Helping ‘tween years last longer
It was a dilemma faced by parents of many ‘tween-age girls. Addie Swartz’s daughter, Aliza, was moving out of dollhouses and into -- if she had her way -- a penthouse. She was surrounded by little girls flashing their navels and asking for pedicures. They had crushes on boys, they were planning careers in Hollywood -- and, like Aliza, they were 8 years old.
“I saw my child being bombarded with stuff that I thought was totally inappropriate,” Swartz said. “The messages that were out there for Aliza and her friends were overly sexual and demeaning. So as a businesswoman and as a mother, I decided to do something.”
Swartz the entrepreneur scheduled a long, thoughtful meeting with Swartz the mom. The 45-year-old graduate of Stanford and Northwestern’s Kellogg business school began her business life at 12 with a home-baked apple pie enterprise. It was so successful that her father called a halt because she had taken over the ovens.
Swartz blazed through top jobs at Disney, General Foods, Rockport and Lotus. She was on maternity leave from Lotus in 1991 when she went out on her own, marshaling other mothers to sell kiddie software at in-home parties modeled after Tupperware.
She was holding software parties in 33 states when she sold out to a conglomerate, making a killing moments before software piracy was about to make her idea obsolete.
“So what did I decide to do?” asked Swartz, who often talks about herself as if she were describing someone else, and frequently lets business lingo slip into her conversation.
“I decided to create a brand that would keep girls a little younger, a little longer,” she said.
Swartz reasoned that she was not the only parent worried about the rubbery line between little-girlhood and young adulthood. She also discovered that the 10 million 8- to 13-year-old girls in this country represent a market estimated to be worth more than $40 billion annually.
Swartz said she developed B*Tween Productions with a mission to “create subliminal messages for girls that are good.” She decided to pair books for young girls with products such as jewelry and journals.
Developing books
Her fast-growing series of Beacon Street Girls books and merchandise was unabashedly inspired by the vast success of the American Girls line of historical fiction and products that has captivated many younger girls for close to 20 years. Swartz had spent hours reading American Girls books with Aliza, and on a foray with her daughter to an American Girls retail store in Chicago, spent $600 in three hours.
Using her most strategic style of chief executive thinking, Swartz spent three years developing a plot line focusing on five girls in Brookline, a “semi-urban” community near Boston. She assembled a management group that included a former executive from Hasbro, a media specialist, an illustrator and several experienced writers who were willing to work together under the pseudonym of Annie Bryant.
She consulted experts and pored through studies on how to strengthen girls’ self-confidence, build resilience and encourage responsible behavior. Then she held 30 focus groups around the East Coast, dividing them into sessions for girls 8 to 10 and girls 11 and 12.
“The essence of the kids who were 8 to 10 was so different. I wanted to understand it,” Swartz said. She found that these girls, while inundated with overly sexual media messages, still voiced dreams and a sense of innocent vulnerability. And they were eager readers.
By contrast, Swartz said the older girls she interviewed had bought into the too-fast society around them. Most would not admit to reading for pleasure, Swartz said. That discovery made her all the more determined to develop books that would appeal to the older group as well.
Along with her advisors -- who grew to include 400 girls in 34 states and five countries -- Swartz wanted books that would engage girls by meeting them on their own literary terms.
In the first four Beacon Street Girls titles -- a fifth comes out this summer -- entire sections are written in the instant-message format familiar to computer-tethered American kids. Other passages are written as diary entries.
‘A character for everyone’
The five central girl characters have adventures, as well as arguments and angst. The stories borrow from current events, such as the Boston Red Sox 2004 World Series victory, and incorporate real-life characters, including the nonagenarian owner of a card store in the real Brookline who acts as a surrogate grandma to many of the town’s ‘tween girls.
Haley Sonenthal, who has just finished sixth grade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, said the believability of the characters was what prompted her to start the country’s first mother-daughter book club devoted exclusively to the Beacon Street Girls.
“I just feel like there’s a character for everyone, like everyone can relate to someone,” said Haley, 12.
She said one of her favorite Beacon Street Girls is Maeve Kaplan-Taylor, whose parents own a movie theater and who organizes blanket drives for the homeless. Maeve is dyslexic, a quality Haley said enhances her appeal.
Haley also likes Katani Summers, the African American granddaughter of the school principal. Katani has an autistic older sister as well as a powerful fashion sense.
“Really, I like them all,” said Haley, who owns a Beacon Street Girls shoulder bag, along with several pins. “The girls are all so different, but they are good friends, so everyone can relate to that -- how they work out their problems and stay close friends.”
Product placement?
Boston psychologist Susan Linn said she admires the Beacon Street Girls concept -- with reservations. Linn, author of a book called “Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood” and a contributor to the Daughters Community Forum website, said Swartz went too far when she packaged the books with merchandise that has expanded to include makeup cases, floor pillows, backpacks and locker-decorating kits.
“I have not read all of the books, but I like the ones that I have read. I think they are reasonably well-written,” said Linn. “But I am troubled by the products -- the jewelry and all that stuff. I think it promotes, along with just about everything else, the notion that books in and of themselves are not good enough. The Beacon Street Girls are not just books. They are a whole industry. The message is that reading is not enough, and that message is flawed.”
But Swartz defends her products as a way to “break through the clutter” of conventional book merchandising. By selling Beacon Street Girls trinkets and other objects, Swartz said she gets her brand name into gift shops as well as bookstores.
“The idea was always to create a world that went beyond the books,” Swartz said.
She conceded that her objective also was to make a profit for herself and for investors who put in about $2.3 million to back the project. About 75,000 Beacon Street Girls books have been sold since the series began early last year, Swartz said.
But she maintained that overriding her financial interests was her own experience as a mother.
“My whole mission,” she said, “is to make a difference for girls.”
