Meet… Margarete and Richard Steiff
There’s no children’s toy quite as iconic as the teddy bear, but did you know who first created them?
It’s 1907 and the globe has gone wild for stuffed bear toys with moving joints and plush mohair fur. A silent film, ‘The Teddy Bears’ is brought out in the United States. American composer John Walter Bratton has just penned ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ and Edison Cylinder records a song called ‘Will You Be My Teddy Bear?’ I can find endless examples of sheet music from the time, with titles such as ‘Dance of the Teddy Bears’ and ‘Teddy Bear Waltz.’ It’s clear that the teddy bear and its cuddly, loving, delightful connotations have struck a chord with just about everybody.
Meanwhile over in Germany, nearly a million of these soft anthropomorphous plushies in the previous five years by a Giengen an der Brenz company called Steiff, which has a remarkable and seemingly unlikely founder at its helm.
Appolonia Margarete Steiff (known as Margarete or Gretle) was born in 1847 in the German town of Giengen an der Brenz. At just 18 months old her ordinary life changed course completely as she contracted polio, leaving the young Margarete with two paralyzed legs and a right arm riddled with pain.
As her parents were understandably desperate to find a cure to help Margarete walk again, they would try treatment after treatment throughout her childhood, enlisting the help of various doctors along the way. Although none of these worked, Maragrate had a happy childhood surrounded by extended family, who doted on her and did everything to make her life easier.
In every house that Margarete lived or stayed in she was given a seat by the windows with the best views. She often visited her grandparents, where her grandad spoiled Maragaret with coffee and pastries, while her grandmother entertained her with stories while making monogrammed stockings for extra cash.
It must have eventually dawned on Margarete that she would have to spend her life in a wheelchair and be reliant on the care of others. In her childhood diaries Margarete asked herself “Who am I? How should I tackle life’s problems? What will become of me?”
In a biography of Margarete Steiff, the author Gabriele Katz writes that “there were no toys for the children of the Steiff family. It was a rarity and reserved for much wealthier classes.” In fact, playing wasn’t considered a priority for children at the time since they had to help their families to work and earn. Any opportunity for playing would have been relished by the local children.
Margarete too joined in as much as she could, with younger children gathering around her wheelchair as she made up games and activities for them. She was so good at this that Margarete was often trusted to take care of two or three children at a time, entertaining them with fairy tales just as her grandmother had done with her.
Watching her friends running around, often going off to play chase or pick flowers, Margarette must have been acutely aware that she risked being left behind in all senses of the word, and this knowledge may have been the catalyst for the resolution she showed to remain a useful part of her community.
As was common in her community at the time, Margarete helped to provide income for her family, making crocheted handicrafts to both sell and give as gifts to friends. She would later choose to train as a seamstress, completing her lessons when she was 17 years old.
She would later say, “There’s no point in whining about your legs all the time when life is running away from you.”
Ever entrepreneurial, Margarete’s sewing skills allowed her to start her own business making clothing in 1877. Employing an increasing number of local seamstresses, Margarete continued to experiment with creating all kinds of different items. In 1880 Margarete hit upon a novel idea when she used a puncushion pattern in a magazine to create a felt-covered, stuffed elephant, which she gave to the local children as gifts.
The elephants were an instant hit and Margarete Steiff had found her calling! Soon she started a company producing all sorts of stuffed animal toys, including rabbits, monkeys, giraffes and dogs.
As these proved to be incredibly popular, Margarete was able to expand her range and gradually hire more people to join her venture. By 1893, the company had grown to employ over a dozen people and was selling its wares in Harrods, London.
When Margarete’s talented nephew Richard Steiff joined the company in 1897, he must have been unaware just how instrumental he would become in influencing the fortunes of his aunt’s toy manufacturing business.
Richard Steiff was so great at drawing animals that his sketches were often used during the company’s design process, and the teddy bear was no different. Using his drawings of a bear at Nill Tiergarten, a popular zoo of the time in Stuttgart, Richard came up with the concept of ‘Bear 55 PB,’ a stuffed bear with moveable limbs and soft fur in 1902.
The bears were shown at the Leipzig Toy Fair the very next year, where an American buyer ordered 3,000 of the soft toys to be distributed in the US. What exactly prompted the teddy bear moniker is difficult to say, as various legends about its origins abound. One of the most popular stories points to a famous 1902 incident with Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt in which he refused to shoot an old bear during a hunting trip. This got turned into a newspaper cartoon, which in turn inspired Morris Michton, a toy shop owner to put two stuffed bears (made by his wife) in his window with a sign saying ‘Teddy’s Bears.’
While we don’t know which teddies came on the market first, we do know that the Steiff company grew enormously over the next few years. In 1907, at the height of the teddy bear boom, the company boasted 400 employees and 1,800 homeworkers. What started out as a small, one-woman venture had swelled to become a globally recognised company.
Sadly, just a few years later in 1909, Margarete died from pneumonia aged 61. Fortunately she witnessed the teddy bear boom and the company’s success first-hand. While the reasons for her success are manyfold, I wonder if it’s possible that one of the reasons that Margarete has been so successful at creating toys for children is that her childhood was taken away from her? Throughout her life she showed great empathy for kids, coining phrases like “only the best is good enough for children.”
While in Germany, Margarete and Richard Steiff are hailed as inspirations, their story is not well known outside of their own country. In the course of my research I scoured the net to find that at least 10 biographies of Maragrete Steiff had been written in German and just one in English (published 30 years ago). As someone living with a lifelong disability who managed to create such a well-known global brand, Margarete’s story should be known beyond the German borders. After all, it’s likely that most of us have owned a teddy bear in our childhood so perhaps we should know where this most iconic of toys has come from!
To find out more about Steiff, visit their website.
Thanks for reading Culture Stories! Are there any forgotten figures you’d like to see featured next? Let me know in the Comments section below. I’d love to know.
Sources:
Margarete Steiff: Die Biografie (German edition) by Gabriele Katz
Margarete Steiff: Teddybären und Kinderträume by Kristina Lüding
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