Somewhere in the Charlotte, North Carolina, International Marking & Identification Association (IMIA) headquarters, there is a room full of the association’s historical artifacts. There are old sepia-toned photographs of men cutting wood molds in white shirts and ties, newsletters with hand-drawn cartoons in place of photos and scribbled-in logbooks yellow with age. There are hand drawings on brittle pieces of paper with the designs of stamps and seals that have been used in municipalities across the country for a century.

The IMIA photo album of its annual meetings is a story told in pictures that Life magazine would appreciate. Each year depicts the changes time confers upon all things: members aging, fashions changing and technologies evolving. This photo is of a Cosco tradeshow booth from the 1950s.

Among the photos, there is one in particular that stands out. Imagine your high school class photo, the long rectangle of a photo that includes everyone in your year. This old black and white is of the same variety, except in place of teenagers this photo features the foundation of an association. The 1911 photograph is the first picture of the members who had, one year earlier, founded an association that will celebrate its 100-year anniversary at The NBM Show in Indianapolis, Indiana this June.

Happy Birthday IMIA!!!
This year, the IMIA celebrates its 100th anniversary. However, it will be their 96th meeting. Why the discrepancy? According to IMIA Executive Director Steve Hewitt, “We skipped a couple of meetings during World War I and World War II, and a couple during the Great Depression.”

Today’s IMIA has 310 member companies. A century ago, there were less than 100. At its peak, the association had as many as 450 members. How has the association grown and changed over the years? Why did they get together to begin with?

According to Hewitt, the official reasons for forming the association were to improve the industry’s product quality, service and pricing. However, as you might have guessed, the hot topic of concern among those three was pricing.

“There were a handful of guys out there who thought that stamps were being sold too cheap. It was all about getting the prices up. The people who formed the industry wanted to be able to communicate that message with other members. It was very difficult to make a stamp in those days, and they wanted to make sure the margins covered the cost of labor and left over enough for plenty of profit,” says Hewitt.

The processes used to make stamps have changed a great deal over the past century, and old stamp presses such as this one are almost never used.

It was not as if the industry was new. Exact dates are hard to come by, but stamp companies had been around since the mid-1800s. The association wasn’t formed for some 50 years after the invention of molding the rubber stamp, which occurred a number of years after Charles Goodyear invented the vulcanization process for rubber in 1839.

Until Goodyear invented the vulcanization process, “The first stamps were actually made of metal. They were called flexible hand stamps. The handle was flexible, but the material was cast metal, the same as used for printing presses. They were set up by hand, then clamped together and put on a fixture. The quality, of course, was terrible,” says Hewitt.

But, once vulcanization was invented, says Hewitt, “A guy named James Woodruff, working with his dentist’s uncle, used a dental pot as a vulcanizer and began making rubber stamps in 1864. But it all started with Goodyear’s discovery.”

Chicago, 1911
In 1910, a group of stamp manufacturers (the “handful of guys” referred to earlier) created the International Stamp Manufacturers Association (ISMA). There isn’t a whole lot known about the initial group that began the association, “But the names Hanson and Cook were used a lot, and the first president was a guy named Willard,” says Hewitt.

They communicated by letter and telegram in those days, and they tried to hustle up and find lists of where manufacturers were, nationally and internationally. The first meeting was held a year later, in Chicago in 1911. Why the delay? In addition to the subtleties of organizing an association, travel was not as simple or as fast of a process as it is today.

“Still, they had pretty good attendance. People had to cross the ocean in ships from Europe. They took long train rides that took two weeks. In those days, travel was a big deal,” says Hewitt.

Another difference back then was fashion and peoples’ priorities on formal dress. Says Hewitt, “You should see the photos I have of those guys back then. Everybody was dressed to the nines. I’m talking suits, tuxedos and vests; the women wore hats and beautiful clothes. It was a huge social event, but everybody dressed nicely in those days.”

Looking at this photo, it’s clear what Lang Stamp Works offered at the time. Today, their website lists these products: rubber stamps, stencils, trophies, pads, seals, banners, engraved signs, inks, daters, numberers, vinyl signs and magnetic signs. Like most stamp shops, Lang Stamp diversified to compete in a business environment much different than the one this photo was taken in.

Fashion and social events aside, as mentioned earlier, the primary purpose of the meeting was pricing, which it seems is always a relevant issue. “They wanted to communicate and see what people were doing, but they wanted to make sure people were getting the price for their stamps. A lot of people didn’t know how to price them. You and I might call that price fixing, but it wasn’t. They just wanted to encourage people to get more money for their product. There were problems caused by people pricing them too cheaply.”

Evidently, they were able to address those issues successfully enough to build a foundation that has lasted a century. All things considered, the industry has a great track record of staying power, and so do its members.

Hewitt adds, “We have nine member companies who were at the first meeting in 1911. Now, obviously, their great-grandparents were there, or the original owners of the companies. Still, there are probably 50 companies in this industry that are more than 100 years old.”

New Technology & Tough Times
Unfortunately, recent decades have been tough on the industry, and it has seen some splintering. “We have half of the number of manufacturers in the United States that we did 30 years ago,” says Hewitt.

Basically, bigger companies have acquired smaller businesses over the years. Also, many companies from other industries began to make stamps. According to Hewitt, it was only a matter of time before others saw the potential of rubber stamps.

“This business is very profitable. When I got into this business, it cost $2 to make a stamp. You could sell it for $10 or $12. It wasn’t uncommon for a guy to have five employees and drive a Mercedes Benz, have a second home and send his kids to college. But, those were the early days before the big guys discovered our industry. Check printers and then big box companies like Staples and Office Depot started diving in 20 years ago, and a lot of member companies were left by the wayside. At first, our members supplied them, but when they realized the profit potential, the big guys got into it themselves. That’s just the normal evolution of business. It’s capitalism. That’s the way it is,” says Hewitt.

One reason others decided to join the stamp industry is that technology had by that time made it much easier to make a stamp. Up until the early 1970s, it was all handset type and vulcanizing. The combination of photo-polymer and photo-typesetting changed everything. Many in the industry were reluctant to change, but by the 1980s, everyone was making photo-polymer stamps (used for hand stamps and self-inking stamps). It is still the most dominant type of stamp in the industry.

“When we stopped having to vulcanize rubber to make a stamp, people could use flash technology and polymer technology. More and more people could make a stamp easier, and so more of them got into the business, and then the big guys started getting into it. You can buy stamps at Staples right at the counter. They make them while you wait,” says Hewitt.

Natural Diversification
In many ways, the history of IMIA is the history of the rubber stamp. However, when the stamp business became splintered with big box stores and others jumping in, it was necessary for the members who were wise enough to do so to diversify.

“That means make other products,” says Hewitt.

He says the first area of expansion for stamp companies was into engraving. “They were already engraving seals, so they took that same equipment and started engraving nameplates and name badges.”

Another benefit of that logical extension was that they could sell to the same customers. “Thank goodness, because the stamp business became very splintered in the 1970s. In the 1980s, a lot of guys began to diversify heavily. In fact, right now, the average stamp guy only has about 60 percent of his annual sales in marking products. The rest of the sales come from products found at The NBM Show: sublimation, engraving, screen printing, etc. There are virtually no stamp guys left out there who just do stamps. A shop can’t survive just doing stamps anymore,” says Hewitt.

Hewitt says the nice thing is that the transition is relatively easy, since the customers are the same, the equipment is the same or similar, and new equipment doesn’t require a huge investment.

“One of the reasons we picked NBM to work with is the awards and engraving part of NBM is already connected to our guys. A lot of our people were going to those shows anyway, knowing they needed to diversify and broaden their product line to serve their customers. The shops that didn’t diversify went out of business,” says Hewitt.

IMIA Today
Today, the IMIA serves its members in much the same way it always has, providing information and keeping members informed of current events and new products. These days, however, they use e-newsletters complete with color photos as opposed to snail mailing newspaper pages with hand drawings in place of photos. Of course, there is one service that has always been, and continues to be, the unique responsibility of IMIA.

“We maintain the only official seal guide in the world. In 1948, they printed the first seal book. It was nothing but, literally, hand-drawn images, though they were later printed. The guys making these seals would hand draw these images and use them to make the molds. They sent the association the drawings to keep on file. If there were changes, the association would make them and let everyone know. We still maintain that information for people to help them manufacture essential seals correctly. Today, we have it on a disc. That was one of the things I changed. We were copying pages up until 2007. Now, the seal software is purchased by members for a one-time cost,” says Hewitt.

The ubiquitous nature of marking and identification products is easy to miss until looked for. Then, it’s everywhere. When the United States Congress sent the Health Care Reform bill to President Obama, it was there for his stamp, seal and signature. This is just one example of the powerful, yet often overlooked, presence of marking and identification products in our everyday world.

“It’s amazing that people don’t realize,” says Hewitt. He continues, “We have one company in Washington D.C., the Baumgarten Company, and in the 1800s, they actually helped design the Official Seal of the United States of America. If you transfer any stock certificates, you need to emboss the corporate seal onto that stock certifying that it is legitimate. It can’t be done without it. Our members make 99 percent of the corporate seals out there,” says Hewitt.

Despite its far-reaching grasp, the members of IMIA remain a close-knit group.

“I would say the vast majority of people who come to our meetings come to see their friends and peers that they have known for years. These are sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters and great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of founders. A lot of the adults my age were kids swimming in the hotel pool together while their parents went to meetings when they were 10-years-old. It is still very much a family industry,” says Hewitt.

And, with diversification, it will continue to be. Raise up whatever glass lies nearby and toast the IMIA. “Happy 100th anniversary! Here’s to 100 more.”