Jordan Motor Car Company

The company's advertising was often more original than the cars themselves; said Jordan, "Cars are too dull and drab." He reasoned that since people dressed smartly, they were willing to drive "smart looking cars" as well.

• Name — Jordan Motor Car Company, Inc. • Trade Name — Jordan Motor Car Company • Type — Corporation • Industry — Automotive • Predecessor — *Jordan Motor Car Company (1916-1919) • Jordan Motor Car Company, Inc. (1919-1931) • Founder — Edward S. Jordan • Hq Location City — Cleveland, Ohio • Products — Automobiles • Hq Location Country — United States

Jordan Motor Car established its plant east of downtown Cleveland at 1070 East 152nd Street in the Collinwood neighborhood along the Nickel Plate Railroad tracks. This not only provided an ideal location for shipping the finished cars but also provided Jordan with ready access to out-of-area suppliers. The plant was built in two stages: the first 30000 sqft building was begun on April 5, 1916 and finished some seven weeks later, while the second addition was completed within months of the first structure. In their first year of production (1916), Jordan sold over one thousand vehicles.

Jordan was also one of the first automakers to christen its model types with unique, evocative names, such as the Sport Marine (with "fashionably low" 32×4-inch {81×10 cm} wheels, it was "essentially a woman's car"), Tomboy, and Playboy. He originally wanted to name the car with the World War I term "Doughboy," but decided on the common-sensical-but-provocative Playboy instead. In 1920, the company issued the Friendly Three coupe, with the slogan "Seats two, three if they're friendly". Jordan used the suburbs of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights as backdrops for his advertising photographs, setting the cars in front of the mansions of Overlook and South Park Drives. Appearing in the June, 1923 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, the ad promoted the Jordan Playboy in art by Fred Cole, driven by a cloche hat wearing flapper hunkered down behind the wheel in abstract fashion, racing a cowboy and the clouds. • Illustration — "Somewhere West of Laramie" advertisement for the Jordan Playboy: While other Jordan ads contained the same winsome prose, one in particular had an unseen outcome: Jordan's "Port of Missing Men", which also appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (1920), featured Jordan's musings on restless men and those places where they travel to when they needed to get away. The ad featured art work showing a Jordan Playboy in front of a cottage in winter by the sea, with a young boy walking by, looking up to the second story window aglow red from within. Jordan wrote to the editor of the Post: We regret that our recent advertisement has offended your high moral sense... perhaps had we placed lights in the downstairs windows as well, the suggestive implications would have been minimized.

• Illustration — Another view of a 1928 Jordan Sedan, prior to restoration work In 1927, the firm introduced its only significant misstep: the Little Custom, a luxury compact. Not only did consumers ignore the car but its financial drain on the company was a leading factor in the takeover by bankers of JMC, leaving Ned Jordan as the company’s titular head. Both Jordan and his wife began divesting their interests in the company in 1928. The company survived the stock market crash of 1929, but with intense competition among the many US automakers then extant, and personal problems besetting Ned Jordan, the company ceased production in 1931. The true total production of Jordan cars is unclear; some sources list the total amount as high as over 100,000 units, while other sources list the production as low as 30,000. Annual production of the Jordan is indicated below (sourced from "The Standard Catalog of American Cars 1805-1932, 3rd edition): • Year — Units • 1917 — 1,788 • 1918 — 5,713 • 1919 — 3,218 • 1920 — 7,817 • 1921 — 8,913 • 1922 — 4,167 • 1923 — 6,691 • 1924 — 6,159 • 1925 — 6,531 • 1926 — 8,469 • 1927 — 6,357 • 1928 — 7,386 • 1929 — 4,323 • 1930 — 985 • 1931 — 263 • Total — 78,780