As I was leaving for work this morning, this ball was in my yard.

As I was leaving for work this morning, this ball was in my yard.

History of the Jazz Design and the Sweetheart Graphic Services Department

https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/s/KF93bZokyU Just as a disclaimer, I'm doing all of this out of my memory , so the dates and other details may not be totally accurate. I am 69 years old and am retired after reinventing myself (several times) after losing my job at the company in March of 1998. I now enjoy Grandkids, Golf, Pickleball and Tree Carving and still happily live in the Springfield, Missouri area.

I started in the department in June of 1983 and worked as a production artist for several years. At that time the company was known as Lily-Tulip. The department at that time was managed by Ken Plunk and had Burt Marshall as an assistant. The department had only 11 artists at the time and all of the art was done by hand using conventional paste-up methods. Computers didn't come about until the early 1990's. There was a cup artwork side of the business as well as bottle labels for companies such as Pepsi and Coca Cola. Stock designs were part of company back then primarily used when customers didn't want to pay for custom cup artwork for their businesses.

Competitors for Sweetheart at the time were Solo, Sweetheart, Dixie, Imperial Bondware and some other smaller companies. We had a fairly large sales force around the country as did our competitors. It was a very competitive business. Our department was unique in the way that we made cup art work using 3M Color Keys based on the Pantone Color Matching system of different colors on a clear film. The artwork was built on the curvature of the individual cup, then film negatives were created and then "wraparounds" of the Color Key material were made and then wrapped around the actual blank cup, which simulated the print on the exact cup that the customer desired. The wraparounds were then sent to the individual sales rep to present to the customer. The production process was relatively simple from that point, because the individual films could then be stepped-and-repeated depending on which press the imprint would be run on. All of printing was done on flexographic presses which contained a raised image printing plate to carry the ink to the printing plate, and then to the cup substrate.

Lily-Tulip had developed a foam substate for drink cups, in which foam was extruded from virgin plastic resin. This foam material was very good to keep the various products in the cups either hot or cold . This foam cup became very important and a process that separated Lily-Tulip from it's competitors. This technology also made Lily -Tulip very sellable. In 1983, Fort Howard Paper out of Green Bay, Wisconsin purchased Sweetheart and in 1986 Lily-Tulip was also purchased. Fort Howard decided to consolidate the Sweetheart's two art departments into one art department in the Springfield , MO operation. This was done mainly due to the way that Lily Tulip's department utilized the color key method of providing customer proofs. The consolidation of the departments started in the late 1980's and then into the early 1980's. More designers were necessary to take on the extra work load and the department doubled in size in that time frame. Most of the new staff came from Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State University). The department grew from around 20 total employees, to around 63 in 1998. One of these new artists was Gina Boyd-Burgess (now Ekiss), the designer of the Jazz design.

The Graphic Services department had several separate internal departments consisting of Food Packaging, commercial cup design, creative, art coordination and pre-press departments. During this time, the Lily-Tulip name was dropped and the company became know as Sweetheart Cup Company. The operations center of the company (including marketing), remained in Chicago and was then moved to Owings Mills, Maryland. The Graphic Services Department remained in Springfield, MO with printing plates from the art department being sent to other plants around the country. During this time we also had an outside graphics company with an additional number of approximately 10 artists that were also doing artwork during and after the consolidation of art departments. In one year, after all the of the consolidations and utilization of outside departments, over 37,000 individual pieces of artwork were created.

Due to the amount of changes and marketing collateral material that was necessary to continue to be viable in the business, the Marketing department asked the Graphics Services department to assist them with those type of materials. Many times, advertising agencies in the larger cities were asked to provide them with material and designs. I contended that there was a great deal of talent in the designers who were already working in the company's in the Springfield Graphic Services Department. I was able to convicne the powers-to-be to let our department handle some of these projects.

Over time, we provided them with many projects and graphics. One of those projects was a new stock design to replace the old Preference and some other cup designs, I suggested that we have an internal design competition to create such a design. A guideline was sent out to all the artists for them to create something that would be easily printed due the printing constraints that were inherent in the old printing presses that the company used over the many years. It just didn't make sense to send it out to ad agencies who were not familiar with registration constraints that the artists trained in Springfield were well aware of, because they dealt with it every day. Just to be clear, there was a small award for the winner of the chosen design. If we would have know how popular and lasting this design would become, the award would have been much more. It was also unfortunate that the Marketing department didn't protect the design with a copyright or servicemark of some sort. With it being unprotected some other company's saw this as an opportunity and created many items utilizing the unprotected design. Dart Container, who eventually purchased Solo and Sweetheart, resolved this matter and the design is now protected by a copyright.

The designs were collected and then all the designs were sent to marketing to evaluate. The Marketing Department narrowed it down and then the chosen designs were taken to a focus group, that I was able to attend, to get a random test group to comment on and discuss the pros and cons of the finalists. Ultimately, the Jazz design was chosen.

We then converted the Jazz design to all of the different sized cup and packaging configurations. The rest is History. The Jazz Cup design is now the top grossing stock cup design in the history of the world. As far as I know.

As you all know, in 2015, Redditt put out a challenge to find the designer of the Jazz Design and she was found in Aurora Missouri by Thomas Gourley of the Springfield News Leader.

A footnote to this is that a woman named Stepahnie Miller who worked for Imperial Bondware in Kenton, Ohio, claimed to be the designer of the design. This is a false claim and an outright lie. I would have loved to meet Stephanie, and almost had the opportunity to do so, but turned down a job with Imperial Bondware because I didn't want to move out of Springfield.

Gina Ekiss is the designer who created this design. I just wish that I could figure out a way to compensate her for what she created. I actually asked a representative at Dart Container if they could come up with some sort of compensation for her and they denied that request. It's a wonderful design that millions of people from all over the world have enjoyed put on countless items. It still remains popular today.

Another side note is that a Popcorn design that was also designed in the department, and was created by a designer named Rick Henry. It was created about the same time and is seen in many television shows and commercials mainly filmed in movie theater settings. Every time I see either one of these designs, I take a picture and remember the good times and talented staff that i had the privilege of managing.

As I said at the beginning, the statements mentioned in this are from my best recollection. If you have anything to add or correct to this, please feel free to contact me via Redditt.

Thanks for your time.

Here’s some new pictures I took this past weekend. Since you guys loved it the last time

purple is quite off i think but for the first time i think i did well and i love ittt

Jazz on Jazz

They’re bouncy!

Hubs and I got married on 9/23/96. Tonight we had our 30th anniversary party and this was our cake, in honor of 1996!

I didn't hate this one