Driving Political Opinion

In September, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Gilman, Chairman of the Board of Gill Studios, Inc. in Shawnee Mission, Kansas. Gill Studios is one of the top twenty promotional product printers in the US with annual sales exceeding $50 million, according to the Advertising Specialty Institute, the largest media and marketing organization serving the advertising specialty industry. Gill Studios’ history is at the very heart of the story of the modern American bumper sticker.

In the 1930s Gilman’s father-in-law was Forest  P. Gill, a Kansas City man who had worked for the Crawford Manufacturing Company, a canvas goods manufacturer. The company made seat and tire covers for spare tires which were attached to the back of automobiles.

Canvas was a sturdy material that could be printed on with pigmented inks. These inks, in contrast to dyes that could fade or run, were able to withstand the rigors of weather and sunlight. As a result, canvas products were a good choice for printed advertisements. Many store owners had the name of their business or their address printed on the canvas awning over their store windows. It wasn’t long before salesmen saw the blank canvas covering spare tires as a mobile billboard waiting for a product name or logo.

Forest had become the company’s silkscreen printer, and when times turned tough during the depression years, the company reduced employee hours before deciding to close down their printing operation. Although Forest was offered a job in the shipping department by his employer, he decided to go into business for himself. His employer gave him some printing equipment and he began his business in the basement of his home in 1934.

Mark Gillman says his father-in-law had a tough struggle to make ends meet throughout the 1930s. Forest managed to eke out a living printing just about anything, from can labels to “bumper signs” for cars made out of cardboard which were then secured with wires or strings to car bumpers. Printed with pigmented inks and treated with chemicals, the signs resisted what the weather threw at them and served their purpose for a brief period of time.

World War II

When World War II came along, Forest won a government contract to silk-screen canvas equipment for the Army.  He also acquired a few industrial sewing machines which allowed him to get piece work for sewing canvas products needed for the war effort. The military used canvas for tents, canteen carriers, ammunition carriers, weapon sheaths, and backpacks, to name just a few of the thousands of products utilized by the armed services.

Before long Forest’s one man operation grew, employees were hired and the company needed more room. Forest moved the business out of his basement and into a building at 906 Central in downtown Kansas City, not far from the swanky Hotel Savoy at Second and Central, well known among Kansas City’s politicos. Harry Truman often lunched at the Savoy Grill, and today his favorite booth, No. 4,  is marked with a plaque. Truman was known to typically order two bourbons, a bowl of navy-bean soup and Yankee pot roast when he ate at the Savoy, thought to be the oldest continuously running hotel West of the Mississippi River.

In 1946 Bob and Joe Switzer founded, Switzer Brother’s Inc., an ink and dye company in Cleveland, Ohio that produced dyes and resins which fluoresced under ultraviolet light. These new colors, called DayGlo, were high visibility inks that could be used by printers to produce new effects. Forest began experimenting with these inks on signage. Although these new inks were more ephemeral than pigments, they were eye catching and advertisers were interested in using them to attract attention. (For information about a children’s book that will soon be published about the “Day-Glo Brothers” check out author Chris Barton’s blog.)

At this same time, some new types of sticky-backed papers became available to commercial printers that had a stripable backing that could be pulled off and the paper would adhere directly to a smooth surface. Up to this time, silk-screened “stickers” had been done on water-activated gummed papers, often called decals, which degraded fairly quickly if exposed to the elements. Decals are images or designs printed on specially treated paper that allows the image to be transferred to another surface such as glass, wood or metal. They were invented in the 1750s and used initially to transfer designs to pottery. Our word decal is short for the word decalcomania, which comes from the French word décalquer, meaning to transfer a tracing, plus mania, meaning crazy, indicating the popularity of the technique. Decals could be adhered to the inside of a glass window or even on a bumper, but they became brittle and did not hold up well over time.

The right idea at the right time

Forest Gill saw the potential of printing with bright-colored inks on these new sticky-baced papers, and he saw the large chrome bumpers on post-war American cars as a logical space on which a printed advertisement could be placed. With gas, metal and tire rationing now lifted, the auto industry was poised for a boom, and Forest Gill had an idea for something that he could stick on every car’s shiny new bumper. It was a classic case of a convergence of technologies.

“One day he went out to the parking lot with a yardstick and figured out how many bumper stickers he could get out of a sheet of the sticky back paper,” says Mark Gilman. The original bumper sticker created by Gilman’s father in law was 3¾ inches tall by 15 inches wide.

“Forest wasn’t by nature a salesman. He loved being in the shop. He was an inventor and he knew he needed help to sell his new product,” says Gilman. The canvas company he had worked for sold their goods through a catalogue. He wasn’t sure how that exactly worked, but he had the notion that this would be a good way to sell the bumper sticker.

A fellow Kansas City printer told him about a magazine that independent salesmen read that advertised products which could be sold in regional territories by traveling salesmen. He contacted Nationwide Advertising Specialty Company in Arlington, Texas and they helped him to create an ad that would advertise bumper stickers not directly to the public, but to sales reps who would sell them to places such as tourist destinations. Nationwide also began to distribute Forest’s sticky new product. As more and more people bought cars after the war, America started going on vacations again to visit places like Marine Gardens in Florida and Seven Falls in Colorado Springs, and the bumper sticker was a perfect souvenir.

Printed initially on black or dark blue backgrounds with fluorescent ink, bumper stickers proudly and loudly announced where the family had been on vacation and served as an advertisement to spread the word about tourist attractions far and wide. And with the name of Gill’s business printed at the bottom, the souvenir stickers served to advertise his company as well.

It didn’t take long for politicians to notice this relatively inexpensive way to communicate with potential voters. Mark Gilman says that the company primarily dealt with local political campaigns early on. “A county attorney might not have needed more than 100 bumper stickers to get noticed especially in a rural county,” says Gilman. Over time, the company began getting larger and larger orders for larger and larger political offices, moving from the county attorney to the state’s attorney general.

Today Gill Studios is a multimillion dollar business with a 240,000 square foot state-of-the-art specialty printing and warehouse facility located on 13 acres in the Kansas City metro area. The company employs more than 500 employees. The company prints thousands of items, but the bumper sticker remains one of their top selling products. According to Mark Gilman, 10 percent of revenues in a non-national election year are from bumper stickers. In a national election year, revenues from bumper stickers account for 12 percent or more of annual revenues.

A tour through the Gill Studios plant is a lesson in non-partisan politics as bumper stickers for Democrat and Republican presidential hopefuls are neatly stacked on pallets next to each other in the shipping areas, ready to be distributed to campaign headquarters across the country.