Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
She came to St. Louis as head of merchandise research for the May Company, became president of Payless ShoeSource, and then broke away to start the now-global Build-A-Bear Workshop. Financiers weren’t terribly interested in custom plush until they met Maxine Clark. Then they asked for a second meeting. When one rather stiff, formal banker propped his feet up on his desk, it took her a minute to register: He’d worn his Ralph Lauren teddy bear socks for her.
Teddy Roosevelt was the namesake for the toy that made you famous, and his niece Eleanor was your mom’s boss? My mother was Eleanor’s private traveling secretary. I remember going out with her to register voters. She was 4-foot-9 and a firebrand—you did not want to say no to my mother.
Your first plan was to be a civil rights lawyer. When did the business instinct develop? I was doing lemonade stands as a kid. I wanted to have money of my own. I’d hear my mother fundraising, and to me it sounded like begging. To pay for law school, I went to work for the Hecht Company in D.C. My boss got sick, and I had to fill in. So I got a lot of exposure to senior management, traveling, making decisions for a big company, and I loved it.
You rose to company president. Why start your own? All those reasons they’d say a woman couldn’t do something—children, not enough experience, not enough money—none of them were true for me. And with the start of the internet, I knew that if we didn’t make retailing better, we were going to lose out.
Then you took your neighbor’s 10-year-old daughter shopping. She wanted a Beanie Baby, and they were sold out. She said, “It’d be so easy to make one.” She meant a craft project, but I saw Build-A-Bear.
Creativity was a big part of your business—“making children happy through the creation of their own stuffed animals.” Did you sew as a girl? No, but my mother did. I’d go shopping with her—ribbons, fabric, thread—I’d wander the aisles just imagining what you could do with all this stuff!
How does the bear-building work? You pick your animal, put it in a machine and get it stuffed, pick out a sound and give it a heart. Then you can give it a bath, brush it, pick out clothes, name it. We invented experience retailing. We had a store before Apple did, before American Girl did. And now we have raised a generation of children who don’t buy a teddy bear off a shelf anymore. Those children are going to apply that to everything else.
Have you always loved stuffed animals? Always. If there’s one left on a shelf, I’ll buy it, because it shouldn’t be alone. My favorite bear was Teddy. My parents took us out to dinner, and I had to keep Teddy in the car, and he was stolen! Actually, my father and a neighbor had taken Teddy, because I used to suck my thumb when I read to him at night, and they wanted me to stop. When I was 40, my father apologized.
Why are these squishy little objects so beloved? Because we always need something to hug. It changed dramatically with Elvis Presley’s “I want to be your teddy bear.” He made it a love object. And we were the next big revolution: We made bears possible for boys and girls, kids and adults. There are all kinds of excuses if you want a bear.
How’s Build-a-Bear coping with the new retail landscape? The challenge is that moms don’t come to the malls as much as they used to. And a child can’t shop online. Now they’ve created this pop-up store idea, so you don’t have to be there 365 days. It’s more affordable—you can even make them out of containers. You are bringing surprises to people.
Retail goes in cycles, you’ve said. The idea of the hunt has changed. It’s much easier and sometimes even cheaper to scroll through your computer at home. I do believe there’s an opportunity for much smaller, local retailers, though, where people make things or provide a curated selection, bringing you their taste. I went to the Unique Boutique [at John Burroughs School], and I spent a couple thousand dollars easily. I had so much fun—it was like the good old days of shopping. We have to make a bigger deal out of local businesses. I think that in 20 years, maybe less, someone will reinvent department stores—it might be Amazon—but we will never need all the malls we have now. St. Louis has been over-malled for a long time. We put two outlet malls half a mile from each other, right near another mall!
Do strangers recognize you at airports? Yeah, they’ll say, “How do I know you?” and I say, “Well, it’s obvious I’m not a movie star!” But there’s something that comes with me that I love that people recognize. There’s a warmth.
Build-a-Bear consistently won kudos as a workplace. Why? Because it’s about your soul. We’re there to sell and make a lot of money and reward the people who work there, but in the end, it’s about making kids smile. It’s not a fancy environment. People brought their dogs to work.
Does it make you sad that Build-A-Bear has ditched the cute titles? I don’t know if “sad” is the right word. I guess the one thing is that I’ll always be the Chief Executive Bear; the title retired with me. It was just for the fun of it. I didn’t want a fancy title; I’d already been a CEO. But Sharon [Price John, Clark’s successor] felt [Wall] Street wanted the titles to be more professional.
You don’t have children, but you owe your business concept to one. And in 2012, another 10-year-old girl said, “Ms. Clark, do you believe that all children’s dreams come true?” I said, “Yes, I do, Tia. What’s your dream?” She said, “To find the sun.” I was throwing out all sorts of ideas: We could go to an astronomy department, she could talk to a weathercaster…And the other kids stopped asking me about bears and started asking about science. I drove home that night and told my husband, “I think it’s time for me to retire.” He said, “What?” I said, “I’m not sure I’ve found my sun.”
Neither of you has exactly fallen idle in retirement. You make a good team. We were not, at first, the perfect match! Bob [Fox] is more detail-oriented; I’m more big-picture. His relatives came over on the Mayflower; my grandparents came over from Eastern Europe. But over time we’ve taken on each other’s traits. And it’s not like he’s running off and playing golf! He spends a lot of time on criminal justice reform and immigration reform.
And you focus a great deal on kids, family, education. My teachers made such a difference. My parents didn’t go to college. Without my teachers, I would be nowhere and nobody. Here, you turn over the rock of education and there’s 8,000 spiders underneath. St. Louis is more complicated than a lot of places; because of all the municipalities, you have more than 60 school districts. And the schools can’t do it all anymore. We have to find common efficiencies. We cannot have a million agencies doing the same thing and getting nowhere. Everybody’s protective; there are a lot of silos. But when we do things together, like the Scholarship Foundation—there are lots of scholarships available, but nobody knew how to find them.
You’re big on summer camps, too. The kids who are successful, even in the most impoverished schools, are the kids with outside activities, enrichment. They love to read, they’re swimmers… So we created Blueprint4Summer, to make it easy for parents to access information about summer camps. Now it’s so popular, a family foundation in Colorado is licensing it from us.
Your big project at the moment is the DivINe mixed-use development on Delmar. What inspired it? When I left Build-a-Bear and I was going a lot to Cortex and working with women entrepreneurs, I saw how diverse these coworking spaces were, and how much people want to work together. I thought, why can’t we create a coworking space for not-for-profits? And have apartments with affordable rent for the young professionals who are making about $35K working for not-for-profits, but want to live like adults, in a small, cool space? We bought the old St. Luke’s Hospital on Delmar—if this were New York, it would have been scooped up in five minutes. And we call it DivINe: Div for the Delmar dividing line, IN for investment and innovation; E for engagement and experience. It’s a $100 million project to redo this whole big space, and you have to do it all at once, so it’s a big undertaking, and I’ve been doing this for three years already! I’m getting a little frustrated with the time it’s taking!
If you could change one thing for St. Louis…? I know this sounds self-serving, but this project I think is the beginning of that. It’s in the center. People from the North Side don’t always feel comfortable about something south, but they will all come to Delmar. If we can make Delmar a bustling metropolis from end to end and start to improve the neglected neighborhoods to the north—over time, without gentrifying so that only rich people can live there—I think we can erase that dividing line.
And what’s your biggest criticism? We are always telling bad stories. And you can’t inspire people with bad stories. What you’re for, get out there and be for it. You want to encourage. Not lie. But when everything is a negative, why would anyone want to be here? Because of the way news is now, you can be overwhelmed by it. Sure, you can call something fake news if you don’t agree with it. But we have to build on good stories. We have to feel like we have some power. And in our local community, we do.
