Disclosure
Clark: Offered to Buy Basic Brown Bear Before Launching Build-A-Bear
“And honestly, I did go there as a customer, because it was an open tour that you could, you know, and I called them after the tour and said, I'd be open to talk to you about buying your business, and they wanted an unbelievable amount of money for their little…”
Assertion Partly supported
Clark: Basic Brown Bear's Tour Had No Protected Secrets
“Anybody could go and see the business. Nothing about that was protected.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clark: Build-A-Bear's customer demographic is at least 60-40 girls to boys
“But in the end, about, it's at least sixty-forty now, girls and boys.”
Insight
Clark: Great merchants aggregate and sell existing products rather than invent them
“I didn't create any of this, I didn't invent any of these parts. The I just brought the parts together, which is what a great merchant does. Like Jeff Bezos didn't write the books. He just put the books together on a platform that you could, we all could buy a…”
Insight
Clark: Protecting intellectual property requires having the capital to defend it
“It's not so much that you protect it, it's that you make sure that you can afford to protect it.”
Insight
Clark: A founder's second most important job is finding a superior successor
“Next to founding a company and coming up with an idea, the next most important thing is to make sure that you have somebody who can succeed you that can do better than you did.”
Insight
Clark: Brand-building commitment is hard to teach founders straight out of college
“Commitment to the time it takes to build a brand and to build success is something that's hard to teach if that, if it's their first job out of college, you know, instead of having the experience that you can't really pass on to them.”
Insight
Maxine Clark: Choose jobs where your results are visible and attributable
“The results, that's what I tell people, get a job where your results are, you can take credit for your results, because I was in a position where those results were catching attention.”
Assertion Supported
Clark: Payless ShoeSource was a $2.5B business with 4,500 stores
“It was a four and a half billion dollar company. I mean, two and a half billion dollar company, 4500 stores.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clark: May Company barred employees from sending external emails
“In fact, we weren't allowed to email anybody out of the company, only inside the company.”
Insight
Clark: Factory tours inspired the idea for interactive mall workshops
“I knew if people were going on tours of a factory that made stuffed animals, imagine if it was in their hometown, what they might do. Could we miniaturize it, make it feasible to be in a mall with the right some equipment, you know, like our stuffing machine, …”
Disclosure
Clark: Build-A-Bear was launched with $1.5 million of self-funding
“I decided I could invest about a million and a half dollars, and if that, if it went bust. You know, that was it. I didn't have any investors at that moment in time, and I didn't owe anybody anything.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Build-A-Bear's barcode ID system returned 10,000 lost bears to children
“And we did bring back about 10,000. Prior to COVID, I think it was around 10,000 bears that we had found over the years and brought back to kids.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Build-A-Bear matched its full first-year sales projection in its first quarter
“We did as much business in the first quarter, October to December, as I thought we were going to do the whole year, the whole first year we were in business.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clark: Build-A-Bear secured mall lease exclusivity against copycats
“And then also, when we did leases with landlords, we signed exclusive agreements to be the only make-your-own-stuffed-animal store.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clark: Mall landlords became Build-A-Bear's largest expansion investors
“The St. Louis Galleria didn't give us any tenant allowance, but every store after that gave us something to build our store. They wanted us to come, and they wanted to be the first one in their market, so in Chicago we had, the next two stores were in Chicago,…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clark: Build-A-Bear performed much better near children's stores than luxury anchors
“If we were near a limited to store or children's place, we did way better than if we were near Nordstrom.”
Disclosure
Maxine Clark: Created an advisory board of children for Build-A-Bear
“I really built a board of advisors that were children.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clark: Bankers wrongly advised acquiring existing factories over starting Build-A-Bear
“A lot of the bankers were telling me that if I bought something, it would be easier than, you know, inventing it from scratch, that you could use it as collateral. That it would be maybe a better, a faster way to get where I wanted to go. They were wrong about…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clark: Teddy bears made up only about 20% of Build-A-Bear's product line
“Teddy bears were not our whole product line. Only a few of our, maybe 20% were bears.”
Disclosure
Clark: Took no money out of Build-A-Bear during 2004 IPO
“And I didn't take any money out of the company at that particular point, but our investors wanted out.”
Disclosure
Maxine Clark: Founded Build-A-Bear at 48, planned max 15-year tenure
“I started the business when I was 48 years old. I wanted to stay till I was maybe 15 years at the maximum.”
