“It not only sells out, we have a 70,000 person wait list.”
Jon Sichel, Head of Distribution and Business Affairs, Hallmark Media
“It” is the Hallmark Christmas Cruise, which sold out its inaugural 2024 sailings.
Hallmark started in 1910 when J.C. Hall stepped off a train in Kansas City with two shoeboxes of postcards. It now also runs the Hallmark Channel (turning 25 this year), a YouTube channel, the Hallmark+ app, a multi-year licensing deal with Netflix, and a Christmas experience in Kansas City that opens for its third year on 27 November, and so much more.
This week Evan Shapiro and I talk to Jon Sichel, live from MIPCOM, to get under the hood of what I consider to be the OG flywheel, from a retailer no less.
Hallmark lives in a lot of separate bubbles. We asked Jon how it gets someone out of one and into the next: how a person who found a Hallmark film on YouTube ends up in Hallmark+ and, eventually, in a store. Jon calls the answer One Hallmark. I’ve been a Netflix and Spotify subscriber for 10 years, and a new sign-up gets exactly what I get. One Hallmark feels more like a membership than a subscription.
Jon and Evan both call what Hallmark does a formula. I think playbook is the better word and creators are running the same one now: know what you stand for from the start, then build an ecosystem around it.
We also get into the family that owns Hallmark and isn’t selling and what comes next for Hallmark+ outside the US.
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That’s it for today but before you go: