Marking Time : Although cheesecake and beefcake and cute cats and dogs still do well, today’s hot calendars offer a more personalized statement.
Let’s get personal.
Personal about calendars, that is. In these post do-your-own-thing days, even the humble calendar is being called on to, well, make a statement. A fashion statement, say, or a political statement. Even a cheesecake statement.
“Today’s attitude about calendars seems to be that if I have to look at a calendar all the time, I might as well enjoy it. Everybody is developing more personalized taste,” says Sherry Timbrook, a spokeswoman for calendar titan Hallmark Cards. Hallmark, for example, is offering 166 different calendars this year--three times the number it produced a mere 10 years ago. Marketwide, there are nearly 4,000 choices available.
Indeed, variety is enabling manufacturers to push the limits of this growing market. Last year, Americans spent a tidy $9 billion on calendars--about $2 billion more than the year before, says Maria Tuthill, executive director of the fledgling Calendar Marketing Assn. in Libertyville, Ill. That pays the tab for more than 500 million calendars a year, she says. (There is some disagreement in the industry over numbers, however, partly because the trade association is so new, Tuthill says. Hallmark sets the industrywide total at only $1 billion.)
Put another way, 98% of all U.S. households mark time by at least one calendar, and the “average household”--so deemed by Hallmark--has five or six calendars. Three are inside the home, two in a purse or wallet and one at the office.
So if time has that unnerving habit of marching on, then one can at least look at cute cats calendars while it does so. Or at dog calendars. Or fishing calendars. Christian calendars. Peanuts calendars. Andy Warhol calendars. Balloon calendars. More cat calendars. More Peanuts calendars. Baseball calendars. Elvis calendars. Wildlife calendars. Cowboy calendars. More Elvis calendars. Suggestive senior citizen calendars.
Suggestive senior citizen calendars?
“I began noticing on television that all the ads geared toward seniors are unflattering--they’re for things like hemorrhoids and death insurance,” says Max Wegenbauer, a Visalia disc jockey who is setting the record straight with his second edition of the Sensational Seniors calendar. Wegenbauer’s direct-mail venture features leggy ladies ages 51 to 76. “I try to put in glamour and glitz. I think seniors are positive, upbeat, vibrant, passionate, alive.”
Not to mention timely. For this happens to be the era of the make-your-own politically correct calendar, particularly in California.
In Berkeley, photographer-writer B.N. Duncan and cartoonist-journalist Ace Backwards are hawking a calendar of homeless people. The six-buck-a-pop calendar features street star Cinnamon Catano for January. And it includes a manifesto of sorts by Duncan, who is himself pictured with the Hate Man of Berkeley: “Whatever their flaws, the persons in this calendar live the principle of ‘To thine own self be true’ more than do many people. . . . “
The same might be said of the stars of the Asian Pacific Islander Men 1991 Calendar, a black-and-white newcomer to the market produced by Antonio De Castro, an Asian-American studies lecturer at San Francisco State University. De Castro’s beefcake calendar features six men of various nationalities variously suited up at their desks or studios and then oiled down in Speedos and other skimpy wear.
But don’t think Mr. April is just another pretty face. De Castro, a Filipino himself, says he plowed almost $10,000 into producing 3,000 calendars of muscly Asian men because “that aspect of their personality has been missing from any kind of media presentation, whether it’s commercials or movies or magazines.”
While alluring newcomers are elbowing their way into the market, some cheesecake classics continue to hold their own. Sports Illustrated, for one, sold 800,000 swimsuit calendars last year, which the magazine delicately credits to the product’s “aura.” But that’s not necessarily true across the board, according to Jeanette Anderson, manager of Waldenbooks in the Glendale Galleria, who notes: “The hunks and babes didn’t do as well as they usually do.”
Of course, the hunks and babes can get some of their fans into trouble. The police chief of Scotchtown, N.Y., recently incurred the displeasure of local human rights officials for posting “sexually suggestive” calendars in his office. The chief, John Hansen, is grappling with charges of sexual discrimination by two female police officers.
What really sells in the calendar market is humor, and the top seller is Gary Larsen’s eccentric “Off The Wall” desk calendar, according to the Calendar Marketing Assn. Larsen’s Far Side calendars have held that lucrative spot for the past four years, selling more than 2.2 million in 1989 alone.
“Humor especially has grown tremendously,” says Anderson. “I think people just want to start out the day with a good laugh.”
Other sentimental favorites are Impressionist calendars because “it’s very easy art to live with,” says Marlene Kristoff, general manager of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art shops. For the less aesthetically inclined, there are animal calendars--twice as many cats as dogs, according to Waldenbooks’ Anderson. And there’s the ever-popular scenic wonders genre.
Such calendar war horses tend to tromp among the freebies given out by businesses. But not all shirk inspiration. Panda Inns and Panda Expresses, for example, produces its own elegant Chinese food calendar with misty photographs and cultural snippets on such topics as Confucius and Peking Opera. Panda restaurants take advantage of calendars’ year-long stick-to-itiveness to reward its customers and retool people’s thinking about Chinese culture.
“It would be a lot more expensive to embark on a major educational effort through radio and TV,” says William Yu, Panda’s director of operations support.
Some calendars love to educate painlessly. The 1991 World Calendar put out by the World Future Society in Bethesda, Md., lists holidays all over the globe, spiffing up many days Americans ignore. Oct. 2 is particularly big in India, where it’s celebrated as Mohandas K. Gandhi’s birthday. Oct. 3 is National Foundation Day in South Korea.
On a practical note, there is the Shift Worker Family Calendar published by Sales Development Associates in Wellesley, Mass. That calendar is designed for families who keep different work schedules. It comes with stickers color-coded by time of day, so that a father on the night shift can let his family know where he is by attaching night stickers to the appropriate days.
And if all this isn’t personalized enough for you, why not take advantage of high calendar technology and order your own laser-printed timekeeper? Artistic Greetings of Elmira, N.Y., will print your birthday and up to 49 other special events on a wall calendar for a mere $9.95.
That’s about par for a wall or desk calendar, these days. (Elaborate art calendars can command up to $50.) But if you rush out to your local card, department or bookstore, you can probably get a calendar on sale. This may seem like a new year to you, but calendar manufacturers are on to the next thing.
“The publishers are done with ’92 calendars,” says Tuthill. “They’re being printed and bound, and they’re already working on ’93.”
CALENDAR TRIVIA
* The earliest-known calendar was a lunar calendar invented by the ancient Egyptians. It had 12 months of 30 days each.
* The Babylonians are believed to have been the first to observe a seven-day week.
* The word calendar comes from the Latin calendarium, meaning “interest register” or “account book.”
* The names of days and months were inspired by celestial bodies and mythology.
* Jan. 1 wasn’t standardized as New Year’s Day until the 10th Century.
* Iowa is the nation’s capital of calendar manufacturing.
* One-third of all calendars are given as gifts. There is at least one calendar in 98% of U.S. households.
* Working mothers buy the most calendars, according to Hallmark Cards.
