Hallmark closing Litho-Krome plant in Columbus, 50 jobs lost
Hallmark will close its Litho-Krome printing plant in Columbus this year, eliminating 50 jobs and ending its more than eight-decade run in the city, the Kansas City, Mo.-based company said Tuesday.
The Columbus facility, located in Muscogee Technology Park off Macon Road in the Midland area of the city, printed Hallmark greeting cards and packaging for Crayola products. Hallmark said that work is being shifted to its "existing supply chain" by the third quarter of this year. That would be in the July-September timeframe.
Hallmark said up to 10 of the Columbus employees "will have the opportunity" to relocate to its printing facility in Lawrence, Kan., while the other 40 will receive severance benefits and assistance with finding employment elsewhere.
Pete Burney, Hallmark's senior vice president over supply chain and business enablement, in a statement, said the company made the decision to close the Columbus plant "after a thorough evaluation and careful consideration. This decision allows us to further improve our capabilities, speed and cost structure so we can remain competitive in today’s marketplace.”
Hallmark said its 150,000-square-foot plant in Muscogee Technology Park (5700 Old Brim Road) will be put on the market for sale right away, with another Kansas City firm, CBRE, handling the real-estate effort.
It was in March of last year that Hallmark unveiled a restructuring that cut the Columbus printing operation from 80 employees to the current 50. About that time, it put a halt to its work on reproduction of fine art and photos, while also shifting portions of the greeting card production process to the Kansas facility.
From a historical perspective, Litho-Krome, founded by artist and offset lithography innovator J. Tom Morgan in 1933, has seen its work force drop from about 275 in 1998 — when the company operated off 13th Street near downtown Columbus — to roughly 140 as it moved into the new and more efficient 150,000-square-foot showpiece printing plant in the Midland area in 2003.
At one time, the Columbus company was known for producing limited-edition prints for a number of major art publishers and artists. The late Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade — the latter once hailed as “The Painter of Light” — were among those who used the company’s fine art expertise.
Hallmark Cards, itself founded in 1910, bought out Litho-Krome in 1979.
Litho-Krome. Crayola and Crown Media Holdings — which includes cable TV’s Hallmark Channel — are subsidiaries of Hallmark, which has seen sales slide as purchases of paper greeting cards have been replaced by many consumers with digital or electronic greeting cards via computers, tablets and smartphones. The company does also market and sell ornaments, picture frames, stationery, stuffed animals and other gift items through its network of retail stores and online.
Privately held Hallmark Cards reported overall revenue of $3.9 billion in 2013, a 2 percent decline from 2012. It did not report how much earnings, or profits, were for the year. The firm has yet to disclose financial data for 2014.
The Greeting Card Association estimates roughly 6.5 billion paper greeting cards are purchased in the U.S. each year, generating more than $7 billion in sales. But it also downplays the impact of the Internet on paper greeting cards.
"Most people now acknowledge many more birthdays than ever before because of Facebook, but they aren’t necessarily sending fewer cards as a result," the pro-card association says in a fact sheet on its website.
This story was originally published February 17, 2015 at 5:19 PM with the headline "Hallmark closing Litho-Krome plant in Columbus, 50 jobs lost."