Wisdom Wednesday - Savannah and Friends/Chantelle
This will be a short Wednesday Wisdom, as it it very hard for me to find information about this company and doll line. If you have any information, please let me know through email (sweetpeacaty@gmail.com) or commenting below.
Savannah and Friends was a line in the mid to late 1990s made by children's clothing company Storybook Heirlooms. 1.1, 1.2
The first doll, named Chantelle, was modelled after the Storybook Heirlooms' model Chantelle Paige 1.1 (who is now a singer 2). (I have messaged Chantelle Paige through her Facebook page, asking her if she has any knowledge of it and if she knows anything about Storybook Heirlooms, I will update if I get a response).
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| Chantelle Paige in real life at age 8 |
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| The horror that is supposed to look like the real life girl I showed you. |
I know I try to refrain from placing my own opinion in the middle of the knowledge, but... The source I got this from says that "obviously, the sculptor did not succeed in making the vinyl Chantelle as pretty as the real Chantelle" . I agree, the face of this doll just looks so wrong, like a childhood pagent beauty who's gone through twenty thousand plastic surgeries and botoxes, which the real Chantelle did not look like. I found some catalog pages from Chantelle's time. Most of the items offered for sale are clothing, most of which have girl sizes available 1.3. In fact, the only furniture-related item for Chantelle was a sleeping bag.
Chantelle's facemold is probably why this doll only was made for a short while 1.1 . Even though the tie-in doll book (remember, this was the height of the American Girl craze) was called Chantelle and the School Play 1.1, the line's name got changed to Savannah and Friends 1.2.
The Savannah and Friends doll line differs in face mold from the Chantelle doll 1.2. This face change improved sales and eventually three more dolls were added. She also had a friend named Lily Bear.
The line was originally just called 'Savannah and Lily Bear' 5. The main gimmick/selling point was that Savannh could be dressed to look like your daughter through fashions available through Storybook Heirlooms. They also sold varying furniture, from wicker chairs, a fancy bed (that Samantha Parkington would envy) and a regular set of tables and chairs.
Sadly, that is all I know about Storybook heirloom's dolls. I don't know what year(s) the new dolls were introduced, other than their names and the fact they existed 1.2.
Storybook Heirlooms, according to www.justmagicdolls.com, is still in business while the dolls are no longer produced. Yet a Google search for Storybook Heirlooms turns up other companies that don't have anything to do with Storybook Heirlooms. Digging a little found that (like with Gali Girls) the company closed its doors. It took me a LOT of work to figure that out!
The company was sold in 1998 to Delia's, but the article I found 3 says that it had over 600,000 buyers in its house file (... I have no idea what that means, but apparently it's a good thing) after owing its customers $1.2 million (that's now about $1.8 million today 4). I found a picture using Pinterest of a catalog page that includes a phone number and a website - www.storybookonline.com. I went to the website just for it to redirect me to a website www.buycostumes.com that in turn redirects me to a Swagbucks 'save x amount of money using cash back', even when I just typed in the regular web address...
When I went to get the web address for the Pintrest pin, I got lead into a deeper rabbit hole thanks to a website called Behance, which has an archive of Storybook Heirloom's catalogs, with a concise date of 1994 - 2006. So Storybook Heirlooms must have closed down in 2006, since JustMagicDolls' page(s) were last edited in 2004. The 2006 pages have a website of just www.storybook.com, but I get redirected to the same two websites when I try to go to them.
Thanks to my trusty tool, the Web Archive (also known as the Wayback Machine), I was able to find information about the website(s) Storybook Heirlooms had. www.storybook.com was a Wedding Photographer's site in 1996, that started simple at first then got more complicated until the website moved to http://teresahalton.com/ in 2001 (http://teresahalton.com/ still actually works, believe it or not, and she is still in the photography business for the San Carlos CA area). The redirect page stayed that way until Storybook Heirlooms acquired it in 2002. They did in fact begin shutting their doors in 2006 but the site stayed up until March 2008. There was only one shot of www.storybookonline.com dating from 1999.
Now it's time everyone's favorite part, why do I think the company went under? I think it may be because nowadays, people don't really want to dress their kids up nice and fancy and have all their kids dress a like. Some parents still have mom and daughter matching outfits, but it isn't common. I guess there was more of a market for Easter/fancy dresses in the 1990s than in the late 2000s? I have no honest clue. I think the fact that Storybook Heirlooms was not that well known (and thus why I can't find anything about them) led to their and their doll line's demise.
I honestly really love Wisdom Wednesday. Doing this research makes me feel awesome. Digging up old/defunct doll lines and giving them the light of day is quite nice. Only bad thing about it is when I hit a dead end, like today. I hope that these articles help anyone looking for more information about these dolls and the companies behind them.
Links Cited
The company was sold in 1998 to Delia's, but the article I found 3 says that it had over 600,000 buyers in its house file (... I have no idea what that means, but apparently it's a good thing) after owing its customers $1.2 million (that's now about $1.8 million today 4). I found a picture using Pinterest of a catalog page that includes a phone number and a website - www.storybookonline.com. I went to the website just for it to redirect me to a website www.buycostumes.com that in turn redirects me to a Swagbucks 'save x amount of money using cash back', even when I just typed in the regular web address...
When I went to get the web address for the Pintrest pin, I got lead into a deeper rabbit hole thanks to a website called Behance, which has an archive of Storybook Heirloom's catalogs, with a concise date of 1994 - 2006. So Storybook Heirlooms must have closed down in 2006, since JustMagicDolls' page(s) were last edited in 2004. The 2006 pages have a website of just www.storybook.com, but I get redirected to the same two websites when I try to go to them.
Thanks to my trusty tool, the Web Archive (also known as the Wayback Machine), I was able to find information about the website(s) Storybook Heirlooms had. www.storybook.com was a Wedding Photographer's site in 1996, that started simple at first then got more complicated until the website moved to http://teresahalton.com/ in 2001 (http://teresahalton.com/ still actually works, believe it or not, and she is still in the photography business for the San Carlos CA area). The redirect page stayed that way until Storybook Heirlooms acquired it in 2002. They did in fact begin shutting their doors in 2006 but the site stayed up until March 2008. There was only one shot of www.storybookonline.com dating from 1999.
Now it's time everyone's favorite part, why do I think the company went under? I think it may be because nowadays, people don't really want to dress their kids up nice and fancy and have all their kids dress a like. Some parents still have mom and daughter matching outfits, but it isn't common. I guess there was more of a market for Easter/fancy dresses in the 1990s than in the late 2000s? I have no honest clue. I think the fact that Storybook Heirlooms was not that well known (and thus why I can't find anything about them) led to their and their doll line's demise.
- www.justmagicdolls.com
- http://www.justmagicdolls.com/meet/StorybookHeirlooms/SHChantelle.htm
- http://www.justmagicdolls.com/meet/StorybookHeirlooms/SHSavannah.htm
- http://www.justmagicdolls.com/meet/StorybookHeirlooms/SHChantelleVC.htm
- https://myspace.com/chantellepaige
- http://multichannelmerchant.com/marketing/relaunches-fairy-tale-ending-for-storybook/#_
- https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1200000&year1=199801&year2=201711
- https://www.behance.net/gallery/4296845/Storybook-Heirlooms-Sampling-of-Work-1994-2006
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