%. It was the first year the project sold all original designs with customization options on select pieces. We also made great strides in getting the attention of young mothers instead of grandmothers. The Hallmark CEO decided to bring us into the company and give us full use of creative staff, and more importantly, give us corporate money for marketing. Within another twelve months Hallmark Baby had increased traffic by 180% and sales by 150%. Now we were getting somewhere and it was time to build the team for more specific purposes. This meant our team of six grew to twelve, incorporating a social media manager, product managers, production designers and even some fashion interns. Our holiday season was a windfall. Our spring 2018 was a landmark. One victory after another and another.

From August 2018 to August 2019 lots of things changed. Hallmark Baby kept growing at the planned rate of triple digit expansion, our new team members helped us procure and deliver nearly every product on time, we were getting much better ROI from our marketing team at DEG, and then...

In June 2019 Hallmark named a person outside of the Hall family to the position of CEO so the company strategic planning was no longer under the direct control of the Hall family. Don and Dave Hall left their positions as head executives and the former CEO of Crayola began switching things up very quickly. One of his initial decisions was to remove Hallmark Baby from the Hallmark Digital family and put it under the struggling Hallmark Retail division, even though Baby had exactly zero brick & mortar retail space. This surprise move told my managers exactly what they feared, even without an official announcement; Hallmark Baby was finished.

Within a few weeks, six of the twelve members of our team were eliminated to preserve even the slightest chance that they could sell the giant catalog of just-arrived holiday baby clothes and toys and manage to rebuild in the next year. I packed a box and thanked my managers because I knew we were all still stinging from the shock. Within another six weeks, every other remaining team member was eliminated without reassignment and the remaining stock handed to Hallmark.com to sell or burn or both. The URL was taken offline (in case you were wondering why no link was provided) and it was as if we never existed. *update - apparently our dev sandbox still exists.

So just like I remembered from my first go-around at the company while helping build and launch Hallmark.com in 1999, the people who looked ahead to how things could be were marginalized in the interest of the status quo, even as corporate profits continue to decline. In January of this year, Hallmark once again announced another round of personnel cuts, the majority of which unsurprisingly came out of the Retail division. With the spread of the COVID19 pandemic, I'm sure this won't be their last either.

Lesson learned and I doubt I will ever return to work on a project for them again because some things never seem to change.

What I learned:

• Salesforce CRM
• ZMags Creator
• Segmented audience targeting
• Brand building and reputation management