Today I received an email with video of Mary Engelbreit receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Greeting Card Association. Mary is the first ever person to receive this Lifetime award and truly she does deserve the honor of being the FIRST.
Mary Engelbreit was certainly a pioneer in the world of an individual artist carving her way without any experience in the greeting card or gift industries. Her achievements, her example was a role model for others who were working their way through these industries.
I remember very well my first encounter with Mary Engelbreit. Although she had been around a bit, I first saw her card and limited gift line in a glass "hut" inside the renovated train station in St. Louis when I went to my Washington U. college reunion, about 20 years ago. I was completely taken with Mary's whimsy, her colors, her love of life, her wit and I couldn't wait to get back to Tulsa and tell my Sweet Tooth partners that we absolutely had to bring Mary Engelbreit to our store.
We did exactly that and some people eventually referred to our store, not as Sweet Tooth, but "the Mary Engelbreit store". Mary's fans loved her black and white patterns and dots, her big splashes of red, her "flat egg" flowers and especially her cherry designs.
People have attempted to follow her example and to use her ideas in their art, but no one has truly managed to do it as well or as beautifully as Mary did.
Over the years we grew the Mary line....cards, t-shirts, dinner ware, paper products, stickers, dolls, art and posters, etc. etc. etc. There was unwavering support for black, white and red and of course, cherries.
In the last few years Mary's gift lines have disappeared. She continues to produce cards through American Greetings and some little memo pads, pens and so forth which are exclusively sold at Michael's stores. Several of my Mary friends can tell you that I was often motivated to call them and leave messages when I found something new at Michael's. At home I have an entire drawer full of memo pads, journals, and so forth. Our garage is a storage for many of Mary's gift pieces which I kept and between Mary and Betty Boop at least one-half the flags which fly outside our home are full of Mary's art.
Mary is still around but there is very little if anything in the gift world for us to carry in the store. I wish it weren't so. But I wish Mary at least 21 more years of success with her art and I hope that someday a few shelves in Sweet Tooth will be lit up with the bright and happy colors of Mary Engelbreit.
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