A sentimental journey to creative hub of 100-year-old greetings card giant

You, especially if you are female, will be one of the various consumer types that marketing analysts in the greeting card industry will have identified and have their sights set upon. Women are the key to the business – after all, they buy 85 per cent of the cards sold by the 1.7bn British greetings card market each year. They can browse for hours – attracted first by design, but mostly purchasing because of the words inside the card.

We buy more cards than any other nation on earth (31 a year). On Mother's Day alone we sent 29 million, worth 67.7m, in 2009. Some of us might lean towards the odd handmade card, but most British consumers still buy from the big names – and they don't come bigger than Hallmark, which celebrates its centenary this year and publishes one in five of the cards we buy in the UK.

Yes, it was 1910 when an impecunious young man called JC Hall left his home in Nebraska and fetched up in Kansas City, Missouri with a shoebox full of collected postcards under his arm. He lived at the YMCA and started a small business selling the cards, sending them to retailers speculatively, figuring that some would actually pay.

As business flourished, he later realised there was a market for a more private card with an envelope and so the "General Motors of emotion" was born. Today, Hallmark, which still has its HQ in Kansas City, is the world's largest card company, although sales fell seven per cent last year to $4bn, forcing the firm to cut jobs both in the US and in the UK. Hallmark employs 13,400 people worldwide, with 3,300 in the UK – principally in Bradford, where Hallmark House in Heaton houses the UK's largest greetings card studio.

Employees are known paternalistically as "Hallmarkers", and those who come up with the designs, words, typography and general look of the thousands of different cards that leave here are the 200 "creatives" who inhabit the third floor.

Their world is lilac and silver, with Disney bunting (Hallmark is licensed to make Disney cards), with displays of merchandise from this market and beyond. Gift bags and spangly or cutesy wrapping paper take up many surfaces. Forever Friends bears peer myopically from corners.

To mark themselves out from ordinary creatives, one area is penned off with the sign "Welcome to Humour". A peek through an archway reveals a group of 20-somethings staring at graphics on screens. No lively banter spawning hilarious one-liners, just hushed concentration.

For staff who need creative refuelling there's a "Chill-Out" room, decorated in striking, deep colours and clashing prints. A giant screen and computer game equipment are on hand for entertainment – or research into the world of the under-15s, perhaps.

The energy around the place is youthful, the dress code laid-back, just short of edgy. Creative director Martin Powderly isn't 20-something, but he wears the obligatory all-black of the trendily middle-aged former fine art student that he is. He talks about "core consumers" and "consumer segregation."

Hallmark is very keen to shake off the perception that its wares are all about gushing sentimentality or arch cutesiness. "We've always had a wide range," says Powderly. "Our consumer has always liked to buy cards that express emotion, but the level of that emotional expression has fluctuated over time.

"Today, she wants something warm but more casual, less formal than years ago, with language that is concise, more simply put."

Hallmark sponsors a new designers' fair each summer, and has its pick of art school graduates.

A quick inspection of new offerings and current best-sellers is a snapshot of how we express feelings about life, love, big family occasions and death.

True to Powderly's word, the range is enormous and can be surprising. Best-sellers (Mother's Day cards) are pale in palette, clean in design and yes, simple in message – "Just want to say that you're loved a lot, Mum, and you always will be!"

Kendra Keller worked as a writer for Hallmark in Kansas City before switching to Bradford a year ago. Her love of England was stirred when she took a Masters degree in Shakespearean studies at Essex University and promised herself she would return one day.

She's an upbeat, sunny American who, as you might imagine, chooses her words carefully. Back in Kansas, where the operation is bigger, she worked on words for children's birthday cards. In Bradford, she does does everything from Valentine's Day to Christmas cards.

Recent messages she has coined include: "Though I don't always tell you in so many words...I love you in so many ways"; "40 looks good on you…39 is SO last year!"; "If I had my life to live over again, next time I would find you sooner so I could love you longer."

This last one, seen as particularly applicable to later or second marriages, sums up how the creatives have to incorporate the findings that arise from their female focus groups and suit cards not only to how families and society in general are changing but also give a nod to dynamics within families and changing methods of communication.

The day of "text speak" in a Hallmark card is not nigh, though, nor even on the horizon. But evolving the business and keeping it relevant means cards need to reflect today's more direct ways of communicating, the language of teenagers ("girls are mega special and should rule the world") and their interests – be they shopping, break dancing, playing on X-Box or reading celebrity magazines.

There are 500 million cards in the company archive to plunder or rework, and the current range or arty cards that are blank inside borrows from some of the better art-deco designs that have been carefully preserved.

On average, each design has an 18-month shelf life, although some classics can last five years. One particular simple basket of purple pansies has, amazingly, been on the market since the 1930s. About 30 per cent of the cards sold by Hallmark in the UK are designed in the US, but with the message tweaked for our different sensibilities.

"Here in the UK people don't go for the same level of sentiment, and the message will be shorter," says Kendra, who fancies masterminding a range of cards featuring quotable quotes from the Bard.

"I think it's stereotypical to say people don't 'get' American humour over here, especially since jokes from Friends and The Simpsons have become global. In general, an emotional message would be dialled back for the UK consumer." Hallmarkers don't like the word "schmaltz", preferring "emotionality".

Design, colour and styling of cards for seasons ahead is to a great extent dictated by the trends identified in other fields like fashion and interiors. Trend bulletins for Christmas 2010 show bold and energetic Pop-Art graphics, but also a return (could it be recession?) to designs suggestive of warmth, homeliness, tradition and nostalgia.

A growing area of the business is the eCard and the customised print-on-demand greeting cards sold through the Hallmark website.

We Brits might be rather restrained compared to the Americans in how big a helping of ready-made sincerity we will buy in a cellophane wrapper, but when we are "designing" the card ourselves online, there is tendency to go over-the-top, if samples in the office are anything to go by.

Why is it, I wonder, that cards aimed at men are so dull – dwelling, as they often do, on golf, football, booze and fishing?

Martin Powderly won't agree that the offering is rubbish, but "the range of subject matter does seem to be limited". Current research in the US is looking into the use of authentic speech such as "Yo Bro!" Findings among focus groups so far show that people like a certain amount of it.

In the States, a best-selling Disney Toy Story card has Woody the cowboy shouting "Yee-Haw" followed be eight lines of rhyming verse. The view among the creatives in Bradford is that one "Yee-Haw" can go a very long way.

Despite the dominance of computer-generated graphics and design, it's refreshing to see an artist hard at work with paper and pastels,

working on the Christmas for the best-selling Forever Friends range, now 22 years old.

Before leaving all this warmth and light, I want to know how

Hallmarkers celebrate birthdays. No special words or pictures – just cakes, I'm told. That's disappointing.