Happy Valentines Day!
On this day, February 14, 1849 the first American-made Valentines were sold in Worcester Massachusetts. Esther Howland, a recent graduate of Mt. Holyoke College returned home to Worcester where she began designing elaborate Valentine's Day cards similar to one she had received from an English friend. Britain's earlier Industrial Revolution had lead to a much wider range of mass-produced products, including elaborate paper Valentine's which had become very popular accross the pond. The English cards often contained several different kinds of paper which were embossed, contained illustrations, and many used paper lace a very fancy. The specially-designed cards didn't catch on in the U.S because of a lack of availability, the cost, and because there simply wasn't a market. Instead in the United States, the tradition of giving simple cards on Valentine's Day the same kind of cards you might give a friend or write warm letter of congratulation on. The idea of cards specially created for the expression of love let alone special cards for a particular holiday were far from the minds of Americans.
But Esther Howland saw and recognized the potential. She combined a German tradition learned from her grandmother of cutting out paper hearts as a sign of affection and combined it with the style of the elaborate English Valentine's Day cards. On a whim, her brother took a few with him on a sales trip for another product and returned with $5,000 worth of orders. Esther was smart, she knew that her success needed to ride on providing cards for as many people as possible and saw that most cards currently on the market were not accessible to the majority of people. She created a line of hand-made cards that started around 5 cents and went up to as much as $50 for extremely elaborate cards with hand-painted pictures, hidden compartments, silken lace, and other niceties. With her innovatative designs in one hand and savvy sense of the potential market in the other, Esther more than cornered the American Valentine market, she created it. Her timing couldn't have been better, with the concept of "Romantic Love" emerging as a popular movement during the Victorian era people latched onto the cards and they created a social movement. Within three years, Esther had hired all of her friends and had built her business into a $100,000 (in 1849 money) a year business. A success for any entrepreneur but a feat for a woman to achieve in the eighteenth century!
Her business rapidly continued to grow, but eventually as Valentine's Day cards became an American cultural icon she began facing stiff competition from mass-produced rivals whom from seeing her success entered the market. They emulated her style of using heart-shaped cards, and because her competitors mass-produced their cards on machines they added many improvements to her designs and most importantly lowered costs. But even her competitors couldn't out-maneuver Esther and her company. Instead it was her ailing father who would end the company. He had grown ill in his old age, and societal and familial obligations placed on women at the time forced her to sell the company in 1881 to a fellow Worcester-based competitor. Worcester now counted Valentine's Day cards among its major industries and for almost eighty years was dubbed (among other names) "The Valentine Capital of America" until the middle of the 20th century when much of the card manufacturing moved off-shore.
Esther Howland is remembered today as the American Mother of the Valentine's Day Card and the designer of (or at minimum the person who popularized) the heart-shaped Valentine's Day cards we know and love (or hate) today.