Two mothers, two babies, one idea that, like many lucrative ideas, now seems obvious. It didn’t at the time, though.
Two years ago, Linda Warwick and Shelley Frost were new mothers with a few extra pounds around the middle, noisy babies and a startling amount of postpartum creative energy.
“We needed an outlet,” says Frost.
After meeting at the San Carlos-Belmont Mothers’ Club in this suburb south of San Francisco, they began taking walks to burn up those extra pounds. The first step in their transformation into video moguls came when they noticed that their babies stared at one another in their strollers.
Then Warwick’s husband suggested, in jest, making an exercise video of baby Erica doing situps.
Video. Video. The idea traveled through their brains and connected with the baby-face-watching phenomenon.
“The face-watching thing,” says Warwick. “It’s the No. 1 thing that babies do.”
Although they knew nothing about how to make a video, they contracted with a one-man video production shop and soon were recording the faces of 85 drooling, gurgling, smiling babies. In an all-day shoot in a local hotel conference room, their video–“Babymugs”–was born. Total cost: $6,000 and three months of editing and effort.
Warwick and Frost still like to call themselves stay-at-home moms. But they are also savvy entrepreneurs who are about to go Hollywood, with an agent from prestigious International Creative Management in Los Angeles (“We had no idea what ICM was,” says Frost), a pending six-video deal with a major studio and “Babymugs” sales approaching 300,000 copies.
The video got a boost recently when it earned the prized “Approved” rating from the Parents’ Choice Foundation, a non-profit group that evaluates children’s media. Across the country, a young and restless audience of babies and toddlers is expressing its approval by growing tranquil whenever “Babymugs” is on.
Warwick, 36, and Frost, 35, say they honestly never thought a video of baby faces, set to music, would take them this far.
“Our plan was not to become such a hit,” says Frost, who quit her job in public relations when her son, Bret, was born. “Our idea was just to put it in the local stores we frequented.”
“We were doing this for kicks,” says Warwick, who quit her job as an art director when baby Erica arrived. “We were trying to entertain ourselves and we wanted to make a tribute to our children.”
Making money, they have found, is also very entertaining. At $9.95 per video, the gross take on the videos so far comes to roughly $3 million. Cut that figure in half for the discount price at which the “Babymugs” distributor sells the video to stores such as FAO Schwarz, Venture, Best Buy and Musicland, and it’s still a stunning $1.5 million, before legal fees, accountants and other expenses.
As Frost modestly puts it, “We can put Bret through college. He’ll have a nice education.”
Warwick also downplays her financial gains, even as she sits in the nearly empty living room of her 1960s-style ranch home, which has been sold for more spacious digs across town. “We were planning to move anyway,” she says. ” `Babymugs’ helped.”
Who’d have known?
As for the parents who responded to a press release in a local paper and allowed their 6- to 18-month-old babies to blink and giggle in the video, they signed “a comprehensive waiver,” says Frost, entitling them to no more than a free video for their efforts.
“At the time, they knew we were working on a shoestring budget,” she says.
The person who is probably wincing the most is the third mother who started out on this project when the team was called Three Friends Productions. A photograph of this third mom even appears in the closing credits of “Babymugs.” Like the fifth Beatle, she apparently left too soon.
To some parents, the idea of playing “Babymugs” might seem like enrolling their child in couch potato school. But Warwick and Frost say this is not what they had in mind. In a note at the start of “Babymugs,” they suggest parents watch the video with their children, dance to the music and notice what catches their babies’ interest.
Child-care experts agree this would be desirable. “We in the child-care field are really cautious about children watching videos and TV because of the obvious dangers of plopping kids in front of the TV and using it as child care,” says Jan McMillan, program director at the Children’s Council of San Francisco, which trains child-care providers.
Still, she notes that her 18-month-old grandson is “totally fascinated” by “Babymugs” and that if parents use a video as a tool to interact with their children, it can be both positive and powerful.
The wholesomeness of the babies’ faces, the jazzy music alternating with soothing melodies and the non-flashy camera angles in “Babymugs” also have drawn praise.
“The thing that’s good about `Babymugs’ is that the first impression kids are getting of TV is not an overload of stimuli,” says Parker Page, founder of the Children’s Television Resource and Education Center, a 10-year-old non-profit group in San Francisco. “It’s very slow and familiar.”
And it has been proven scientifically that babies, indeed, are students of the human face.
“Babies learn that the face communicates a heck of a lot about what’s going to happen next,” says Joseph Campos, director of the Institute of Human Development at the University of California at Berkeley.
He explains the widespread appeal of baby faces as the “cuteness gestalt.”
“When you have a head that is relatively large in proportion to a body, low eyes in proportion to a head, and round features, it’s physically attractive, even to a very young infant,” says Campos.
For the young at heart too
Warwick and Frost say that older people, including some nursing home residents, love the video too. In what may be an optimal experience for many, the video does not include any noise from the babies. Instead, the soundtrack (all non-copyrighted music) plays. And the video does not include any crying babies.
As for the six future video projects under discussion, the entrepreneurs are keeping mum. “It’s top secret,” says Warwick.
Who’s their agent at ICM? “We can’t say his name,” says Frost. “He doesn’t want people calling him.”
They will say they have been approached by Hollywood studios including Columbia, Tri-Star and Twentieth Century Fox and that at any moment, they’re expecting a call from the unnamed agent to tell them a video deal has been reached.
In Warwick’s living room, a commercial for “Babymugs” flashes onto the television screen. Erica, her face tear-streaked, looks up and toddles over. She puts her hand on the screen to try to touch the baby’s face.
Bret loses interest, for the moment, in the bubble-wand and stares at the baby faces, transfixed. The room falls quiet, except for the Dixieland soundtrack.
“See?” says Warwick.
“See?” says Frost.
