High profile: Phebe Phillips
The Dallas Morning News
June 6,2003
By Leif Strickland

About three times a week, Phebe Phillips -- Dallas' queen of haute couture plush -- gets in her Volvo, winds out the driveway of her Turtle Creek Boulevard high-rise, and sets off to work. Her destination is the garment factory where she designs her line of luxuriant stuffed animals. On her way, however, Ms. Phillips attends to other matters. Cruising through East Dallas, she eyes the neighborhood's Dumpsters and bushes and sidewalks. As soon as she sees a stray dog, she jolts into action, grabbing a kibble-filled bag from the passenger seat, raising it to the sunroof and launching it toward the dog.

"It's my paper route," Ms. Phillips says.

Many words can be used to describe Phebe Phillips' life, friends say, but "commonplace" is not one of them.

The 43-year-old Dallasite takes her dog, Fred, for daily trips through the park in a jogging stroller. She daydreams about cats and dogs when she's bored. (While stuck in traffic recently, She mentally rewrote the lyrics of "Fly Me to the Moon" from a cat's perspective.) And she makes her living by creating whimsy.

For two decades, Ms. Phillips has designed a line of plush animals known for their high-quality craftsmanship and exclusivity. With names such as Rumpus Bear (motto: "Rumpus ate too many honey waffles") and Kitty Pinkus ("I'm bashful, therefore I blush"), the cats, rabbits, bears, dogs, frogs, mice, pigs and elephants ooze personality.

Frequent auction lots on the Dallas charity circuit, they sell for $34 to $200, at Neiman Marcus among other places. They're also featured each year at the White House Easter Egg Roll. Fans can't get enough.

"Phebe dear," Helen Gurley Brown, former longtime editor of Cosmopolitan, wrote in a letter a few years ago. "While I was in the hospital for a little surgery, somebody sent me Kitty Pinkus whom I have renamed DREAMKITTY. She has been my constant companion for five days, never out of my sight."

Jordan's Princess Alia Al Hussein Al Salem wrote a letter to thank her for "the lovely toys" her sons had recently received: "I was quite amused at how much Hussein in particular likes his Frog Prince -- I wasn't sure, at nearly 13, if he'd be 'macho' about such things!"

Though each toy has its own style, the common element among "Phebes" is how uncommon they are.

"It's not expected for a rabbit to have ears this long," Ms. Phllips says, sitting a coach in her workspace in the Lorch Building in East Dallas. "It's not expected to have a violet rat. It's not expected -- but it's wonderful, and it works."

The same, friends say, could be said for their creator.

Unique from the start
Ms. Phillips grew up in Gilmer, a tiny town in East Texas, where her family's roots go back 150 years. She was idiosyncratic from the beginning.

"When you show up for kindergarten with red cat eyeglasses and a fuchsia dress with white polka dots, you're kinda set up for a certain kind of life," Ms. Phillips says. Her mother, Joyce -- "the creative one," Ms. Phillips says -- ran a children's clothing store. Her father, Otis, was an entrepreneur; he had businesses in the lumber and cattle industries. Their daughter took after both of them.

Starting around age 12, she began accompanying her mother on her regular trips to the Dallas Apparel Market, where she helped select clothing and toys for the store. Ms. Phillips was so unimpressed with most toys, she says, that she chose to have only one stuffed animal herself, a rabbit named Bunny.

Everything else, she recalled, "was so common. Cheap materials. Poor craftsmanship. Nothing to set them apart."

In high school, She was a cheerleader and class president. She also ran a record store called The Beat. ("I always had the best lemonade stand on the block," she says.)

Later, at Southern Methodist University, she studied broadcast, film and journalism and modeled on the side for the Kim Dawson Agency. After graduation, she got a reporting job at KXAS-TV (Channel 5).

It was challenging work, but Ms. Phillips was feeling restless. She wasn't sure what she wanted to do, and she quit her job to find out.

The Idea
The answer came in the fall of 1983. Ms. Phillips, then 24, was struck with the idea to create stuffed animals. She had never considered going into the toy business. Looking back on the decision, she's not sure exactly how it came about.

"It was the names and the phrases, I think -- I thought of the names and phrases first," she says. "I thought of the name Rumpus Bear, then I thought of his phrase: 'Rumpus ate too many honey waffles.' " And after drawing Rumpus, she said, "I wanted to create him."

Working with her mother, Ms. Phillips designed and created six plush bears.

She had to cut some corners: Her vendor didn't have any standard, plastic stuffed-animal noses, so she made them from ultrasuede. Ms. Phillips also used black eyes, not the humanlike colored ones she put on her later toys.

In late 1983, She took the six bears to the Dallas Apparel Mart, where she got a break almost instantly. A buyer from Neiman Marcus was looking for a local designer to make elephant plush dolls for the upcoming Republican convention in Dallas.

It was her first paid gig in her new business. Ms. Phillips was commissioned to make about 100 toys. But even more important than the actual job, She says, was the relationship it established. Many designers toil for years without ever attracting the attention of the likes of Neiman's. Yet Ms. Phillips had an in from the beginning.

"For Neiman Marcus, obviously, it's a perfect match because of the exclusive and the uniqueness and the quality," says Shelle Bagot, vice president and general manger of the downtown store. "That's why [the Phebe Phillips line] has had such longevity with us."

Stars are born
Her business might have started with a stroke of luck, friends and family say, but Ms. Phillips was hardly an effortless success. Michelle Racioppo, who has purchased about 50 "Phebes" for her daughter during the years, says the first dolls looked "sorta scary."

"It was something about their eyes," she said. "But they went from scary to adorable when she started cutting them differently."

The very first pieces also lacked the touch that came to distinguish Phebe's animals: the bottom of one foot is leather, inscribed with the character's name and motto, which she often signs during in-store appearances.

Friends call Ms. Phillips an "eccentric" and a dreamer, but they also say she wouldn't have made it in the toy business without being aggressive and aware of the bottom line.

"You really have to have thick skin to be in this business -- there are a lot of evil buyers out there," says June Chow, a children's toy and accessories designer in Dallas who has known Ms. Phillips for several years. "Someone will always be at the next corner ready to kick you down. You've got to be persistent and persevere, and she does that."

In the first decade, Ms. Phillips made many sacrifices in her personal life; once, she recalls, she fell asleep during a date. But by the early 1990s, she was overseeing production of several thousand toys a year, more than 100 of which she gave to charity. She also fell in love.

In 1993, she met Mac Hargrove, now 41, through a friend. As a financial consultant, he met her main dating criterion: He was not in a creative field. ("I couldn't handle two of us," she says.) They married a year later.

By the mid-1990s, production was up to about 6,000 animals a year. Ms. Phillips had a crew of eight working for her in the Lorch Building. Yet as much as she loved her business, Phebe says, she was growing weary."It was the same thing every day," Ms. Phillips says. "I was burnt out."

She did a survey of her friends about what she should do next. "They said I either should be a psychologist or a standup comedian," Ms. Phillips says with a laugh. She decided to go with psychology and started looking for a local graduate program.

But as she prepared to close the Phebe Phillips Co., she realized she couldn't let her business go. The answer, she decided, was to subcontract the production work, so she could focus on designing the toys and running the business. She found a small American-owned factory in China that specializes in luxury goods and began production there last year.

Ms. Phillips also enrolled in a joint psychology and theology graduate program last fall at Dallas Theological Seminary. Her long-term goal, she says, is to become a Jungian psychotherapist; to write pop psychology books and children's books; and, of course, to continue making Rumpus and company. The eclectic goals are fitting, those who know her say.

Robert Dotson, a fund-raiser for a local foundation, says Ms. Phillips"adds a new and playful and hopeful element in life," both for her toy customers and for her friends.

"We live in a very plastic society -- everyone wants to be the same, with their Lexuses and their Prada purses," Mr. Dotson says. "The special thing about Phebe is that she's a nonconformist -- she's very transparent about that."

As a result, he says, "She brings joy and hope and opportunities for discovery and creation at every turn, on every corner."