Accidental Branding. The perfectionist: julie aigner-clark (baby einstein).

Our one-year-old son had gone to bed and we started talking about Baby Einstein. We had two couples over who didn’t have children and they didn’t understand why it was such a big deal. But kids are just amazed by it. So we pulled out the video and showed it to them, and then another. Then we realized that six adults had just spent over an hour watching baby videos. Mark Klienman, Philadelphia.

My first glimpse of Julie Clark comes unexpectedly on television. I am watching the State of the Union address. It’s the sixth year of George W. Bush’s presidency and things are not going well. As a result, the speech lacks the jaunty, boisterous tone that entertains me whether or not I voted for the guy on my screen. The president meanders through the economy, education, health care, immigration, and energy in the first 40 minutes of the address. Just as I am about to flip to a rerun of CSI, he begins talking about the contributions of individual Americans who are sitting in the box with the first lady, Laura Bush. This part of the speech is akin to human-interest report on the local evening news (“Fireman Saves Cat From Tree. Cat’s Owner Marries Fireman. Story at 11!!”) and it perks me up. President Bush first singles out Dikembe Mutombo, the famous Congolese NBA basketball player who has recently donated $15 million for the completion of the Biamba Marie Mutombo Teaching Hospital near Kinshasa, the first modern medical facility in the Congo. Then he introduces Julie Aigner-Clark, saying:

After her daughter was born, Julie Aigner-Clark searched for ways to share her love of music and art with her child. So, she borrowed some equipment, and began filming children’s videos in her basement. The Baby Einstein Company was born. and in just five years her business grew to more than $20 million in sales.

In November 2001, Julie sold Baby Einstein to the Walt Disney Company, and with her help Baby Einstein has grown into a $200 million business. Julie represents the great enterprising spirit of America. And she is using her success to help others. producing child safety videos with John Walsh of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Julie says of her new project: “I believe it’s the most important thing that I’ve ever done. I believe that children have the right to live in a world that is safe.” So tonight, we are pleased to welcome this talented business entrepreneur and generous social entrepreneur.

Clark is an attractive blond woman with straight hair and frosted lipstick. Her teenage daughter Aspen sits next to her, just behind the first lady. In addition to Mutombo, Clark is surrounded by Wesley Autrey, a man who recently threw himself in front of an oncoming subway in New York to save the life of a stranger, and Tommy Rieman, a U.S. Army sergeant who has been awarded the Silver Star for bravery under fire in Iraq.

“It came as a complete surprise,” Clark tells me later, “and it was this huge secret, so I couldn’t tell anyone until literally moments before it happened.” What was she thinking while she was sitting there and wondering if the president might mention her among the dozen or so people sitting in the first lady’s box? “The whole time during the speech I was , Well, as a mother of a teenager, all I could do is keep poking Aspen and whispering ‘Don’t pick your nose, quit pulling your hair, stop touching your knee. don’t kick the first lady in the head!’” Clark’s appearance in the State of the Union address creates some controversy. The next day Timothy Noah, writing for the Web zine Slate, titles his account “Bush’s Baby Einstein Gaffe. The President Lionizes a Mountebank.” He argues that Clark is a charlatan who has defrauded other women with the videos by playing on their neuroses.

Clark is surprised by the attack and, like other entrepreneurs I’ve encountered, she is particularly vulnerable and thin-skinned. “I was upset. I guess it was because I was being attacked really personally by someone who didn’t know anything about me. The fact that he totally neglected to mention anything about The Safe Side really annoyed me.” The attack on Clark seems unfair to me as well. Noah’s key points are that Clark hasn’t done anything more significant than enrich herself, that recent studies suggest television viewing is not good for children, and that Baby Einstein is the leading edge of a movement that makes untrue claims to women so they can feel safe about ignoring their children.

The first point is not true. Since selling Baby Einstein in 2001, Clark created a program, called The Safe Side, whose videos instruct children about the dangers of using the Internet and talking to strangers.

She persuaded America’s Most Wanted host John Walsh to join her effort, and they donated a video to every school district in Texas. The presidential nod was for this as much as for Baby Einstein. Noah’s second point. about the possible danger of showing videos to babies. is possibly true, but not relevant to Clark. The studies suggesting dangers to babies from television exposure were published only after Clark had sold Baby Einstein to Disney, and none addressed the baby video phenomenon directly. Finally, whether or not the baby video industry preys on the insecurities of new parents, ordinary parents believe that there is some good in exposing their babies to classical music and foreign languages while watching slowly moving, pleasing images. Assuming that these consumers are all chumps just because of two unduplicated medical studies doesn’t seem fair either.

Even if the attack on Julie Aigner-Clark seems mean-spirited, something in the critique resonates with me. Watching Clark on television, I cannot help but have the feeling “Why her? What makes this woman so special?” She looks like an ordinary person standing up there in front of the entire nation, like just another soccer mom. But that is also her appeal. Julie Clark was never a marketer or a businessperson.

She was an English teacher and then a stay-at-home mom. The evil motives assigned to her are off base. Clark wasn’t trying to swindle anxious mothers. she was one. “I was a real, honest-to-God stay-athome mother and I wanted this for my child,” Clark says, “and I was lucky that other mothers felt the same way.” In other words, Baby Einstein was an Accidental Brand.

The Julie Clark I meet a month after the State of the Union address in suburban Denver is an entirely different person from the one I have seen on television. The early March day is the warmest on record in Denver, the temperature already topping 75 degrees when she greets me at her door. Clark is casually dressed in sandals, torn jeans, and a David Bowie concert t-shirt. Her shoulder-length, golden hair hangs loose over angular features. She is wearing no jewelry except for a slender wedding band (no diamond) and a small gold Rolex watch that might pass for a knockoff. A pickup truck, parked in the circular driveway directly in front of the front door to her house, is splattered with mud. I’m late, having crawled along in Denver traffic to reach her, and she hustles me into the pickup because we are running late for school.

As I have met more accidental entrepreneurs, I’ve found that they fall into two categories. The first group, which includes Gary Erickson at Clif Bar and Gert Boyle at Columbia Sportswear, sees the business as a lifelong pursuit. These folks become so attached to their creation that they hang on through the difficult transition from running a company where everyone knows each other to masterminding a true corporation with hierarchy and lots of bright-faced people they don’t recognize. The second class of entrepreneur never really wants to run a corporation at all. When the business gets to the size where being in charge means doing more administrative than creative work, these founders get out. Clark falls into the second category.

When Julie Clark sold Baby Einstein to Disney in 2001, it had exactly 8 employees responsible for the $22 million in revenue it produced that year. Julie and her husband, Bill Clark, who was COO of Baby Einstein, netted about $40 million on that sale. Even if it put them in the same league with minor investment bankers and successful law firm partners rather than the Bill Gateses or Warren Buffetts of the world, there was enough money for Clark to do whatever she wanted.

So it is revealing that in the sixth year of her retirement, she has come full circle to where she started out before meeting her husband, having children, and starting Baby Einstein. Julie Clark is once again teaching English.

The private middle school where Clark teaches is a model of progressive modesty. Classes are extremely small, with 15 students on average, and from what I can tell, the level of the teaching is excellent.

The physical structure of the building is decidedly modest, however.

The building is a two-story affair with institutional fluorescent lighting and cinderblock walls. A recent renovation has brightened things up by adding multicolor tiles to the floor and bright yellow paint to the walls.

If there is irony in a multimillionaire and famous entrepreneur teaching poetry to sixth and seventh graders, none of the kids in Clark’s class see it. They shuffle in with the ragged steps of teenagers, looking curiously at me sitting in the back of the class. One of the last students to arrive is Clark’s daughter Aspen, the older child who accompanied her to the State of the Union address. Aspen is goldenskinned and confident, with an unusually upright bearing for a 12-year-old. Unlike some of her classmates, she makes direct eye contact with me when her mother introduces her.

Clark starts the class out by reading a poem. It is “Hurt Hawks” by Robinson Jeffers, about a man who kills a wounded hawk out of mercy. It could be a parable of adolescence, but the reason it delights the class is because it plays to the adolescent obsession with death:

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse The curs of the day come and torment him At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head, The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.

The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

What I notice first about Clark during the class is how well she listens. Any student who speaks has her full attention. her entire body is still. Like great entertainers and politicians, she completely focuses on the person in front of her. In my experience, this is a very unusual quality in an entrepreneur or a CEO. She also has a natural affinity for children. They speak to her both familiarly and respectfully, which is a difficult balance to achieve with young teens.

They also joke. when a student mentions the odd name of a friend, Clark says, “It’s just amazing what parents will name their children. I mean, you have them naming their kids after a tree. Wait. I actually did that.” She deadpans the last bit as Aspen smiles, and it’s clear that one of the main attractions of teaching for Clark is the opportunity to spend time with her daughter.

Teaching is a luxury for Julie Clark. After graduating from Michigan State University in 1988, she took a job teaching adult education in East Detroit because she couldn’t get a day job teaching children. It took her two years to finally get that day job, and it was teaching English in middle school, just as she does now. After four years, the strains of supporting herself on a teacher’s salary persuaded Clark to seek other employment and she found a job working for a company called Optical Data Corporation.

Optical Data was founded to bring a new technology from the 1980s (the laser disk) into the classroom. The ability to store vast amounts of visual data on a single disk gave schools in this pre-Internet era new options for teaching and helped eliminate carousels of slides.

Julie was paired with a salesperson at Optical Data and her job was to show schoolteachers how to use the technology. The company was losing money and Julie was laid off after just a year, but it was a pivotal moment in her life for two reasons: First, because Julie met her husband Bill at Optical, where Bill was CEO. Second, because helping middle school teachers use laser disk technology planted the seed in Julie’s mind that video could be an effective teaching tool.

After leaving Optical Data, Julie moved in with Bill and into “The Hills,” a nondescript, sprawling condo complex in Bedminster, New Jersey, south of Morristown. She took a job working on child assault prevention for a nonprofit. In 1994, Julie became pregnant for the first time. She left her job after delivering Aspen and became a stayat-home mom. A year later, Optical Data was sold to Cox and Bill moved Julie and their newborn daughter Aspen to the Atlanta area.

Even in New Jersey, Julie had begun to think about the sights and sounds that babies are exposed to every day. Julie didn’t like a lot of the media influences that surround a child’s life. from advertising to music videos. and wanted to give Aspen a strong foundation in the things that were important to her. This meant classical music, art, poetry and foreign languages. Clark found that some of this existed for young children, but virtually none for babies. And there were no baby videos to speak of. She was looking for something that did not exist. a way to stimulate her baby’s mind with images and sounds that were important to her. She didn’t have time to do anything about it while she was apart from Bill, but the idea did not leave her mind.

When Clark moved to Georgia, she and Bill bought a house in Alpharetta, “otherwise known as purgatory,” in Julie’s words. As Aspen passed her first birthday and Julie was able to sleep through the night, her thoughts turned back to the idea of a learning video for a baby.

She decided to make a video. I ask Clark what made her take this step, the step that so few people with good ideas take. “I’d seen Bill do it at Optical Data, so I wasn’t intimidated. At first, I treated it like a hobby.

That took a lot of pressure off.” Julie was lucky that she had a friend who owned video equipment and let her borrow it for an entire year. She also had a mostly empty basement that became her office and production studio. A black velvet drop cloth was the entire “set” for the video. Since coming up with the idea for a baby video when Aspen was born, Julie had carefully watched what her daughter was attracted to. She noticed that slow movement, such as that of a diorama, was endlessly fascinating to Aspen. She also saw that certain colors and objects were more compelling than others.

Clark didn’t convene a focus group of mothers or conduct research to see what she should put in the video. she just put in what she knew her own daughter liked. She also had another motive for completing the video; midway through production, she became pregnant again.

In all, it took her a year to complete the first Baby Einstein video and cost Clark and her husband $17,000 in personal savings.

The first video is called Baby Einstein Language Nursery. Julie provides the narrative voice, as she did in all the videos produced while she owned the company. The video is incredibly simple. The background is black. It starts with the music from “Pop Goes the Weasel” playing as Julie’s manicured hand pushes the button to a simple popup toy. which pops up. Julie says, “Hello.” Then the Baby Einstein logo and the words “Language Nursery” slowly draw themselves on the screen. Next we see a fish tank. a straight-on image that looks real enough to send a Siamese into conniptions. Then a second woman’s voice, speaking in German, reads a poem while different shapes appear slowly, one after another, on the screen. For an adult watching without the presence of a lovable tyke, the video is enough to induce restless leg syndrome. It is like Blue’s Clues in this sense. what seem like painfully slow, disconnected images to us can hold endless fascination for babies.

Or so parents tell me when I ask them about Baby Einstein. “Our son loved them,” one tells me. “As soon as we’d switch it on, he’d just stare at them for 25 minutes. It was really helpful because he never drank enough formula, but he would drink more when he was watching the videos.” What is so fascinating about this video to me is the way in which it subverts adult expectations. Instead of being presented with a narrative flow, characters, and action, we see still images and set pieces with a mostly unrelated soundtrack. In other words, Baby Einstein is the video version of a storyboard book. It works more or less the same way that a baby book does. giving the baby stimulus and allowing the parent to point and narrate. The idea is simple, but powerful. It is also very different from anything that existed before, including standouts for slightly older children such as Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues. This is another reason that the criticism of Baby Einstein and the genre seems a bit off target. Studies warn against letting young children watch television in general, but none have tried measuring the particular effects of baby videos, still a new genre. Baby Einstein moves a lot slower than other children’s television, really no faster than the pages of a book turning.

Just as with John Peterman’s venture into catalog retailing, Julie Clark was gifted with a complete lack of knowledge about the “rules” of video. Baby Einstein Language Nursery breaks them all. It doesn’t have a catchy theme song, doesn’t feature high production quality, doesn’t even use sets or always keep the pictures and soundtrack in synch. Above all, it doesn’t move quickly to keep children entertained and it doesn’t try to appeal to adults. One nice element is the presence of Clark and her children. “There’s a certain quality to them,” one parent tells me, “and we’ve seen quite a few other videos. Part of it is that you can see Julie Clark and her kids. The youngest one is a baby in the earliest videos. Then you see her get older. It’s almost like watching them grow up.” Clark enjoyed making the Baby Einstein Language Nursery video, but selling it was a nightmare. “I had literally never sold a product in my life,” she says, “and I didn’t get a lot of support outside my own house. When I would go to a playgroup and tell other women, they didn’t jump all over it and say, ‘What a great idea!’ They were like, ‘Well . . . . okay.’” Still, she persisted, driven by her strong belief that the video would be good for babies. Clark sent copies of the video to Toys “R” Us and other big retailers she located online, but she never heard a word from any of them. She also sent the Baby Einstein Language Nursery video to a variety of magazines. Here she had more luck. Parenting magazine wrote a positive review of the video. Suddenly, Julie Clark found herself in business.

Running a business meant dealing with issues Clark had not considered before. “I realized that I had to accept credit card payments.

How do you do that? Getting the tapes duplicated and having boxes made and shrink-wrapped wasn’t hard, but what about shipping? It wasn’t a lot of volume but suddenly I was the order entry person, warehouse manager and mailroom clerk at the same time.” Clark was initially selling the videos direct to consumers, operating from her basement. The garage became her warehouse. Still, Clark kept looking for retail distribution for the Baby Einstein video. A friend told her that she should go to a trade show. something Julie did not even realize existed. The industry show for children’s videos is called Toy Fair and takes place every year at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City. Clark could barely scrape together the money for the Toy Fair entry pass from her meager earnings, so there was no question of exhibiting.

The Javits Center is an awkward, unlovely structure on the West Side of Manhattan, near the Hudson River. It is laid out like three large shoeboxes with holes cut in the sides, linking them. The convention space incorporates 10 separate exhibition halls on two levels, with over 300,000 square feet of floor space. Although small by modern standards and unable to host massive events like the Consumer Electronics Show (held annually in Las Vegas), Javits can still be confusing and intimidating for first-timers. Visitors may enter the Javits Center through one of a series of glass doors on different levels for their show only to realize that they’re a good quarter mile from their show.

ToyFair had over 20,000 attendees, and Julie felt completely overwhelmed by the hubbub in the main exhibition hall. But she had a mission. She had identified a small, upscale retailer called The Right Start as the best possible place to carry her video. She spent two days wandering the halls and looking at name badges, trying to find someone from The Right Start, until she literally ran into a group of eight women from the retailer.

“They must have thought I was crazy, but I was able to convince one of the women, named Wendy, to take a look at the video. That’s all I got. her first name. I didn’t hear anything for two and a half weeks, so I finally called their headquarters and asked to speak to Wendy. The receptionist told me that she had left the company and gave me the name of the woman replacing her. When I got through to her I told a white lie. that Wendy had loved the videos and was going to pass it on to her to look at. This woman paused for a moment and I could hear her shuffling things around. They she said, ‘Okay, I see the video on the desk here, but I don’t have a note from her or anything.’ But she agreed to take a look at it.” The new buyer called Clark back the next day with an order for 60 videos. All 60 sold out in a single day and The Right Start reordered. Then they asked for another title in six months. And this is where fate intervened for Baby Einstein.

The second video Clark produced was called Baby Mozart. She had toyed with calling it “Baby Einstein: Mozart” or some other combination of words, but in the end decided that simpler was better.

This video hit store shelves in February 1998, and just two weeks later, a scientific study was released that appeared to prove that listening to Mozart could improve brain functions in babies. The story quickly reached the national headlines. They called it “the Mozart Effect.” Baby Einstein exploded, with sales jumping from $100,000 in 1997 to $1,000,000 in 1998.

As we leave Clark’s middle school, I get a clear look at the Rockies.

They’re omnipresent on a sunny day in Denver, hovering over the background like a pipe organ in a church. The snow-capped peaks look unreal to my New Yorker eye. It’s more like a painted backdrop on the set of a colorized Hollywood movie. And it seems out of place against a backdrop of Best Buys and Bed, Bath & Beyonds. We pull into a shopping mall where we are meeting Julie’s husband, Bill, and their longtime collaborator, Jeff Mettais, for lunch. The restaurant is P.F. Chang’s. It is one of these new, upscale casual-dining behemoths that seem to have sprung up everywhere in the past few years. We walk in and are greeted by a terminally perky hostess. The interior of the restaurant looks to me like a ski lodge that has been decorated by Pottery Barn.

Bill is older than Julie by nearly 13 years and he complements her personality. Where Julie is energetic, impulsive, and demanding, Bill is calm, measured, and flexible. One of Bill’s biggest roles was as a professional mentor for Julie. Even before he joined Baby Einstein, Bill was an entrepreneurial role model for her. The company he was running when the pair met, Optical Data, was partially funded by ABC. The concept of using laser disks to bring vast amounts of information and images to the classroom seemed revolutionary when it launched. Unfortunately, it blossomed just in time to be outmoded by the DVD and then the Internet. When I ask Bill about the company, he smiles. “We made a lot of history and lost a lot of money.” Baby Einstein was clearly something different. Just as the first video was nearing completion, Julie and Bill moved from Alpharetta to Denver. Bill took a job with a nonprofit specializing in the needs of entrepreneurs in the Denver area. A year later he left when it became painfully evident that Baby Einstein was growing faster than Julie could handle on her own. The division of labor at Baby Einstein was straightforward. Bill took over operations and began to put together a strategic plan for the company. He helped Julie think through the intellectual property issues for Baby Einstein and was able to secure strong trademark protection for the company’s branded products.

He also helped think through the life cycle of the consumer and was instrumental in getting Julie to launch a line of videos for children 1 to 3 years old to complement the offerings for newborns. Julie was CEO and had complete control over the videos (and later, books), the brand, and the creative process. “Baby Einstein videos and books were really handcrafted products with Julie’s fingerprints all over every single one,” Bill says, as he sips at a bowl of soup.

It is this intimacy, this handcrafted authenticity, which gave the Baby Einstein brand its extraordinary strength. As with most of the other brands in this book, the success of Baby Einstein hinged on Julie Clark’s ability to persuasively tell her own story. that of a stay-athome mother who created a product that she wanted for her own baby.

This “by us, for us” mentality, along with a strong story, is what sets Accidental Brands apart from corporate brands. Nobody likes buying things from nameless, faceless corporations. A brand gives a company a face. An Accidental Brand has a clearer face and a stronger story.

Whether it was during her appearance on Oprah or the back cover of a Baby Einstein book, Julie Clark knew how to tell her own story.

Accidental Brands tend to be very careful about hiring. A bad hiring decision can pollute the corporate DNA and bring down the morale of the entire organization. Thus, most companies who experience the kind of explosive growth Baby Einstein enjoyed between 1998 and 2000 (which increased tenfold as sales went from $1,000,000 to $10,000,000) hire in proportion to their sales. Not so with Baby Einstein. In total, the Baby Einstein Company had just eight employees in 2001 when it was sold to Disney. Sales results for that last year were $22 million. a staggering $2.75 million in revenue per employee. I asked Bill Clark at lunch about the small size of the company and he characterized it as a lifestyle choice. Managing a huge group of employees changes the nature of the workload for the CEO and COO.

Hiring any faster would have ruined family life for both Bill and Julie.

And they really considered employee members to be family as well.

Of the eight employees in Baby Einstein at the time of the sale in 2001, seven are working on one of the Clarks’ two new ventures, namely The Safe Side and Memory Lane.

In 1999, Disney Publishing approached Julie and asked her to license a series of books under the Baby Einstein trademark. Clark was intrigued because she had always wanted to write and thought that books were a natural complement to the Baby Einstein videos. She agreed, with the caveat that she be given complete creative control, and began to produce a series of books that numbered 20 by the time of the company sale, contributing significantly to Baby Einstein revenues.

By 2000, Baby Einstein had attracted a great deal of competition, and both Bill and Julie felt that the company needed additional capital in order to stay on top of the industry it had spawned. Their workdays were getting longer and longer, making it harder to have a normal family life, and the company was testing their personal values. Baby Einstein was producing video, Julie was creating books for Disney to sell and produce on a licensed basis, and Clark had also introduced a Little Einstein line for small children. The complexity of the growing operation was enormous, and it was clear that major investment was needed to take it to the next level. Faced with a fundamental life decision, the Clarks agreed quickly on what to do. They elected to sell the business. It was a simple decision, Bill says. “This thing’s going to eat our lives up, and we just asked ourselves, ‘What’s more important, our kids or our business?’ ” Julie nods emphatically. “We never ran a single ad and we never did any marketing. Baby Einstein was all word of mouth. We knew that we would have to sell it eventually because we wanted to spend as much time as we could with our kids. The surprise. what we never anticipated. was that we would have this tremendous success with the business.” So Julie and Bill called Disney. The couple’s experience with Disney Books had been positive and they liked the fit between the two brands.

Julie says she told Disney, in effect, “We like you and we’re calling you first. We’re selling the business and we want to know if you are interested.” They were interested. Ten months later, Julie and Bill Clark sold Baby Einstein to Disney for $40 million.

Of the entrepreneurs profiled in this book, only two. Clark and Roxanne Quimby. have sold their businesses outright. For both, the loss of control seems to have been like watching a child go to college.

Buying a brand from the founder is a delicate business and Disney was clear about the endgame. At one point during negotiations with the lawyers, Disney’s point man put his hand on Julie’s and looked at her sharply, saying, “You understand we’re buying the right to run this business the way we want to, right?” Julie understood. and didn’t. When the sale was completed and Julie had the customary title of “retained consultant,” she expected to hold on to creative control over the product. Instead, she was gradually pushed aside. Then she reached a breaking point. “I thought it was really going to be great to work with Disney, but then it wasn’t. So I finally said, ‘That’s that and it’s done, and I’m really proud because this would never have existed without me.’ ” Disney even brought in another mother to run the business. but this one had an MBA. “She said something like, ‘We’re going to make this thing slick,’ and I knew it was trouble right then,” Bill says.

After some further frustrations, Julie says, “In the end it became impossible for me to work with Disney. I couldn’t let go and it didn’t work out.” On the revenue side, Disney has done a remarkable job growing the brand. By 2006, in just four short years after the acquisition, Baby Einstein revenue grew nearly tenfold, to over $200 million. And Disney has resisted the impulse to “Disneyfy” the brand. The same logo Julie drew at her dining room table in Alpharetta, Georgia in 1996 is still the one on Baby Einstein books and videos; the Disney logo, while there, is small and subdued. But in another sense, Bill’s comments about the Disney attitude to the brand ring true. Professional actors have replaced the Clark family (Aspen and Sierra used to be regulars) in newer Baby Einstein videos, and the videos’ look and feel is no longer handmade. In addition, much of the revenue for the Baby Einstein brand now comes from licensed toys, baby toiletries, baby gear, and party supplies, among other items. In short, the Baby Einstein brand is not as authentic as it was under Clark. It is no longer the loving result of one mother’s efforts for other mothers.

As we leave lunch, I ask Clark when she realized that she had actually become successful. that she had made it. She laughs, and points to a DSW store in the mall we’re driving out of. “It was right there, actually. I can literally remember being at that store and having two pairs of shoes in my hands, trying to decide which pair to buy and then thinking, ‘Wow, now I can buy them both.’ ” It says something about the intimacy of Clark’s dreams that everything she values in life. from her children to the first (and last) corporate offices of Baby Einstein to the people who help her build that company. can be found within an arm’s reach in her original neighborhood of Denver.

I am curious about Bill’s comment about “Julie’s fingerprints” being all over every one of the products of Baby Einstein. The phrase suggests an obsession with detail that I haven’t yet seen from Clark.

Unrelenting attention to the small things is common among Accidental Brand entrepreneurs, but Julie seems far too relaxed to be obsessive. As we drive to the home studio of Mark Burr, who edited all of the Baby Einstein videos for Clark during the independent run of the company, Clark almost has to divert to a Wal-Mart to buy a Baby Einstein video, as she is temporarily without a copy, but Mark has one. Burr lives in an unremarkable townhouse development a few minutes’ drive from Clark’s old neighborhood, where he has turned the first floor into a full video production studio, with a converted bedroom featuring a full AVID video editor.

Julie is working on a speech she will be giving to Microsoft a week later and it quickly becomes clear that she has something very specific in mind. To an outsider, the process of video editing is tedious, but Clark is plainly no outsider. She relishes the chance to paste the perfect story together with video bits from the Baby Einstein and Safe Side tapes. She also seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of her own work. When Mark is looking for footage to fill out the music from an edited line, she knows exactly the single scene from among a dozen videos to pull. They talk by shorthand, completing each other’s sentences and thoughts. I later ask Clark about the Microsoft talk and she says, “I loved it because I was standing in front of this roomful of Harvard MBAs and really, really brilliant people and sharing my story. And I realized they were actually learning something from me.” The video-editing session reinforces my feeling that Baby Einstein was a labor of love for Clark (and it also reinforces my growing conviction that I will never direct feature films). And perhaps that is the secret of the brand. For Julie Clark, Baby Einstein was a child no less than Aspen or Sierra. Julie’s entire focus is family, and it has been consistently so for her entire adult life. As long as Baby Einstein was part of the family and brought the family together, Clark handled it brilliantly. When the business threatened the balance and sanity of her family, she gave it up. When Disney took control of Baby Einstein, Clark could no longer contribute. She couldn’t be a foster parent to her own child.

Mark chuckles when I ask him if Clark is obsessive. “Well, Julie is unusual because she is not only creative but very detail oriented. She knows exactly what she wants.” Julie smiles, and reminds Mark that he had once. after margaritas apparently. told Clark that she was difficult to work with. Mark shakes his head and changes the subject.

He won’t be baited. But it is easy to see that Burr has worked so well with Clark because he knew how to surrender ownership to her and focus on becoming intuitive at knowing what she might want.

Letting go was difficult. By the end of 2002, Julie Clark was completely done with Baby Einstein. she was no longer consulting for Disney. So she channeled her effort into a new endeavor. This one came from a new anxiety she had acquired as the mother of two girls.

She was not confident that they were getting the right instruction in school on how to protect themselves from strangers and the pitfalls found on the Internet. In 2003, she founded a company called The Safe Side to address the dangers of childhood. She decided to use the familiar tool of instructional videos in a new way to show kids good practices with strangers and with people who were not strangers but might still pose a danger.

This time around, Julie’s celebrity from her Baby Einstein success gave her a leg up. She had capital and a great deal of support. In late 2002, Clark was asked to appear on The John Walsh Show. This was the same John Walsh who hosts America’s Most Wanted, and Clark saw an opportunity. She said she’d appear on the talk show only if she got an hour of Walsh’s time to tell him about The Safe Side. The gambit worked and Clark got Walsh to sign on with her to support The Safe Side. Clark spent an entire year shooting the first Safe Side video, investing $400,000 of her own money to produce it. a hefty step up from the $17,000 the first Baby Einstein video had cost her. In January 2004, the video was ready for editing. Then, a few days into the editing process, disaster struck.

“I had worked out the night before and lifted and I was sore. I was sitting in the editing studio, rubbing under my arm and I felt this tiny, tiny bump. I didn’t think about it for a couple of days and then I decided to try to find the spot again. It took awhile but I finally found it. Then I took a permanent marker and put a dot on the spot.” Clark went to see her doctor, who was conscientious enough to send her for more testing. The next few days were a whirlwind. “On Wednesday morning, I had a mammogram. They looked at the films and sent me back to my doctor. I knew that wasn’t good. I had a biopsy on Thursday, and by Friday I was diagnosed with a carcinoma, an invasive cancer.” I ask Clark about her reaction to the diagnosis as we sit outside her new house, overlooking her pool and the mountains. She peers into the distance as she answers me. “Your whole life kind of goes black and all you think about is your kids. they were 9 and 7. I had them spend the night at my best friend’s house. On Saturday, they came home and we sat them down at the kitchen table and I told them, ‘Mommy got some bad news. I have cancer, but I don’t have the kind you die from.’ That’s what I told them, because I needed to tell them something but I didn’t want to terrify them.” Over the next several days, Clark did what most people do these days when they learn they have cancer: she used the Internet to read everything she could find about the disease. And she came to a firm resolution.

“I decided that I wanted to get it out and never have it happen again. I decided to have a double mastectomy, which was a radical choice. I saw five oncologists that first week and none of them recommended a double mastectomy. All of them said chemo, a lumpectomy, and radiation. But the thing is, all of these oncologists put you in a group. They have a standard path that they follow with all breast cancer patients. But my cancer was my own, it was unique. I didn’t want it coming back. Ten days after the cancer was diagnosed, I had a double mastectomy. I had no chemo and no radiation.” Here, she sighs and allows herself a smile. “I had my three-year anniversary on Saturday. three years with no signs of recurrence. That’s a big deal.” After recovering from the surgery, Julie’s first reaction to the cancer was to plunge back into work. She returned to The Safe Side with a vengeance and shifted her strategy away from retail sales towards schools. With Bill’s help, Julie championed an effort to donate a free video to every school district in the state of Texas, which is what got her noticed by one of President Bush’s West Wing staffers. She continued working at a blistering pace for almost three years, until everything caught up with her.

By 2006, Julie and Bill had left their first Denver neighborhood, and the basement that had seen Baby Einstein exceed $5 million in revenue, and moved to a dream house further out in the Denver suburbs. The stunning, 10,000-square-foot contemporary sits on a hill overlooking Denver with a clear view of the Rockies. As we walk through the house I get a sense of the vast scale that money buys in the suburbs these days. The ceilings are 25 feet high and it looks like it might take scaffolding to change a light bulb. Downstairs, Bill has put in a home theater that seats 10 in front of a 75-inch, highdefinition TV, just past the requisite pool table and around the corner from his office. The kitchen is modern and marble and there is a full dining table outdoors as well as the one indoors. The backyard pool is landscaped with stone and sits next to a cushioned basketball court. Julie’s office is on the main floor and looks airy. and slightly uncomfortable. In fact, the whole house seems a bit intimidating, somewhat larger than life. The feeling I get from Julie is of the slightest bit of buyer’s remorse. “It’s a lot of house. sometimes we wonder if we need it,” she says as I crane my head up to see some of the mementos from the early days of Baby Einstein.

Finally, in 2006, Clark began to change gears. “I decided ‘I just don’t want to work this hard.’ The cancer was a big wake-up call; it just took some time to get the message. I thought, ‘You’ve been given this wonderful gift. You had this super-successful business; you’ve got more money than you ever thought you’d have in your life. You were a teacher, for God’s sake!’” She pauses and laughs. “I mean, I was making $25,000 a year. My kids are still young enough that they like me and I can enjoy them. I was ready to just shelve The Safe Side, but Bill and I had talked a lot about the school opportunities, and he decided to jump in and take it over. I decided to go back to teaching.” So in the fall of 2006, after a hiatus of nearly 15 years, Julie returned to teaching, and in the same private middle school where her daughter was in sixth grade. She came back to teach poetry and English and to spend more time with her children. She is also training to teach a humane education program. geared to teach children how to care for animals, around the Denver School system. If she has any regrets, they are impossible to detect. As the light begins to drain out of the Colorado sky, I sense that Julie Clark is finally exactly where she wants to be.