The Baby Einstein videos accomplished great things, at least commercially. Sarah Conrad Gothie, a graduate student at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, tried to understand why. Her master’s thesis, completed in 2006, is called Great Minds Start Little: Unpacking the Baby Einstein Phenomenon.
“The Baby Einstein Company began in 1997 when former teacher and new mother Julie Aigner-Clark and her husband, entrepreneur Bill Clark, produced the first video in their basement,” Gothie explains. They “went on to produce Baby Shakespeare, Baby Van Gogh, Baby Da Vinci and others whose titles seem to promise visual, verbal and scientific literacy and creativity to any child who watches”.
Parents snapped up the videos. In 2001, annual retail sales were $25m, and the Walt Disney Company bought the entire Baby Einstein Company. Four years later, annual sales had climbed to $200m….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.