Crazy for Cute : Their Tacts Differ, but Anne Geddes and Mary Engelbreit Have the Kid Market Cornered
In the kingdom of the cute, photographer Anne Geddes and artist Mary Engelbreit reign. Geddes’ baby images adorn greeting cards, books, stationery, totes and T-shirts, while Engelbreit’s nostalgic drawings embellish a diverse line of products--mugs and magnets, samplers and stickers, boxes and baby bedding.
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Anne Geddes can’t help but smile. Turning the tables on her, a photographer has brought a big bunch of sunflowers with which to pose her, much as she poses all those elfin babies as everything from cactuses to carrots.
Geddes has plenty of reasons to smile, not least among these the fact that her new $50 coffee table book, “Down in the Garden,” with its cover of a snoozing infant done up as a butterfly, has U.S. sales of 200,000.
For the moment, Geddes’ husband, Kel, holds the heap of sunflowers in his lap. Laughing, she teases him, “You look like a very old bride at her fifth wedding.”
In a Beverly Hills hotel room, a copy of her garden-themed book before her, the New Zealand photographer admits right off to being a charlatan: “I don’t have a garden. I hate gardening.”
Hers are make-believe gardens, where babies sleep in watermelons, sit in flowerpots, peep out from under mushrooms and metamorphose as inchworms.
But her success is very real. Since creating her first calendar in 1992, Anne and Kel--who left a TV network post to manage and market Anne--have launched a veritable baby boom in 50 countries with 16 products from baby books to totes. This year, close to 10 million books, calendars and greeting cards have sold in the U.S.
An Aussie living in Auckland, New Zealand, she decided after seven years of shooting traditional baby portraits that “I’m painting by numbers.” So she set aside a day a week to create. The first payoff: a photo of infant twins sitting in cabbages with cabbage caps.
A style was born.
It’s a style now so familiar that babies as flora and fauna seem almost normal. Recently, waiting in the green room at the “Oprah” show, Geddes cuddled two babies-as-bumblebees. None of the other guests even blinked. “That did concern me a bit,” she says.
Hundreds of proud parents submit pictures, hoping their little ones will decorate the next Geddes creation as a ladybug, bird or pond lily.
Each baby is paid, but pros need not apply. Geddes said thanks, but no thanks, to an agent touting “an experienced 6-month-old.” The butterfly on the cover of her book is a former neighbor’s daughter. As with many Geddes images, her wings are not what they seem. “Very expensive white velvet,” she explains.
For Geddes, 40, baby central is her studio below the apartment where she and Kel, 49, and daughters Stephanie, 12, and Kelly, 10, live. Although she puts babies in pots and buckets and stuffs them into foam carrots and pea pods, Geddes insists: “Everything the babies are doing is really comfortable for them. Newborns love to be wrapped nice and securely.”
Watermelon halves were de-juiced and lined with bubble wrap before the babies went in. For babies posed tummy-down on hard surfaces, “We have hotties,” Geddes says. (That’s Australian for hot water bottles.)
Lilliputian babies perch on giant flowers. But this isn’t “Gulliver’s Travels”; it’s computer imaging. Says Geddes: “People ask, ‘Where do you get those big flowers?’ I say, ‘Oh, they grow them very big down in Australia and New Zealand. You must get down to see them.’ ”
Her flowers are fresh, but her red toadstools are Styrofoam and plaster. The work boots in which newborn twins nap are fool-the-eye custom jobs, size 23. (To put things in perspective, Shaquille O’Neal’s a mere 22.) Babies as peas in pods rest on a carpet of 240 pounds of real peas, later fed to the Auckland Zoo’s elephants.
Why do her calendars and books jump off store shelves? “Maybe I’ve made it OK to love babies,” she suggests. “Everybody’s gotten so uptight about themselves. I think maybe it frees them up a little bit.”
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We reach Mary Engelbreit by phone at the Engeldome, the onetime Greek Orthodox church in suburban St. Louis that houses Mary Engelbreit Studios, shrine of a $90-million-a-year business built on “Breit ideas.”
These include a new bimonthly magazine, Mary Engelbreit’s Home Companion, which debuted in September and already boasts as subscribers more than 30,000 devotees of the artist’s whimsical work, which is heavy on nostalgia and homespun homilies.
Martha Stewart, she isn’t. Engelbreit, wife and mother, says, “If the cooking were up to me, we’d all starve in a really cute room.” She adds: “Our magazine kind of assumes that you aren’t organized and you never will be organized, but you want a nice house anyway. We show quick and easy ways.”
Take crafts, she says (something she herself hasn’t time for): “If you’re going to spend a fortune, you might as well go out and buy the thing.”
In the magazine’s premiere issue, readers tour the house that Engelbreit greeting cards and frames and teapots--350 products in all--built. It’s a recently acquired 1914 Georgian mansion outside St. Louis, where she lives with her husband, Phil Delano, a onetime social worker who’s now her licensing director, and their two teenage sons.
No, the walls aren’t covered with her signature cherries and checkerboards, but it’s very Mary, with her collections and her drawings. And, she swears, no decorator got his hands on it. The Companion shuns “done” houses, perfect palaces barren of family mementos. “Kind of scary,” she says, “like Stepford houses.”
Now in stores is “Mary Engelbreit: The Art and the Artist,” a large-format, $30 book illustrated by you-know-who and chockablock with round-faced, apple-cheeked little girls in sailor blouses, straw hats and the like. Cute, awfully cute. But Engelbreit bristles at being called cute.
“There is kind of an edge to some of the greeting cards,” she says. Just as there’s kind of an edge to Engelbreit. On the flip side of employee business cards is Ann Estelle, the bespectacled icon of Engelbreit’s fantasy family, skirt hitched up, hat pushed back and cigar clenched between her teeth, saying “Cute Is My Game.”
Some dismiss Engelbreit as an artist. After all, she’s self-taught and actually fills in her pen-and-ink sketches with color markers--”I can’t paint.” She shrugs, “I think it’s jealousy.”
Others condemn her portrayal of a syrupy-sweet time that never existed. She admits to dishing up “a little bit of nostalgia and a little bit of wishful thinking and a little bit of hope. I think it’s a good way to feel. The world seems very scary right now. There’s a lot of ugliness.”
She draws largely from memories of her childhood, which was “just kind of perfect. We grew up in a great neighborhood full of kids, with woods and creeks all around us. We built forts and had stores and put on shows. I think everybody likes to feel they could have this warm, comfortable life. We do very well everywhere but Manhattan. Apparently they’re very happy the way they are in Manhattan.”
As a child, Engelbreit doted on the Saturday Evening Post covers with their Norman Rockwell slices-of-life. From her mother’s and grandmother’s books, she would copy the cherry and checkerboard themes popular in the ‘20s and ‘30s.
“The drawing part is what I love to do,” she says, but she also runs an empire that includes seven retail stores from St. Louis to Denver, with 13 more planned, including one in Los Angeles.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Engelbreit should feel very flattered. Copycats have proliferated to the point, she says, where “we have an attorney who does nothing but stop them.”
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So what’s it all about, this cute craze?
“There’s something appealing, particularly to women, about the ability to show some sort of vulnerability and be safe at the same time,” says Renee Florsheim, associate professor of marketing at Loyola Marymount University. “Ordinarily, it either costs us our jobs or our safety. These are innocent kinds of things that allow us to open up a little bit, show we do like cute, without somebody taking advantage of it.”
She points, too, to a yearning for the security of childhood, a time of perceived innocence and simplicity, for the well-ordered households of our homemaker mothers and for the days when there was an order to life--”Babies could be expected to be cute and small children could expect to have their lives ordered in some way.”
Finally, she says, “You don’t lose anything by participating. . . . Most of this is stuff you would share only with people you would trust. I don’t think you would send something like this to your boss.”
