By Laura Stagliola, Administrative Assistant
November 13, 2014
The period between 1860 and 1870 in the history of the Dennison Mfg. Co. was defined by the tag. The jewelry box business was steadily progressing and E.W. was expanding the number of sales offices and production size at a fast pace. E.W. patented the idea of reinforcing the hole in the tag with a paper washer on each side on June 9, 1863. The sales of tags for the first year were about ten million.
Much like Aaron Dennison found that jewelry boxes in the 1800s were not reliable products, E.W. felt that imported tags from Europe were of inferior quality, and sought to change that. The world of advertising frequently used tags, but E.W. had to create a market for small jewelry tags of uniform size with a professional appearance. Businesses took some convincing but E.W. was able to harness and create with a tag machine. Now that jewelry tags had been introduced, Dennison’s newest invention focused on shipping tags, also known as direction labels.
While shipping tags had been used well before the 1860s, the Civil War posed an overwhelming demand for cheap, durable tags unlike the expensive linen tags in Europe. After E.W.’s merchandise tag designer created the gummed washer to support the hole in 1863, his first shipping tag machine put out “about 15,000 tags a day and delivered 10 million tags to the marketplace in the first year.” Buyers quickly took to the new shipping and the need for tags increased steadily throughout the 1860s into the 1870s.
