In 1934 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt got into the act; the avid stamp collector sketched a design for a Commemorative Mother's Day Stamp based on the famous " Whistler's Mother" portrait.
As luck would have it, another German man was on the same bus. Herman Sieger was a stamp collector and dealer, who turned out to be from the same region in Germany as Eiermann.
But there was also an incentive for the post office to design stamps that were new and novel because along with the first stamps came the first stamp collectors, and they presented a unique value to the Postal Service.