The Power Of Whimsy

SANDRA BOYNTON’S studio, in a converted barn next to her Connecticut home, bears the milestones of her singular career: a long rack of greeting cards featuring quirkily drawn animals; a room full of small, sturdy children’s books, with names like “Snuggle Puppy!” and “Barnyard Dance!”; and, upstairs, where she does much of her work, old-time radios and jukeboxes representing her more recent foray into music CDs for children.

Mike Ford and Ms. Boynton are songwriting partners. One of their three-minute songs can take a month to complete.

Ms. Boynton’s CDs have garnered three gold records and one Grammy nomination. These accomplishments, on top of the hundreds of millions of cards and tens of millions of books she has sold, are all the happy — and profitable — results of an unconventional approach to business.

As an entrepreneur, Ms. Boynton maintains a firm grasp on market realities and her finances, but she says she has succeeded by refusing to make money her main objective. Instead, she says, she has focused on the creative process, her artistic autonomy, her relationships and how she uses her time.

“I don’t do things differently to be different; I do what works for me,” she says. “To me, the commodity that we consistently overvalue is money, and what we undervalue is our precious and irreplaceable time. Though, of course, to the extent that money can save you time or make it easier to accomplish things, it’s a wonderful thing.”

While Ms. Boynton may make all of this sound relatively straightforward, she has overcome hurdles in three industries that have routinely tripped up or roundly laid low legions of would-be entrepreneurs.

MS. BOYNTON, 54, describes what she calls an “absurdly happy childhood” in Philadelphia. The third of four daughters, she attended Germantown Friends, a K-12 Quaker school famed for its arts education and interdisciplinary teaching. Her father, Robert Boynton, was an English teacher at the school. “The best English teacher I ever had,” she says.

She was fascinated by business at an early age and remembers selling pretty yellow flowers door to door for a dime when she was 8. Later, she discovered that they were weeds, but she still had takers. “I always liked selling things,” she says. “It gives you a sense of self-sufficiency.”

When Ms. Boynton was 14, a local newspaper printed drawings from an exhibit of her school artwork. She used the $40 she earned from her first published work to invest in two shares of AT&T — though she mistakenly thought she was buying shares of I.B.M. She still has the stock but has no clue how much it is worth.

Stocks held a special glamour for her: Her grandfather worked at a silver company, rising from the mailroom to the vice president’s perch. “Family legend has it that the company offered penny-a-share stock to employees, and he bought as much as he could afford,” she says. “And he became a wealthy man. That stock eventually put most of his 17 grandchildren through college.”

In addition to her investing activity, she developed a strong interest in art, music, literature and writing — all of which were central to the Friends curriculum. The school was so stimulating, academically and artistically, she says, that her first year at Yale was a disappointment.

At Yale, she majored in English, became involved in drama courses and productions and met her future husband, Jamie McEwan, in an acting class. She also worked on her drawing. Ever the entrepreneur, she started illustrating gift enclosure cards that were precursors of her animal-populated greeting cards.

In 1974, Ms. Boynton met Phil Friedmann, a partner in Recycled Paper Greetings, a greeting card company based in Chicago, at a stationery trade show. After Mr. Friedmann and his business partner, Mike Keiser, saw Ms. Boynton’s work, they asked her to start making cards for their company.

They wanted to pay her a flat rate. Though she was only 21 and unknown, Ms. Boynton, who had learned a lesson or two from her father’s other careers as a writer and publisher, demanded royalties.

“We quickly relented,” Mr. Keiser recalls of the royalty negotiations. It was a shrewd move on his part, too. He says that over about a decade — from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s — revenue at Recycled Paper went from $1 million to $100 million, largely because of the popularity of Boynton cards. Ms. Boynton has made 4,000 different cards for Recycled Paper, including the still popular “Hippo Birdies 2 Ewes” birthday card.

By Mr. Keiser’s rough estimate, Ms. Boynton has sold around a half-billion cards, which, he says, makes her one of the best-selling card creators of all time.

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