Joe Purce carved time out of his 89th birthday to take a kind of inventory, looking around, reflecting, making notes.
He wasn’t reminiscing. Purce was reconciling, examining spreadsheets, cost-of-sales reports, and trying his darndest (without success) to re-hang sandals that had fallen from a display rack at his Kathryn’s Hallmark store in Sanford.
Besides working full time as he nears nonagenarian status, he recently celebrated the 67th anniversary of his connection to the greeting-card behemoth.
His doctor warned him not to quit during a routine exam. “‘Well, yeah, we’ve had a good visit, and you’re looking OK and all that,’” his physician told him. “And he said, ‘But that one thing you talked to me about, about getting rid of the store … With your personality, I don’t want you selling, because the first thing is that you’re going to get lazy. And then you’re going to trip and fall, and then you’re going to break something — and then you’ll
be gone.’”
Purce laughs at the recollection. “Hey, Gerry,” he told his doctor. “Be a little more direct, would you please?”
FAR FROM FIFTH AVENUE
Purce’s past 27 Hallmark years have been in Sanford. It’s a lifetime away from Fifth Avenue in New York City in December 1958, when the 22-year-old Iona College graduate got a job stocking Hallmark merchandise at R.H. Macy & Co.’s flagship store in Herald Square.
Hallmark sold greeting cards, gift wrap and note paper, as it does today. Eighteen-year-old J.C. Hall founded the business in 1910 by hawking postcards out of shoeboxes around Kansas City, Missouri. Its 1,130-plus Hallmark Gold Crown retail stores are now part of a diversified company, including Crayola markers and the Hallmark cable TV channels. Descendants of J.C. Hall still own the business.
Hallmark’s product diversification gave Purce an opportunity. He left Macy’s in 1970 to help open the Hallmark Gallery store, also on Fifth Avenue, becoming its retail manager. One December day, exhausted from a holiday crush, he dropped into the men’s restroom. Hallmark’s founder was there, too.
“Who are you, young man?” the elderly Hall asked, then asked Purce to help carry his bags to the Plaza Hotel. Purce accepted the assignment, and with Hall thus cornered, picked the older man’s brain about Hallmark’s success and philosophy.
Purce leveraged those insights in 1974 after acquiring the Hallmark store in Woodbridge, New Jersey, seeking to “try to do something on my own, rather than working for a corporation.” Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, Purce owned, then eventually sold, a dozen Hallmark retail shops.
By 1990, ready for a change, he took a departure, selling “Precious Moments” collectibles to Hallmark stores and other retailers around
New England.
A ‘JOE PURCE STORE’
In 1998, the company’s national credit manager, a friend of Purce’s, told him that Hallmark’s store in Sanford was for sale. Ready for a more temperate climate, Purce bought the business, naming it after a granddaughter. He expanded the space and the product line. In 2020, the store moved to the Spring Lane Galleria off U.S. 1 in a space covering 12,000 square feet, or about four times the size of most Hallmark stores, he says.
At first, about 75% of his revenue came from Hallmark lines. After adding Pandora jewelry, Vera Bradley handbags and products from about 150 vendors, now about a quarter of store revenue is Hallmark-related. He calls his $1 million inventory “a Joe Purce store.”
“They’re not a franchise,” he says of Hallmark’s retail business. “They’re just a label, but they control who gets that label … This store is much bigger than the average Hallmark store, so therefore you’ve got to fill it.”
Replenishing inventory from so many vendors, and seeing what is selling and anticipating what might sell better, is both Purce’s work and nemesis.
“If we have too much inventory, we’ve got a problem,” he says. “And if we have too little, we have a problem. You can’t do business from an empty cart, but if it’s too full, we can’t pay our bills.”
‘DO I ENJOY IT? YEAH.’
These days, as he has since the beginning in Sanford, Purce rises around 6, has breakfast, then typically arrives at Kathryn’s Hallmark by 7:30. He completes a few set-up tasks and plans his day. He’ll scoot out around 9 to grab himself a second coffee and orders of oatmeal for himself and his wife Pat from McDonald’s (“second breakfast,” he calls it), then heads back to the store, which opens at 10 a.m.
He splits time between inventory-related tasks and reviewing reports in his windowless office and roaming the floor, where he’s gregarious in greeting familiar customers and fastidious about displays. He leaves by 4 p.m. Lunch, if he eats at all, might be an apple. He’ll unwind with a beer at the nearby Camelback brewpub, then head home for dinner with Pat.
“Do I enjoy it? Yeah,” Purce says. “Is it fatiguing at my age? Yes. I don’t think there are too many people this age, who’ll be hitting 90 next year, that would keep doing this.”
He admits he doesn’t “have the killer instinct, the drive” he did in his early days. Computerized inventory systems frustrate him, keeping him from time on the floor.
But he has few regrets. And a goal: to eventually sell to the right buyer. Then, ask
for a job.
“If they want me here, I could be out front, or back in the office,” he says. “Whatever it might be. I’m like a lump sitting back in the office.”
What would J.C. Hall say if he walked into Kathryn’s Hallmark to see Purce still at it, 67 years later?
“Very loyal, son,” Purce says. “Very loyal.” ■
