They calculated their success according to what they and other socially responsible entrepreneurs call the "double bottom line": one tallied profits, the other good works. And they promoted it all in their catalog and in the press.
Of course, at the outset, when the Denharts decided to leave their home in Connecticut and head west to start a business, they hadn't given much thought to how they'd measure their rewards. "We just thought we'd start this business to make a couple of nice part-time jobs for ourselves," recalls Gun. "The only strategy was to sell high-quality Swedish products for kids." It was strategic enough.
The first catalog, which Tom photographed in Sweden -- in Gun's childhood room -- in only 10 days, was printed and mailed to 75,000 would-be customers. A tiny ad asking the teasing question "Why are Swedish babies so happy?" was placed in Parents magazine. Some 2,500 responses later, the catalog had pulled in $53,000 in sales, well shy of breakeven but enough to try again. By the second year, the business, still operating out of two locations -- a spare room and the garage -- began to post modest profits.
Because the Denharts showed a genius for design and customer service, their products practically sold themselves to the affluent parents who constituted their customer base. Marketing was a matter of placing the Swedish baby ad in the occasional magazine, renting reliable lists, and talking up the company's honorable intentions to reporters. Tom's instincts for image making had been well honed at Ogilvy & Mather, and he applied them brilliantly to render the catalog an understated masterpiece of direct mail. The book was a celebration of childhood in which beaming babies romped happily in bib overalls and cotton jumpsuits.
The catalog won a devoted following among upscale baby boomers who bore children and spent lavishly on them throughout the 1980s. Before long the company (which was named after Gun's grandmother) was mailing millions of catalogs a year and employing hundreds of people to meet the demand for its products. The founders' humble expectations notwithstanding, they had a booming business on their hands.
Astonished by their good fortune, they were equally surprised by the seriousness of their own intent. What had been hatched as a plan to liberate Tom from a grueling pace in the New York City advertising world had become something more than an exercise in self-determination or wealth creation or even business building. The longer the Denharts worked at it, doubling sales and sometimes head counts during each of the first five years, the more they came to view the task they were engaged in as a process of creating a community. They were inventing their own counterculture, right inside that old bicycle factory on 10th Street in Portland, where their ideals about the meaning of work and the proper balance of things could become not merely points of private conviction or the subject of Gun's scholarly interests but the stuff of lived experience.
"The purpose of this business is not selling baby clothes," Gun Denhart professes. Like the chorus of conscientious and often reluctant capitalists who preached about socially responsible business building in the mid '80s, Gun attributed a higher purpose to her enterprise from the start. "It's been a way to grow. A way to create opportunities for people to be fulfilled at work and find some deeper meaning in what they do." Since the company was making plenty, it was not about the money.
Gail Johnson, the Denharts' first employee and now the company's vice-president of operations, recalls the early years: "We'd be packing orders and, assuming we were going to be around next season, we'd discuss how we would want to be treated and how we would treat employees as we hired more. We would dream of the kind of environment we wanted to work in. We wanted it to be a humane place, a place where people felt comfortable being themselves, could grow, have fun. All of that. So we were going to create this workplace by conscious design. From the very beginning, even when we were doing horrendous work and logging insane hours, that's what we were talking about."
By the early 1990s the company had largely achieved those goals, owing to its steady accretion of perks and benefits. It seemed to occupy a place on a Platonic plane above the shadowy world of capitalism. Other, lesser ventures might spend their days putting off vendors or exploiting workers or stalking costs. At Hanna Andersson the mission was somehow more pure. As people liked to say around the place, Hanna cared.
* * *
"It's surprising how fragile it all is," says Gun Denhart in her airy office overlooking downtown Portland. The 48-year-old cofounder possesses an easy grace that belies the stresses that have beset her business in recent months. As the matriarch of a company that trades on cloaking children in the purity and innocence of Swedish cotton, she is served well by a pleasant reserve and a Donna Reed-meets-Ingrid Bergman demeanor. When she talks about the past year and the accumulation of crises her company has faced, her native Sweden lingers in her voice.
