Fit to Be Tied

For many a foot-weary U.S. Christmas shopper, much of the fun begins at home in disguising--and glamorizing--the surprises. Gift wrappings worth some $150 million will be bought to sheathe Christmas presents this year. Never has the U.S. family (which last Yuletide spent an average $3.17 on wrappings) had a wider choice in tissue and bows, from the plainest papers at 25 tissue sheets for 25-c- to the fanciest at $1 a sheet. All this spending for wrapping will provide a fine Christmas present for Chicago Printed String Co. With a multicolored array of 185 different kinds of paper and some 3,000 varieties and sizes of ribbon, it claims to be the biggest in the fast-growing industry. "When you're sophisticated," explains Chicago Printed String President Sol Weiner, "you can wrap a gift in a newspaper. But if you haven't arrived yet, you keep up with the Joneses."

Palm Tree Christmas. Keeping up with the wrapping tastes of the Joneses, Chicago Printed String has found, depends on where the Joneses live. Southerners, who know few white Christmases, have no use for papers depicting snow scenes and jolly snowmen. Floridians like palm trees on their packages; New Englanders will not buy anything with birds on it (Chicago Printed String has never figured out why).

The most elaborate wrapping is done on the West Coast and in Texas cities.

Broadway plays often start wrapping fads. The King and I roused interest in wrappings with an Oriental motif. My Fair Lady brought Victorian wrappings out of designers' files. The company hopes to pick up something from Camelot.

Machine-Tied Bows. The Chicago Printed String Co. was founded by a Czech family who came to the U.S. in 1912 with a process for printing names on tape for labels and industrial tagging. The company developed its own tape machines, began experimenting with decorative tapes. It jumped into the wrappings business in 1927 with Ribbonette, a fast-selling cotton ribbon that curled easily when drawn over a sharp edge. In 1939 it began sending its "Tie-Tie" girls to department stores to conduct gift wrapping schools. After World War II, sales began to boom, will reach an estimated $15 million in gift wrapping sales this year. With the shift to department-store wrapping for the customer, the company this year began leasing machines to stores that mass-produce jewel-shaped bows. For next year it has perfected a machine that will tie sunburst bows.

Though the fastest-growing part of its business is industrial (e.g., nearly every package of Life Savers sold has a 5-in. Chicago Printed String tear-open tape), the company is developing new wrappings to titillate the giver. Sometimes they miss: last year a fancy line called "Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh" hardly sold at all. This year the company put on sale the first laminated plastic wrappers. Sandwiched between the two-ply plastic films are pressed feathers, leaves, glittering sequins and colored confetti. A single sheet, 20 in. by 26 in., costs $1. Chicago Printed String was astonished when not only the Joneses but the people the Joneses keep up with snapped them up. By last week sales were over $200,000.

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