For three generations, the craftsmanship of West Germany's toymaking Steiff family has delighted children the world over. As the town's biggest employer, the family has also endeared itself to the burghers of Giengen (pop. 14,000), a community of cobblestone streets and gingerbread houses that has nestled for the past 900 years in the wooded foothills of the Swabian Alps. Although it seems an anomaly in such a storybook setting, the bronze bust of Theodore Roosevelt in the lobby of Giengen's town hall is there for good reason: the Steiff company is best known for its line of Teddy bears, a product that takes its name from the U.S.'s 26th President.
"The Teddy bear," says Hans-Otto Steiff, 48, who has headed the business for the past 18 years, "has always been our most popular toy." Still, it is only one of a menagerie of 250 different stuffed animals running the gamut from A (alligators) to Z (zebras). Visiting toyshops and department stores in the U.S. last week, Steiff was taking orders for everything from a thumb-sized ladybug made of clipped wool (60¢) to an 8½-ft.-tall giraffe covered in mohair plush ($500). The company's 2,100 workers also turn out life-sized gorillas, kangaroos and buffaloes. Total production amounts to 3,500,000 individual animals a year, and all are handmade.
The company's painstaking approach to toymaking began in 1880 in the Giengen dressmaking shop of Margarete Steiff, Hans-Otto's great-aunt. Partially paralyzed by polio since childhood, Margarete happened on the idea of fashioning toy elephants from scraps of felt and cloth for use as pincushions. They proved so popular with friends that Margarete soon gave up dressmaking, began turning out other stuffed animals with the help of relatives. When several Steiff-made bears wound up as table decorations at the 1906 White House wedding of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy's daughter, the resulting publicity made the German company bullish on bears; the following year it sold 974,000 cuddly Teddy bears in the U.S.
Lifelike & Lovable. The Teddy-bear craze soon diminished, and Steiff, buffeted by economic upheavals and two world wars, had to diversify to stay afloat. Over the years, Margarete Steiffs family (she died in 1909) gradually expanded its facilities to manufacture other toys, including kites, wagons, wooden scooters and construction games. It also went into production of valves for pneumatic tires and fiber glass. Today the various family-owned enterprises are small but unmistakably healthy, with sales totaling some $14 million a year.
Stuffed animals, while accounting for no more than half of that figure, remain the firm's obvious pride and joy. At Steiff's toymaking factories each animal is stitched and stuffed with care. Material for coats is selected to simulate real fur. In sewing on eyes and mouths, skilled workers take pains to ensure that each animal wears a distinctive expression. Some animals are equipped with voice boxes that enable lions to roar, bears to growl and donkeys to bray; many have movable heads and limbs. The continuing purpose is to make them lovable as well as lifelike. "We never model them after the full-grown animal," explains Hans-Otto Steiff, "but always after the young, slightly ungraceful ones."