It started with an elephant — the complete story
It started with an elephant.
Before the teddy bear, there was a small felt elephant. It was meant to hold pins.
In Giengen, a town in southern Germany, Margarete Steiff made an ordinary sewing-room object that children wanted to play with. A pincushion could become a creature. Something useful could also become something loved.
The business that followed would carry her name far beyond that room. But its beginning was modest: fabric, a pattern, and a little animal finding a different purpose in someone else’s hands.
The elephant’s change from pincushion to toy is documented; the paper scenes are imaginative reconstructions.
A livelihood, stitch by stitch.
Margarete was a trained seamstress before she became a toy manufacturer.
Born in 1847, she contracted polio as a toddler. It left her legs paralyzed and affected her right arm. She learned tailoring, worked with her sisters, and established a felt-clothing business in 1877.
This was skilled, practical work: garments and household articles, customers and orders. Toys were still ahead. Her story begins with a woman building a livelihood, and with a material she already knew how to cut, shape, and sew.
The business began with felt garments and household articles. The toys grew out of a craft Margarete already practiced.
A pattern. A pincushion. A plaything.
Late in 1879, Margarete found an elephant pattern in a fashion journal.
She made it in felt as a pincushion. Children’s interest opened another possibility: the same soft animal could belong in their games. By 1880, the little elephant had become the beginning of a toy business.
There is a small act of imagination in treating an object as a creature. A shape cut from felt becomes an elephant; a child gives that elephant a part in a game. The sewing room and the playroom meet in the same object.
Steiff dates its manufacturing business to 1880; the pattern is documented in late 1879.
The elephant acquired company.
Horses, monkeys, pigs, and other animals followed the elephant into the range.
In 1893, the toy business entered the commercial register. Four seamstresses and ten home workers helped make its products. The animals also appeared at the Leipzig Toy Fair.
A collection was becoming a company. Behind each new creature were repeated tasks: pieces to cut, bodies to fill, seams to close. The name on the business was Margarete’s; the work was already shared among many people.
Four seamstresses. Ten home workers. Even this early in its history, the workshop extended beyond its own walls.
Then came a bear that could move.
Margarete’s nephew Richard Steiff designed a jointed plush bear called 55 PB.
Its arms and legs could move. Margarete was initially skeptical about its commercial prospects. The familiar company story was about to take a new direction, through a design that belonged to the next generation.
A movable toy invites arrangement: a different posture, a new part in a game. It can sit beside its owner, stretch out, or take a place among other animals. The maker supplies the joints; the child supplies the story.
No original 55 PB is known to survive; Steiff’s illustrated example is a later replica.
The bear went to the fair.
Richard’s design appeared at the Leipzig Spring Fair in 1903.
Steiff’s account records an American buyer’s order for 3,000 bears. It is a striking change of scale: one design, a trade-fair stand, and a market across the Atlantic.
The teddy bear’s history has more than one beginning. In Brooklyn, Morris and Rose Michtom were also making bears, inspired by the story of President Theodore Roosevelt refusing to shoot a captured bear. These strands belong beside one another.
Two beginnings, an ocean apart: Richard’s bear in Germany and the Michtoms’ bears in the United States. The familiar toy has a shared history.
Nearly a million bears. Many more hands.
By 1907, Steiff reported production of 973,999 teddy bears.
The workforce numbered 400 employees and 1,800 home workers. The company’s expansion reached beyond a single factory building into the homes where much of its work was done.
A small identifying detail traveled with the animals: the button in the ear, introduced in 1904 by another nephew, Franz. At this scale, a tiny mark connected each individual toy to the business that made it.
Production and workforce totals are historical company figures, also reported by Germany’s patent and trade mark office.
A business can be counted. Affection cannot.
Margarete died in 1909. Her nephews continued the company.
The records give us dates, designs, orders, and quantities. They tell us how a sewing business became a toy manufacturer. They cannot account for every private life those toys entered.
That is where this story leaves the workshop: with an animal small enough to hold, and room for its owner’s imagination. The elephant began as an object with a job to do. Becoming a companion was another kind of usefulness.
From Elefäntle to the bear: a pattern becomes an animal, and an animal becomes part of someone’s world.
Sources: [1] German Patent and Trade Mark Office · Margarete Steiff [2] Field House Museum · Field Notes, Summer 2017 [3] Steiff · Company history [4] Steiff · Iconic teddy bears [5] National Park Service · Steiff Teddy Bear