Will the motivational merch industry survive the downturn?

When "work incentive" posters began appearing in the mid-'20s, many Americans evidently suffered from an excess of modesty. "Strut your stuff!" urged one of the popular lithographs produced by Chicago's Mather & Co., an innovator in the motivational products sector. Urged another: "You've got the goods—step out and show 'em!"

Mather & Co. enjoyed a brisk business selling its cheery plugs for hard work and emotional discipline but stopped production in late 1929. Slogans like "Worry Bags No Game" and "RESULTS TALK" didn't sound so uplifting after the Wall Street crash. Small surprise, then, that Successories, today's market leader in inspirational wall art and employee-reward trinkets, is currently advertising a sale.

Successories is banking that $100 off every order over $500 will stem their evident troubles. Founded in 1985 by Chairman Emeritus Arnold "Mac" Anderson and once a ubiquitous presence in mall kiosks across America, Successories has seen its number of bricks-and-mortar retail outlets dwindle from 36 to four. According to Hoover's, Successories boasted 100 employees in 2007 and does about $10 million in sales a year; both of those figures would be about a fifth of what they were 10 years ago. The company traded publicly from 1990 to 2003, when it was taken private by a company controlled by current CEO Jack Miller.

That corporate history might be adding a new, grimmer chapter. And when I called the Aurora, Ill., headquarters last week, Marge, the receptionist, sounded chastened and suggested that tempers were short around the office because the company had very recently been bought out. Who had acquired them? No staffers were told, she said. "We're always the last to know." The troubling lack of transparency aside, Successories stakeholders must have a more pressing question in mind: Can a product line that celebrates devotion to the job survive this slump?

Melissa in the marketing department curtly informed me that no one at Aurora wished to speak about their strategy for weathering the economic downturn. ("Thank you, though.") Marge offered to connect me to the CFO, who didn't return my call.

A staffer at Successories' Gainesville, Fla., store location—who also had "no clue" as to whom the new owner might be—answered the question without hesitation. "The downturn, or whatever you want to call it, sure, it's affected our business a lot." He blamed the fact that the customer base was mainly not the man or woman wandering in, cup of Starbucks in hand, but corporations and institutions. "And when companies aren't doing well, they don't have much to spend on products like this." Never mind, he added in remarkable deadpan, that there are fewer employees in the United States now than there were a few years ago.