Valentine’s Day rituals have evolved over centuries but a major commercial disruption happened in 1849 in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Expensive, hand-made Valentine’s Day cards had been around for decades, but Esther Howland wondered if they couldn’t be mass produced and sold for less. In 1849 she produced a dozen samples and asked her brother, who was handling sales for her father’s stationary company, to see if there was any interest in them. She hoped to get $200 in orders but he came back from a sales trip with $5,000 in orders!
Her cards were hand-made but she did it at scale and could sell them for far less than other companies. She used high quality paper and introduced many new designs. Eventually she targeted every part of the market with cards selling for 5 cents to $50. Within a few years her business was selling over $100,000 in cards a year – the equivalent of a several million dollar business today.
She sold her company 30 years later and Worcester remained the “Valentine Capital of America” for several more decades.
