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Hallmark Store, It’s Christmas Year-Round
From The Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly
By Doug LeDuc
dougl@fwbusiness.com
With seven months left in the year and summer not yet officially under way, it may seem a little early to be getting ready for the coming winter’s holidays. But Dave Hamrick is not one of those types who can’t get into the Christmas spirit until it is cold enough outside for a coat, hat and gloves. Hamrick is president of Warsaw Party Shops, a family-owned retailer of Hallmark merchandise, Christmas items and gifts and collectibles.
It operates Dorothy’s Hallmark stores in Columbia City, Huntington, Plymouth and Rochester and three Party Shops in Warsaw, where the chain has its headquarters. The stores are named after Hamrick’s mother, Dorothy Snyder. His father, Norm Snyder, is chief executive officer. Early in May, the company ordered all of the Hallmark Keepsake Christmas ornaments it plans to sell this year, and to accomplish that, “we get to see them early on,” Hamrick said with the enthusiasm of a serious collector.
Since Hallmark Cards got into the Christmas ornament business in 1973, it has come out with more than 4,000 ornaments. And a Party Shop museum on Lake City Highway is “the only place in the country where you can actually see every ornament on public display,” Hamrick said. In addition to Hamrick’s duties as president, “I get to take out the trash and do a lot of payroll, and I’m the complaint department — you wear a lot of hats in a family business,” he said. “I’m also curator of the museum. You have to have a dedicated person to keep up with this business. There’s so much to do and take care of.”
The museum takes up about 2,000 square feet of the 12,000-square-foot store where it is located. The rest of the space is divided evenly into an area for Hallmark merchandise and an area for gifts and collectibles. The ornaments are displayed by date in wood-frame glass cases on the wall to make them easy to find, and extra copies are stored by date. Warsaw Party Shops has a vast assortment of ornaments from previous years in storage and does a thriving business with collectors.
“I’m kind of the used car salesman of ornaments,” Hamrick said. “We do a lot (of business) on eBay and a lot on our own Web site … And we get a lot of referrals from other Hallmark stores across the country.” He said he likes to refer to Warsaw as “the ornament capital of the world.” And the city may hold that place in the hearts of Hallmark ornament collectors who travel out of their way to visit the museum regularly and put up multiple Christmas trees each year to display their treasures.
Many ornaments from previous years are purchased at ordinary prices of $20 or less to replace one broken in an accident, he said. But ornaments in high demand that aren’t easy to find can sell for much more to collectors who expect their value to continue to rise as the years pass.
“We have a classic car series, and the first one was a Corvette,” Hamrick said. “It’s now worth $100.” Collectors have been known to pay up to $500 for some Hallmark ornaments, and the company keeps the valuable ones that aren’t on display locked in storage. Contact with ornament collectors over the years has provided valuable insight into what they like. Hamrick shares that with Hallmark through a special panel of retailers from about half a dozen stores flown into the company’s Kansas City headquarters every year to discuss future ornaments.
Retailers on the panel “talk about what we like and dislike and what can be tweaked and what has worked in past years,” he said. The museum has raised the Party Shop profile as a place to buy special ornaments, which has contributed to exceptional sales volume. That enables it to get a greater allocation than usual of limited-edition ornaments, which increases the store’s attractiveness to collectors.
The store expects to draw some big crowds, for example, to the Hallmark 2008 Keepsake Ornament Premier, which is scheduled to take place at all Hallmark stores July 12-13. The event features an ornament Hallmark only makes available that weekend. Doing what Hamrick calls “pretty good business in ornaments each year” also helped in competition with other Great Lakes region stores for an artist signing event.
A bulletin on the Party Shop Web site says master artist Ken Crow will be at the store for the signing Sept. 12-13. Hallmark is only scheduling 20 artist signing events this year, and there won’t be any others in Indiana. “We are hoping to have a special event-exclusive ornament that Ken will sign,” Hamrick said in the bulletin. “If you are not familiar with Ken Crow yet, he is one of the Hallmark Keepsake artists who like to add animation, motion and sound to his designs.
In addition to collectors who visit Warsaw specifically for the ornament museum, the city’s proximity to lakes attracts a lot of visitors from out of town, and Hamrick said he’ll be doing more this year to promote the museum as an enjoyable place they can come and spend a few hours. Some visitors who stop by to pass a little time could find themselves captivated by the ornament collection, particularly if they learn an item that has decorated their tree for years is worth more than they realized.
“A lot of them are surprised,” Hamrick said. “We have people who, when they come, they’ll say, ‘I don’t collect ornaments,’ but when they see them, they’ll remember and say, ‘I’ve got that one and that one and that one,’ and that’s how collectors get started.”
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