These 3 valentines created by Esther Howland are part of the Metropolitan Museum's collection. The lace-adorned cards originally cost from 15 cents to 35 cents
reporter as not only the “pioneer maker of valentines” but also as a “monopolist.”
Those cards gave Esther an idea. Why not make similar-looking ones that aped the style of the British products? She would, in modern business parlance, go upmarket, selling cards for as much as 75 cents, an outrageous luxury at a time when the average American worker made less than a dollar a day . In 1849, she created a few prototypes and cajoled her brother to hawk them in New York and Boston for her. In short order, she had orders worth a few thousand dollars.
The Sumner Street house in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Esther Howland began the New England Valentine Co. Each of the young women she employed in her third-floor workroom worked like an assembly line, each assigned a specific task.
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