Teddy Bears

The Teddy Bear started his famous life over a hundred years ago.  He was born in 1902 in a small town called Giengen (which is close to Stuttgart) in Germany.  He was the invention of Richard Steiff, one of Margarete Steiff's nephews.

Richard Steiff worked for his Aunt at the Steiff Company, along with his brothers, Ernst, Otto, Franz and Paul.  Richard was the company's designer and it was also his job to develop new items to sell.  For a long time Richard had the idea of producing a soft toy bear that children could hug.  He spent many hours researching his idea at the Stuttgart Zoo, where he did loads of sketches of the bears there.  Richard Steiff designed a number of toy bears, one idea was a bear who was positioned on a set of cast-iron wheels.  These bears were produced to help children walk and also small children could actually sit upon their backs and ride upon them.  However, this bear could still not be held and cuddled.

He produced a number of bears that stood upright on their hind legs, but by no means were these bears cuddly, infact they were very tightly stuffed with woodwool and so they were extremely hard to the touch, once again they could not be hugged and cuddled.

In 1902, however, Richard designed a series of string-jointed animals - including a bear.  When Margarete Steiff first saw the prototype of the bear, she was not very impressed.  However, Richard was even more determined to make a sample bear that would sufficiently impress his Aunt.  Hence, the Bar 55PB was born [55 cms tall and made of Plusch (Plush) and was Beweglich (movable)].  This first bear still resembled the 'real' bear in that he had a long and very pointed muzzle, a hump on his back and a short body with long limbs (the early Steiff Teddy Bear was made to resemble the real bear when he was standing on all fours).  The first Teddy Bears also had a nose which was made of a sealing wax.  So, the 55 PB Bar was the first teddy bear and he was ready to face the world, his first public debut being at the Leipzig Toy Fair in March 1903.

With the popularity of the teddy bear being what it is today it is very difficult for us to believe that at this toy fair he was not at all popular, infact he was even termed as a 'stuffed misfit'.  To think, this could have been the end of the teddy bear. 

The Steiff brothers had started to pack up the teddy bear samples as it was the end of the show and there was absolutely no interest in him at all, then oddly enough out of the blue came Herman Berg, the chief buyer for the toy department of a New York wholesaler (George Borgfeldt & Co).  Berg had been searching the toy fair for something which was a bit 'different' and luckily he just caught sight of the Steiff Teddy Bears before they were packed away.  It was lucky for Teddy Bear lovers everywhere he could see the bear's potential and placed an order for 3,000 of these bears.

The Teddy Bear craze now began.............

The teddy bear very quickly began to grow in popularity throughout the western world and very soon the teddy bear was being produced by soft toy companies in both Britain and the United States.  The teddy bear had indeed started his journey into hundreds of hearts.

At www.ginosbears.co.uk we love the history of the teddy bear and we love the many stories told to us by lovers of the teddy bear.  It is because of our special love of the teddy bear that we specialise in supplying old, antique and collectible teddy bears to other lovers of the teddy bear.  We also supply some rather unusual teddy bear ephemera too, some of which are rather quirky such as the lovely Elsie Bear Brooches and the Champagne Charlie Bears, not to mention some old books and postcards, etc.

If you too love old teddy bears with history or teddy bears with provenance or if you are a collector of unusal teddy bear ephemera then take a look at our website at www.ginosbears.co.uk where we think you just might find that very special teddy bear of your dreams.  We look forward to welcoming all teddy bear lovers there.