Tales Of A Fourth Generation Textile Executive: Sandra Magsamen Books On Steroids Are A Hit!

Happy Monday Friends,

For as long as I can remember, soft fabric books have been a hot selling item for children.  They continue to still be a very hot item today.  Very often when we have a book panel in a line, it is usually the best seller.  In any case, building on the success and popularity of book panels, we at Studioe, in conjunction with Sandra Magsamen, brought you what I look to call “books on steroids.” These are just like the old books, but they have the added bonus (the steroids) of a 3 dimensional appendage on the top i.e. a hat, antlers, ears, etc.

Studioe has had 3 rounds of introductions of these books.  In the first round, we released 5 books.  Here they are below:

In the next round, we offered another 5 books.

Finally, just this past October we introduced the first holiday grouping.  Unfortunately I can’t get an image of the cover from the website like the ones above, so I am just going to tell you about the others and you can click on the link if you want to see what it looks like.

• I Love You Snow Much.  This is a cute story about snowmen and the appendage on the snowman is a knitted winter hat.
• I Love To Gobble You Up.  This is a Thanksgiving story where the main animal is a turkey and the three dimensional appendages are the tail feathers.
• Boo Boo I Love You.   Of course, this is the Halloween book.  The special appendage is a black hat on top of the white ghost’s head.
• Boo To You! & Whoo Loves Halloween? Trick or treating bags.  This is the first foray into something other than a book with Sandra Magsamen.  Here you get 2 different Halloween bags on one 36″ panel.  So far we are very pleased with the sales of these too.  We do plan to delve into other sorts of non-book projects in the future.

If you go on social media, you can see loads of these book images all around.  People are excited about these books and they are having fun with them too.  What a fun and easy project to make with a child or grandchild.  That is why we just decided to continue to produce some more books to be offered for sale at the May market.  Don’t tell anyone, but the plan with some of the new books is to have appendages hanging off of the bottom as opposed to on the top. Think of feet hanging off or something like that.  Rest assured, it is going to be adorable.  Please note that we plan on keeping these books as basics until the sales tell us to drop them.

So in my infinite wisdom (which isn’t much), I have reached out to the real publisher of the hardcover Sandra Magsamen books about the possibility of having our sales reps sell the books to you.  In case you haven’t been in a kid’s book store recently, you probably didn’t realize that these types of books are sold in hard cover with the appendages and all.  With that, I wanted to reach out to shop owners and resellers of fabric to see if they would be interested in offering the books in their stores.  They sell for around $7.99 retail.  What do you think?  Is this something that you would consider? Please do let me know and I can continue to pursue the possibility of offering the hardcover books to shops across America.

In closing, I have 3 things to say:

1. I can’t wait to see all our competition trying to copy this idea.  Just remember that ours are the real deal.  Stick with Studioe & Sandra Magsamen.
2. If you made it this far in my blog and want to join me, my staff, some licensed designers, sales reps and other shop owners at a dinner at market in St. Louis, please email scott@jaftex.com to be eligible because space is limited.  You must be an existing customer in good standing to be considered.  I would love to have you join in on this intimate dinner with others in our great industry.  We always have a lovely time.
3. The VDTA Vacuum & Sewing Show in Vegas is coming up quickly in early February.  I will be there at booth 855, so please stop by to say hello and see what’s going on.

That’s all she wrote folks.  Keep on buying and selling the awesome Studioe “books on steroids” by Sandra Magsamen.  Have a great week.

Regards,

Scott “definitely not on steroids” Fortunoff