Margarete Steiff was born in 1847 in Giengen-on-the-Brenz in southern Germany. At the age of two, she was struck by polio. Because she was chair-bound she chose the only thing open to her – dressmaking. She opened a small shop on the ground floor of her family cottage in Lederstrasse.
In between customers and orders, she spent plenty of time entertaining children, as she was barren.
Children began to go to her for more stories. She also started making soft toys to make her stories more interesting. She took the scraps from her sewing and fashioned them into elephants and horses. Perhaps she even made the world’s first soft toys!
She had stumbled on a new industry. More and more demand for her soft toys poured in and she began to get more helpers. Soon even foreign orders came in.
By 1893, she had a catalogue made. In the same year, she had a booth at the great Leipzig Fair.
In 1903, she got an idea from her nephew Richard to make a fuzzy brown mohair bear. The completed animal had black shoe-button eyes and a long pointed snout.
On the last day of the Leipzig fair, an American buyer asked the Steiffs if they had a new product. Without much conviction they pulled the bear out of its box. The American ordered 3,000. Bear had arrived in America.
In 1906, US President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt was giving a party in the White House and wanted a novel table decoration.
It was said that he saw a bear in a toy shop and as Roosevelt was a bear hunter, he thought that it was a perfect piece for his table.
It was indeed a great decoration because when someone asked the President for the name of the toy, he said, “Teddy Bear”. So after three years of waiting, the toy had a name.
By 1907, more than a million were produced in the little factory. Giengen became teddy bear town, which today has several places of interest including a museum dedicated to Margarete Steiff and her legacy.
When Steiff died in 1909, she knew that she had invented a toy cherished above all others. And above all, teddy bears are the greatest and most durable success story in toy history.
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