1. Why did you launch Make Baby Laugh!?
The beginnings of the company can be traced back
to the first time our founders, Bridgette (“Bree”)
and Dean Rutter, heard their son Van, laugh out loud. Most
parents will agree that a child’s first true laugh is
magical. For the first three to nine months, most
babies only smile or offer far more subtle signs of their
pleasure. But when that first real laugh happens, well, all
of a sudden we know that our babies are connecting pleasurably
with their parents and their world. This is where the idea
began...
Like all new parents, Bree and Dean relied on
learned “techniques” and intuition to find ways
to repeat the keen delight of their child’s laughter.
But after countless games of peek-a-boo, gentle tickling and
other time-worn favorites, Dean started to wonder if there
were resources available to help them learn new ways to make
their baby laugh. By late 2001, Dean started to casually research
the topics of prompting a young child’s laughter and
developing a child’s sense of humor.
In March, 2002, Dean began an intensive investigation
of these topics and concluded that, with the rarest of exceptions,
very little was available in the marketplace to help parents
learn new ways to inspire laughs and to develop their kid’s
sense of humor. As a successful entrepreneur (Dean founded
Apartments.com in the 1990’s), Dean saw an opportunity
to fill this void and have a great time doing so. Bree and
Dean formally launched The Make Baby Laugh! Company, LLC in
April, 2002 and released their first video, Giggle Together!,
in August 2003.
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2. What’s special about
Make Baby Laugh!’s videos?
We like to think that there are many things that are special
about our videos. First, our videos try hard to entertain the entire family
(not just your kids) while helping parents learn new ways
to make their children laugh. We believe that our products
fill a void in the marketplace — to our knowledge, no
other video producer tries to help parent get laughs out of
their little ones. Our products also offer positive and constructive
examples of great parenting skills — another topic that
is woefully neglected out there.
Somewhat uniquely, our video present parents with their children
(not actors) demonstrating things that they found to delight
their kids and inspire their laughter. They also feature dozens
of real families — folks just like you — engaged
in unscripted, joyful fun. The majority of our videos focus
on normal, everyday kids carrying on in joyful way —
not puppets, not costumed creatures nor animations —
real kids that our child audience identifies with.
In the grander scheme of things, we believe our videos are
the first produced with the express purpose of helping parents
to develop their children’s sense of humor. We believe that
by merely using the techniques shown in our videos, parents
show their kids that laughter is important and that this is
the first step to a developing a child’s sense of humor and a happy loving kid.
Perhaps most important, our videos are interactive in an
entirely new way. While other "interactive videos"
aim at getting a child to react to the video, we take a unique
approach and attempt to give parents "tools" for
interacting with their children. At least 10 times per video
title we show things parents can use to entertain and
prompt laughter. So turn off the TV and give them a shot!
Our fondest hope is that parents try the things that the folks
in our videos demonstrate so that the joy we share spreads
far and wide.
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3. How do Make Baby Laugh!’s
videos compare to other early childhood videos?
The home video industry places Make Baby Laugh!’s videos
in the "Developmental" category of the Kids &
Family video genre. Popular titles in this space include those by Baby
Einstein, certain Sesame Street titles, Babyscapes, Baby Genius
and others. Personally, we believe our video have more in
common with the titles produced by Big Idea Productions, the
creator of the VeggieTales franchise, as their videos teach
values and morals - qualities that echo our goals of helping
parents build stronger family bonds and develop their child’s
sense of humor.
Most of the popular Developmental videos are aimed at teaching
skills, imparting knowledge, exposing children to arts,
geography and cultures, etc. We believe that most offer a passive
viewing experience for the child and parent. And while they
do offer safe, constructive "video babysitting",
they focus on engaging or even mesmerizing their child audience.
Somewhat uniquely, we produce children’s videos that include content for adults yet are enjoyed
greatly by young kids. We believe this approach is important
given that young children and, by default, many parents, tend
to watch our videos dozens of times without tiring of them.
We think that our focus on entertaining the entire family,
building stronger family bonds through laughter and helping
parents develop their children’s sense of humor sets us apart
from most in the Developmental niche. We hope that you agree.
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4. How did you settle upon
your videos' structure/format?
When we conceived our video format, we very early on decided
that our videos needed to convey natural and realistic family
interactions. We felt that scripting performances or staging
things wouldn’t achieve our goal as parents might be disinclined
to try the techniques shown if our videos looked "produced".
In other words, we consciously chose to not to put words in
folks mouths, tell them to act in certain ways. As well, we
elected to videotape families, in their homes, in local parks and back yards—wherever they as families were comfortable.
With our format decided, we settled upon videotaping 50 or
more families for every video we produce. We place no limits
on what they do nor do we offer much in the way of direction.
Our style is furthered by the use of handheld professional
digital video cameras which purposely give our products the
"feel" of a home video while offering us the flexibility
and quality of digital video. Again, this was a conscious
choice as our overarching goal was create videos that folks
at home could identify with and relate to.
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5. Why do you include an
animated character with your videos?
In addition to the reasons we share in the Meet TickleMon
page, we created TickleMon because when kids fall in love
with characters, they don’t just want to watch them on TV.
They want to play with them, wear them, store their lunches
in them; they want to "live" with these new friends.
For better or worse, this merchandising occurs with virtually
every character that comes on the scene. Our desire to provide
a positive role model — something we strive very hard
to do with TickleMon — suggests that we want to eventually
offer a full range of products so your kids won’t have to
return to toys and figures that promote the behaviors (e.g.,
aggressiveness) that are counter to our aims.
As well, there are economic issues. Because home video sales
typically cover only a portion of our operating costs, we
know that our longer term success must include the sale of
other merchandise. So, knowing that folks regularly spend
money on character merchandise or apparel, we thought that
by creating a character that embodies many positives we might
persuade parents to spend their hard-earned money with a company
that uses its profits to make the world a happier and more
joyful place.
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6. Can I get the Music Soundtrack?
Sure, click here to purchase
our video soundtrack CDs. We do not anticipate selling our CDs through retail
channels so the only place to buy our great music is here
on our website.
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7. What are Make Baby Laugh!’s
plans for the future?
Make Baby Laugh! recently released two new videos
in early 2005 (see New Products). Similar
to Giggle Together!, these videos focus on kids ages 1 - 36+
months. Beyond this, Make Baby Laugh! expects to produce videos
that target older kids (ages 3 - 5 years and
ages 5 - 7 years) and to produce videos organized
around specific themes (e.g., Bedtime Hilarity!).
You might be interested to learn that our videos are built
around what we refer to as Discoveries: parents’ demonstrations
of the things they do to delight and make their kids laugh.
Because parents provide us with new Discoveries and because
with success more and more parents will likely share
their Discoveries with us, we believe that we will
be able to gather the material necessary to produce videos
for many years to come.
The introduction of our TickleMon character also hints at
the probable expansion of our product line into merchandise.
We believe that if parents endorse what we are trying to accomplish,
then we will be able to introduce additional characters, a
few of which we have already conceived. With more videos and
additional characters, we fully expect to expand our product
line to include books, plush characters, props/toys, apparel
and related merchandise.
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8. Who founded Make Baby Laugh!?
Make Baby Laugh! was founded by Bridgette and Dean Rutter
in April, 2002. Dean is the creative force behind Make Baby Laugh! and has had his hand in every task and decision regarding
the development of our vision, videos and the business as
a whole. Bridgette provided invaluable support during the
launch phase of the business by finding and coordinating most
of the talent that appeared in our first video, Giggle Together! For most of 2004, Bridgette served as executive producer for our Laugh Together! and Chuckle Together! titles.
Bridgette and Dean are the proud parents of a
son, Van (born in June, 2000). Van serves as our Director
of Product Testing and holds sway over many of our editorial
decisions. For more information about our founders and the
other great folks that contribute to our products, please
refer to our People page.
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