You were everything to me in the 90’s. That was such an impressionable time for me. Would you consider that the golden age?
Yeah. We were just talking about it the other day. Certainly the golden age of licensing, definitely. Licensing was very different back then. There was a lot of it. You would license with a manufacturer and they would distribute everything. Now, you have to find the store first who wants your stuff, and then approach a manufacturer — they don’t sell it. You know so, it’s just flipped, it’s totally flipped. But back then, oh my gosh, of course it was new on the marketplace and we just had so many licenses. It was great, it was fun.
How did it start?
My idea was to have a greeting card company. Which we started and we ran out of my basement. And we decided to go to the stationery show, and we only had — it may have been 20 cards, maybe. We just went and set up a card table and put these 12 cards on the card table. And we got so much positive reaction, and New York Magazine came through and photographed it and put it in their next issue. Which really — if that hadn’t happened, I’m not sure where we would be doing this now. But that did happen, and also we approached by a couple of agents at that show. And several people came up and said can we license your art for a calendar for picture frames or something. And we were like “sure!” — we didn’t know what licensing was. So we quickly looked it up, found out what that involved. So we really learned on the go about licensing.
What influenced you as an artist?
My mother read to us every night and she had a lot of books from her childhood and from her mother’s childhood — so really beautiful illustrated books. And you know I would copy the illustrations and I was constantly drawing the stories that she read so. That’s what I wanted to do from when I was really young.
