1. Why did you launch Make Baby Laugh!?
2. What's special about Make Baby Laugh!'s videos?
3. How do Make Baby Laugh!'s videos compare to other early childhood videos?
4. How did you settle upon the structure/format of your videos?
5. Why did you integrate an animated character with your videos?
6. Can I get the Music Soundtrack?
7. What are Make Baby Laugh!'s plans for the future?
8. Who founded Make Baby Laugh!?
1. Why did you launch Make Baby Laugh!?
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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 somewhere between three and 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 parent 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.
2. What's special about Make Baby Laugh!'s videos?
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We like to think that there are many things that are special about our videos. First, our videos 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 series 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.
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 parents things they 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.
3. How do Make Baby Laugh!'s videos compare to other early childhood videos?
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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 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 and exposing children to arts, geography and cultures. 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 almost exclusively on the child.
Somewhat uniquely, we produce children's videos that not only include content for adults, but are generally enjoyed by kids and adults alike. 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.
4. How did you settle upon the structure/format of your videos?
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As 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 parks, in their 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.
5. Why did you integrate an animated character with the video?
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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 merchandizing 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 need 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.
6. Can I get the Music Soundtrack?
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Sure, visit Giggle Together! Music Soundtrack to purchase the CD. We do not anticipate selling our CDs through retail channels so the only place to buy our great music is here on our website.
7. What are Make Baby Laugh!'s plans for the future?
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Make Baby Laugh! plans to release two new videos in early 2004 (see Products - Future Plans). Similar to Giggle Together!, these videos will significantly adhere to the Giggle Together!'s format and focus on kids ages 6 - 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 Chuckles!).
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 our success will likely result more and more parents sharing more and more 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.
8. Who founded Make Baby Laugh!?
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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!
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.
