9. The Business of Laura

Hello, Wilder listeners, Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. We've been working really hard on this and we're so grateful for all the feedback you've been sending us. We want to address some of that feedback in a few weeks in the final episode. So please consider this both an invitation and a reminder that if you have thoughts on Wilder to please let us know. All of our contact information can be found in the notes to

This week, Joe is.

Going to be walking you through some of the industry that Laura has inspired. As anyone who listened to her podcast Under the Influence knows, Joe is the expert in influencers and Laura is arguably one of the original influencers.

Now I'm giving you over to Joe.

Hi, Glynn, good morning.

I'm passing the pigs bladder baton.

We should get one of them. Oh, you know what, I'll bet someone makes one and sells it for like seventy dollars.

I'm sure if we went on Etsy right now we would find a number of pigs bladders that were branded with Little House.

By the end of the episode we will find out where to buy a pigs bladder baton, and with that, the business of Laura just just thank you.

We have cups, we have t shirts of course, the books always goal and I mean I've had almost eleven hundred dollars sales today.

Really, when you're on the road going from Laura Ingles Museum to Laura Ingles Museum, you're inevitably going to go to a lot of Laura gift shops.

Those little porcelain jack dobs for ten dollars I got, Oh, there's Laura Ingles Wilder homies.

I mean, have to get a coffee cup.

That's the kid. Yeah, coffee cups we love. I like these too.

The shops have everything. They're so not just books, but mugs, dolls, bonnets, candy, pretty much anything you might need to cosplay the prairie life.

That's the biggest cellar in the store.

Usually tin cups. Everybody like says oh yes, because you know that was the very first episode Laura and Mary got their own tin cups.

When Glynnis, Emily and I were on the road last summer, we spend a lot of money on gifts. Tin cups included.

Little tin cups, Young, They're cute.

Those are one of the most popular.

And then our slates with.

And it's not just us, hords of people do this every summer.

Over the whole year.

We can get up between ten thousand to probably twelve thousand a year. We've had twenty thousand in one year.

They come from all over the world.

Out Look at all of these people today.

This is all today.

Oh my gosh, today.

Are should we name the states through here today?

Yeah?

Here, Minnesota, Kansas, Nevada, New York, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio, California, North Dakota, Germany, Oregon, Oregon, Norway, now Texas, Virginia.

Maybe we've got all the states right now. Except when Laura Ingles Wilder set out to write her life story into the Little House series, she wanted to be a writer, an author, a successful one. Today, almost a century later, between the books, TV show and the intense tourism culture around her, Laura is undoubtedly a brand anyone who writes books today, much like Glennis and I do know that writers have to become a sort of brand in order to survive, to build an audience and to sell enough

So I like to call this look clean, romantic, prairie cottage.

I mean, I think you can just look at the popularity of cottage core as an aesthetic on TikTok first day of school cottage core.

Okay, y'all are going to think I'm crazy, but gone with a bonnet.

This dedication to living a very simple, homespun life. People are getting millions and millions of followers by almost cosplaying as frontiers women.

To be perfectly honest, when this line hit Target stores, I was actually.

A huge hand of it because one I love Little HULLSLM Prairie.

I grew up with it, and to act.

It can easily be argued that brands like the American Girl Dolls, the Pioneer Woman, Hillhouse Home, and all of the Nap Dresses all had Laura to thank for laying the groundwork of prairie life nostalgia.

I think a few brands that come to mine are Christy Down, lots of Calico cotton dresses, the Nap Dress by Hillhouse Home doan.

Entire home goods companies have been inspired by prairie nostalgia, including one created by TV Laura herself, Melissa Gilbert.

It really started out as a retail line sort of, but there's more to it than that. It's a place for women over a certain age, women like me.

From nap dresses to bonnets, to butter churns, paper dolls, tin cups, and many, many, many spinoff books. There is an entire industry of Laura that she never could have conceived of, though I kind of bet Rose could have imagined it. And as always, it thrives when times get hard, when people get fed up with their lives and have an urge to look back to a simpler era.

We've had in the past twenty years two pretty big crises. One was the financial crisis of two thousand and eight, and then, of course there was the pandemic that we all lived through, and in each of those cases the interest in Little House spite.

It is not a leap at all to say that Laura Ingles Wilder may have been one of the very first influencers. What I want to know is how did all of this get so popular? How did the fantasy of prairie life get sold to millions? I'm Joe Piazza and this Isness of Wilder. Hello, I'm Glennis, Lennis and Emily Great tomorrow night.

I know are you from Distory very a long time?

We just bought the place of February.

Really, Oh, I'm excited to hear your experience of your first pageant season.

That's Glennys and Emily arriving at the Prairie House manor Bed and Breakfast in De Smet, South Dakota. I sadly wasn't with them for this part of the trip, and I have a lot of fomo about that. But when they arrived they found this very unexpected story. You found Laura's influence, her sphere of influence, in a place that you didn't expect. You found that she had inspired this couple. It was Robin Eric Right during COVID. They'd done a road trip. They'd come to Smet.

They had grown up loving Laura Ingalls and decided to uproot their life from Denver and take over.

A big city, A big city, big city, Yeah.

Where they'd been for years and had uprooted and come to Desmet and taken over this bed and breakfast in

Right, if that's a big life change, there's.

A huge life change, and also a very kind of TV movie inspiring one. I'm just uprooting my life in the big city to open a little B and B centered around Laura Ingles Wilder. So they fled big city life. They bought the Prairie manner and now they're running an inn together. They have a business that is directly based on Laura.

It seems surreal sometimes, like when we come back from the grocery store and I see the house, I'm like, wow, that's ours.

Rob and Eric are just you know, the tip of the iceberg in terms of families who've tapped into their love of Laura in one way or the other and turned it into a huge business. Like we met Anne Lash who runs the homestead site, and her family bought that in the late nineties, and she talks about growing up being read the book.

My parents and my brothers came on vacation in nineteen ninety six and it was for sale and it had been farmed for many years, and a family that was farming it at that time they were older and wanting to, you know, move on and sell it and stuff. And so that's really how we came across it. So we purchased the homestead in nineteen ninety seven and then have over the past twenty five years kind of built it up into what it is and welcomed thousands and thousands.

Of visitors over the years. It's amazing to me that there is not just one, but two and probably many more of these kinds of stories. That Laura's draw is so strong that just one vacation can uproot an entire life. And it's worth reminding us that these towns are very, very small. Laura isn't just a business in these places, she is the main industry. Let me put this in perspective for you. The town I'm just met has about the same population now as the time when Laura lived there.

It is an economic boost.

As pageant director Bill Richards explained to us.

We use a lot of local people for supplies, for lumber, for concrete, for construction work, electrical plumbing, all that kind of stuff. The businesses that get the biggest boost would be probably the convenience store, Nellie's Cafe and the bar and things like that. The other ones are more I would call secondary effect, where because you have people that we hire out here, that has a multiplier effect as well.

Those houses, museums, and stores are all independently run, and then they also sell and profit off the things they're license from the books. The books themselves and the many many sequels and offshoots of them that came long after Laura passed away. And what I keep thinking again and again is whether or not Laura would have actually wanted this. How did Little House go from just a book series to a brand that can actually be licensed? Of course I had to talk to Glynnis because she is the

It's so hard to say, because could Laura have envisioned any of this As a question, I wonder, could she even envisioned the books having this impact and having this legacy. We know that she wanted to leave a significant part of the Little House rights to the local Mansfield library.

And that didn't happen because Rose ignored those wishes and granted the literary estate to Roger Lee McBride.

Yeah, I mean this has to be one of the great random inheritances in literary history. I mean, Roger Lee McBride's fate intertwining with Little House is wild. And even as a kid, I would be like Roger Lee McBride, person that keeps getting mentioned on the back cover of the book, Laura never met him, which is incredible.

Don't you think it's incredible?

Yeah, it's wild. And at the same time, we know from all.

The episodes we did that Laura and Rose's life emotional financial everything life was so enmeshed, so maybe Rose thought that she had not just permission, but the right to do what she wanted with it.

I mean, who knows. And it was Roger who ended up selling the rights to the Friendly Family, yep.

I mean we know that Laura and Rose had turned down offers from radio to serialize the books. This is sort of before TV was such a huge thing, and we know they had consistently turned it down. So as soon as Rose dies almost immediately, Roger does a one tot eighty, takes it to Hollywood to meet with Disney, and then fate intervenes and he ends up selling it to a Friendly which how we have Michael Landon well, which is how we.

Really have the Business of Laura, because the Friendly Family took on the copyrights and they've created a massive industry around Laura and Little House that I don't think she ever could have imagined.

I mean, I don't know that I could have imagined it as a child. So much of this is Internet fueled too. I think I would just like try and make these clothes for myself as a kid, or like staple brown yarn braids to everything I owned, And now you can go to at Sea or to Amazon and buy all of the stuff and it all exists. And that I think is like the collision of fandom, legacy licensing the Internet.

It's just it's so accessible now.

When we get back from the break, we are going to talk to the family that ended up with the rights to all things Little House. How'd they get it, and what's their intention with Laura's legacy and finally what kind of stuff is being created from it.

My father and Friendly acquired the rights to the Little House books from a man named Roger Lee McBride.

That's Trip Friendly. You heard from him in our TV episode telling the story of how his father created the Little House television series. These days, Roger Lee McBride's daughter still owns the copyrights on the Little House books, but the Friendly family owns the licensing for products and media.

Friendly Family Productions owns film, television, merchandising, theme park and other rights to the classic books by Laura Engels Wilder, as well as to the Little House on the Prairie trademark. When the television program was first broadcast on NBC in the nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, my father created a licensing program which included lunch boxes, dinner plates, beverage ware, posters, puzzles, board games, calendars, costumes, McCall patterns, and many other items.

The Friendlies take their role very seriously. They know that Laura holds sentimental value for a lot of people. None of us know how Laura would feel about these products today, but the things that are licensed definitely feel in line with the wholesome, cozy nature of Laura's children's books.

We've worked with a selective group of licensees that we believe reflect the values of the Little House on the Prairie brand in which we hoped would resonate with families and fans today. So simple, joy, optimism, charm, and craftsmanship, I would say, our integral parts. We would probably reject any inquiries that are not consistent with the brand values or are quote unquote are rated, such as alcohol, gambling. They're sort of vice products.

How much impact can a product actually have when it comes to the legacy of Little House, There's so much stuff that I wanted to find an example of a company truly manufacturing in the spirit of Laura and Goes Wilder.

The Queen's Treasures, in particular, has been a long time licensee and they continue to expand their line of dolls and doll accessories.

That's Rebecca Friendly Trip's daughter and one of the driving forces behind continuing Laura's legacy.

They have some beautiful eighteen inch dolls. We started with Laura, then Mary and most recently Nelly. They of course each have a variety of outfits and accessories, and there are some amazing doll size scenes.

So we have a obviously a Laura doll, and Laura actually comes in a night gown with a cap like they used to wear, and her box turns into a bit, so even the box can be used.

That's Joanne Particulia, the president of the Queen's Treasures toy company. Queen's Treasures makes pretty much every accessory that you could possibly imagine for a little house doll set.

Mary comes dressed in a pretty blue dress, and she has a lunch pail which has the typical things that she would have brought to lunch. GE's a hard boiled egg, a little molasses cookie, abiscuit, that kind of thing, and she comes of course with a little chalkboard. We have a black cook stove, we have clothing, we're actually working on a Olsen's Mercantile, which is really going to be cool that kids can open up and they could play shop.

Joanne started her toy business in her garage in two thousand and three by making doll trunks and accessories. Eventually she started focusing on Laura because she thought that story would be inspiring to young kids.

We wanted to do women who change the world, and Laura Ingleswilder is literally the first novelist I became obsessed with. I have reread those books. I can't tell you how many times. It just transports you to a place where for me, looking back, children don't go now. You know, every child you see has something electronic that they're obsessed with and staring at, and they don't have any sense of what history is. But Laura, She's just resonates with me.

Joanne's goal isn't just a tap in a demand for Laura and Little House, but to use those stories to influence people, small people, children.

We put these imagine this cards in with each product that says, imagine life over one hundred years ago, when there was no electricity and to cook on a stove you had to bring in wood and wait for the stove to heat up. And you know, we just go through scenarios that maybe children wouldn't even think about today. We have a lot of homeschoolers that love our products, so we really do try to keep it in an

Kids who are learning from these dolls. Joanne told me herself that she's felt way more connected to Laura and the lessons of the Ingles and prairie life while she's been building this brand.

I feel a little bit like a pioneer, if you will, you know, persistence and being able to face a problem and move on. They had so much adversity that happened in their life, and they still smiled at the end of the day and appreciated what they had.

It's the simplicity that we keep coming back to, the urge to go back to basics, have real concrete experiences, get offline. We hear it over and over and over again in our increasingly connected digital age now. So far in this episode, we've been looking at businesses that start with Laura, but a lot of them go way beyond her in the wholesome, cozy feeling of the books into our modern world in ways that you might not even notice. After the break, we're getting into the products and trends

Is the dog store?

I've never even heard of it.

It's like, you know, those like flowery prairie dresses that I wear all the time?

Yes, I do.

Hyeah.

This is where it all happens.

This is where that's me and my co author, Christine Pride on our book tour in la We had some time to kill and naturally, I felt myself drifting towards a store that sold prairie dresses. Yet another overpriced prairie dress. Yep, I see what you're talking.

I mean they're cute.

No, I know, they're like a real shoe. You can totally see Laura wearing these.

Right, she's lavender.

I have that actually. Yeah.

Wow.

Beyond the official Little House products, there is so much in our world that seems to be influenced by Laura. Her DNA exists in brands all over our social media feeds and in the real world. I fall for it all the time, and maybe you do too. I bring this up to Glennis a lot, a lot, a lot. So now I want to talk about things inspired by the prairie esthetic. And so I'm thinking the Pioneer Woman. Do you remember her read Drummonds. Yeah, her net worth is,

I mean absolutely, it's hard to see how it's not.

And then you have things like the American Girl Dolls, Kirsten the Prairie, she was my American girl doll, my first American girl doll, and her life on the prairie, again not directly based on Laura's life, but definitely influenced by the prairie nostalgia that is in these books. And more recently, you've got the nap dress phenomenon, nap dresses and cottage core. And you know what nap dresses are.

Wow.

Yeah, I looked in my closet and I have been suckered into buying nine nine of these.

What's them? You tell me what's the appeal there?

I don't know, because I've been influenced by cottage core on social media and it makes me feel like a beautiful lady running through the prairie. It's but and I'm not the only one. I talked to social media and branding expert Stephanie McNeil about the fact that during the pandemic, Hillhouse nap dresses. Hillhouse is the big nap dress company. We're selling over a million in inventory in something like twelve minutes.

Hillhouse is really interesting because the nap dress is a very kind of cottage core look.

They're definitely capitalizing on it.

That's the author and reporter Stephanie McNeil. She covers influencing branding and marketing on social media. I called her up because I wanted to run the theory by her that cottage core is fueled by longing for a simpler, cozy time, just like life on the prairie.

I could definitely see that.

I think it's also.

This idea of unbridled femininity that I think you see a lot in cottage core as well, where this embrace of a time where women could be very freely and dressed up.

Stephanie has a few theories on why these trends persist. It's never just one thing.

I think that kind of is behind a lot of these trends that are based around identity and personal style and lifestyle is I think people are really just looking for connection, and I think sometimes it's easier to be I'm going to go in on a cottage core and connect with people online who are really into cottage core that it is to I don't know, go to a gym class and find a friend.

Again, we circle back to the idea that these prairie inspired trends are just a longing for a perceived simpler time, a false nostalgia, and a desire for connection in an over connected world. But you all know from listening to this podcast that Laura's life wasn't actually that simple. Her family lived in poverty, she experienced so much trauma as a child. Her ode to a simple, happy, cozy life is mostly fiction, but that fiction continues on social media today.

Often.

You know, you look at these accounts and it's moralizing and prioritizing a type of simplicity that is actually quite expensive and quite inaccessible to most of us.

That's Sarah Peterson, another expert in social media marketing and branding and the author of the book Momfluenced.

I think the construction of this imagery is really interesting because often it requires quite a bit of money and quite a bit of aesthetic investment, but it's always done in this like oh it just happened to be like this, And I'm not putting a lot of effort in effort seems to be at odds with the performance of this type of pioneer femininity.

Sarah's right, these products are expensive, and it takes a lot of disposable income to be able to afford one hundred dollars plus prairie dresses and all the sour dough starters, pots and mugs that influencers and cottage core companies are selling to us these days. And I think it's worth taking a second to think about exactly what we're buying into. What is this sphere of influence, what are we trying to achieve with all of this stuff.

I think the prairie chic aesthetic is so big on Instagram, particularly for momfluencers, because it taps in to our cultural understanding of mothers as being connected to the divine feminine, as being connected to the earth, being connected to domestic spaces. I really think this prairie you nostalgic aesthetic directly taps into our cultural construction of the ideal American mother in a.

Way that makes for, you know, big business.

I can't stop thinking about this, about what makes the ideal American mother, the ideal American woman. How dresses and mugs and the collection of all of these trappings of prairie life play into our desire to buy our way into being more complete and happy women. There's a lot of brands these days that are working to create a place for women to figure out how to be in the world, and one of those is actually called Modern Prairie, and it was created by TV Laura Melissa Gilbert herself.

I think we all really rediscovered Cozy during Lockdown too.

Just before twenty twenty, Melissa and her husband Tim bought a cabin in the Catskills and renovated it into their permanent home. In her memoir about that time back to the Prairie, she recounts the joy she felt in letting go of the life that she'd built in La She let her hair go gray, she took joy in cooking and gardening, and essentially rediscovered herself in this genuinely simpler life. When she founded Modern Prairie, she wanted to capture this simplicity for others.

I think Modern Prairie's a space to remind people of that cozy, basic, woamy warm, those nostalgic feelings Boo brought up to the current times.

The initial idea for the brand started with just one product.

I have had this sort of little patchling of an idea for a couple decades that there's something more to do with just the entire sort of prairie ethos It all for me starts with them, of all objects, a butterbell. It's a ceramic holder for butter. You put the butter in it, and you put it in the crock and you put it upside down in water, and it keeps your butter fresh and soft without having to refrigerate it.

Modern Prairie now sells that butterbell for forty nine to fifty plus. So many other things go on their website. There's backyard roofstore, quoted place mats, a Prairie iron stone handled one gallon croc potmets, a set of farmhouse aprons, pinafoor aprons, tablecloths, and my personal favorite, the deep dish baking pan. But what feels special about Modern Prairie is

It's a place for obviously women over a certain age, the mature women like me. And it's not just about buying things. It's now grown into a community and we have all these workshops and everything from you know, how to paint with watercolor, to how to deal with grief during the holidays, to how to get unstuck, which is a big thing with women over a certain age. You know,

What I think is so interesting is that almost everyone we spoke to in this cottage core prairie life world seems to be striving for a simpler life. The people that are making it, the people that are buying it, everyone is trying to get to something simpler through commodification.

Yeah, it's a strive for simplicity and also self sufficiency in a world where neither.

Of these things really exist. And I think, are we all so miserable and overconnected and overworked that will pay for simplicity? This feels like a big joke capitalism is playing on us, by the way, because I think the answer is yes, absolutely.

Though I also think this, like this desire to get back to the simpler life, which is so well represented by Little House on the Prairie, is not a recent phenomenon. Like I'm just thinking of those old commercials we found from this eighties being like come home, come home to the simpler life.

Like there's always this fantasy.

Around getting back to this simple life, which, as we know, never existed, right, Like, they did not have a simple.

Easy life. They had a terrible hard life.

All of the people who actually lived in this time period would kill to live in our time period with antibiotics and electricity.

But like, the.

Fantasy of that is so pervasive.

So pervasive. It's so pervasive that people will pay, you know, fifty dollars plus for a butterbell or three hundred dollars for a prairie dress that is essentially a nightgown. And there's entire there are entire stores in Brooklyn to sell things that look like they could have been on.

The prairie exactly.

And also I kept thinking about how everyone wants to use Laura as a gateway to something else, as a gateway to simplicity, as a gateway to community, and it reminded me that it's always bigger than Laura the human being. It's bigger than these prairie stories. It taps into our very humanity, what we desire, what we're hungry for, and as this episode showed, what people are willing to pay for those things.

Yeah, pay for a sense of community and safety and coziness and simplicity. And maybe you two can make a doll out of straw and have just like a direct connection to sustainability.

I'm going to open my own atsy shop after this episode. Don't worry. I'll check in with the friendlies and make sure that it's kosher. And I'm going to make some pig Potter toys. Yes, yeah, we're gonna make so much money.

I mean, in this episode, we've come up with our own business ideas.

So listen, it's never ending.

It's never ending. It's never ending. If this episode has taught us anything it's that Laura is everywhere. She's ever present, no matter what form she happens to be in. Laura is going to stick around for a very very long time. In fact, I can't wait to see what ai Laura does now. That is a business idea. Wilder is written and hosted by Me and Glennis McNicol. Our story editors are Me and Emily Meronoff. Our senior producer is Emily Maronoff.