Hallmark’s Hairball: A Former Artist Told How He Didn’t Get Sucked Down Its Drain

By ERIC BARTON

Back in the mid-’90s, a manager at Hallmark Cards went to her boss to ask him to fast-track a line of cards for Kwanzaa. The holiday was getting mainstream attention, and the manager explained that American Greetings and other competitors were likely working on the same idea.

Her boss quickly shot down the idea. “Kwanzaa can’t be very important,” he said, “because I’ve never heard of it.”

The anecdote illustrates something I heard frequently while interviewing current and former employees of Hallmark for this story about the company’s layoffs. Many described a behemoth bureaucracy within Hallmark that stifles creativity and often sucks good ideas into a vortex of paperwork and budget meetings.

Turns out somebody has actually coined a phrase for Hallmark’s overblown officialdom. In 1998, former Hallmark employee Gordon MacKenzie dubbed it “the Hairball.”

MacKenzie worked for three decades at Hallmark, and he wrote and colorfully illustrated a book titled Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fools’ Guide to Surviving With Grace. The book describes the company headquarters on Grand as a “Big Grey Place” where a management hierarchy shoots down good ideas in the name of tradition.

During those 30 years, there was not a day when I was not subject to the inexorable pull of Corporate Gravity tug, tug, tugging me toward (and, during one unhappy year, right into) the tangle of the Hairball, where the ghosts of past successes outvote original thinking.

The Hairball.

MacKenzie discovered along the way, however, that it’s possible to live outside the hairball, to orbit it and exist without being sucked in. MacKenzie did this by convincing a Hallmark vice president to create for him a new department called the Humor Workshop. He brought in the most talented artists and writers in hopes of creating a place that could produce good ideas within a company that generally didn’t appreciate them.

When creating his Humor Workshop, MacKenzie used his budget to buy his employees roll-top desks and divided them using stained-glass windows and antique doors that were hung from the ceiling. Instead of wastebaskets, he bought old milk jugs. When a Hallmark bureaucrat found out about it, he was chastised for not buying the company-mandated cubicles and trash cans, even though his way cost less.

After the Humor Workshop, MacKenzie somehow convinced his boss to create him a new job. He called himself – and this is no joke – the “Creative Paradox.” He covered up the fluorescent lights in his office and filled it instead with candles. When low-level employees brought him ideas, he signed off on them, and their bosses assumed that the “Creative Paradox” must be high up in the company to simply approve ideas. In fact, he had no power. But he existed outside the hairball, and somehow got good ideas into stores.

MacKenzie tells his story mostly with anecdotes and with colorful and clever sketches that cover almost every page. A higher-up at Hallmark once asked MacKenzie to come up with a new way to think about the corporate hierarchy, to redraw the corporate pyramid. So in the book, MacKenzie includes his notes on how he reached his idea: a plum tree.

His plum tree was to remake the corporate culture where good ideas — the plums — have a lot farther to go before reaching the top branches. The idea was roundly loved when he presented it, but, like many good ideas at Hallmark, never went anywhere.

MacKenzie  

After he left Hallmark in 1991, MacKenzie became a consultant and a motivational speaker. According to a couple of Hallmarkers who worked with him, he has since died. But his book is still available online, and in the illustrations alone, it gives a detailed look into a company that many say operates as efficiently as a clogged drain.