Our Story

My name is Dan Sherman and I own and operate Great American Collectibles. My wife (Allison) and I started collecting the Great American Taylor Corporation's Old World Santas back around 1997 or thereabouts. Great American Taylor Corp, out of North Carolina (owned by Jack Taylor), had first released their collectible line of carved, primitive folk art Santas back in 1988. During Jack's heyday (early to mid 1990s), the Old World Santas sold more than $1M in gross sales and was even sold through large department stores, nationwide.

Due to the rapidly growing popularity of the Great American Old World Santas, Jack started having problems scaling his operation to meet demand. By the late 90s, he was not able to keep up with demand. This is where most companies start thinking about outsourcing to China. But to Jack's credit, he was determined to keep all the operations here in the US. By Christmas of 2000, Jack was having difficulty keeping the company going and wasn't able to deliver hundreds of Santas for the 2000 Christmas season. Because we were collectors, we were aware there was trouble in paradise. We decided to try to help out as much as we could. One thing led to another and we ended up buying the trademarks and intellectual property that constituted the Great American Taylor line of collectibles and formed our own company called Great American Holiday Collectibles Company.

In February of 2001, I quit my job and became a full time Santa maker. Previous to quitting the corporate world, I was in software sales, selling software development tools to Fortune 500 companies. I had NOT A CLUE how to make a resin collectible. I didn't even know that resin was a plastic before the fall of 2000 when we went to Jack's shop in North Carolina to check out his operation. But I did know that I was an entrepreneur and I was bound to make this work.

But boy, I had no idea what I was getting into. I had quite the time getting up to speed on making resin collectibles. To top it off, Jack had not been able to deliver on many of the prepaid orders that had occurred during the Christmas 2000 season. So, we had stores and collectors calling us constantly, asking when they were going to get the figurines that they had already paid for. We had to explain the same thing over and over and over, to so many people. That we were a new company and we had no obligation to send their pre-paid pieces since it was Great American Taylor Company that owed them their merchandise, not us. However, we also knew that these same customers were the future of our company's revenues and from a good will standpoint, it just didn't make sense to leave them high and dry. So we promised each and every one of them that we'd deliver their orders by the end of 2001 and do so for free (we would foot the bill.)

WOW! That was easier said than done. By a LARGE margin. After we jumped into this business, we quickly realized that manufacturing and hand painting resin collectibles entirely in the US, and doing it at a reasonable cost, was a daunting task. Actually, a MONUMENTAL task. The retail price for the first group of 1988 Old World Santas (made by Great American Taylor Corporation) was approximately $22.50. That was retail price. So, Jack was selling them for $11.25 wholesale. Imagine selling a hand made resin figurine that took about 2.5 hours to make and paint, for $11.25. You can probably see how that didn't work out very well in trying to scale to demand over the long haul. Jack paid his painters by the piece and it amounted to a little over a $1 an hour, on average. The only way he could do this was because he basically found folks that just loved to paint and they didn't do it for the money. Jack didn't like paying that little, but the pressure to keep the price down to compete with Chinese made collectibles was great.

But I was undaunted. I was going to make this work, despite any challenge I faced. I spent day and night (working 18 to 20 hours a day) from February to September 2001, learning everything I could about making resin figurines. We rented a little dilapidated barn in the middle of a cow pasture in Sherwood Oregon, and I toiled away. We had a self-imposed deadline of Sept 1st, to get the 900+ backordered Santas (that we got no money for) out to the patiently waiting customers from the previous year. On top of that, we had the 2001 Christmas season looming, wherein we'd presumably be shipping new orders. We had to get those shipped within a month or so after the backordered ones were shipped to get the Santas to customers by Christmas.

After spending over $100,000 (money we didn't have), we shipped our first Santa in the last week of August. It was a HUGE undertaking. At the height of that season, we used the talents of over 220 painters, painting from their homes. By the end of the 2001 Christmas season, we had manufactured and shipped over 2000 Santas. You can't imagine how elated we were at the end of that season. To know we had gone from not knowing the first thing about making resin collectibles to having 4 full time employees and 200+ painters working non-stop to produce 2000+ pieces and shipping them on time.

I had an extremely emotional reaction on December 21st, when we shipped our last santa for the season.

A side note... that Christmas season WOULD have been even bigger had it not been for some terrorist plowing into the twin towers approximately two weeks after shipping our first Santa. That really impacted our sales for our first couple of years.

As soon as we started making our Santas, we quickly learned that wholesaling these little guys for $11.25 was just not going to work. At all. When we sent out our first batch of Santas in the fall of 2001, our retail price was $34. That means we needed to make a profit from a wholesale price point of $17. Uh, yeah. That didn't work out, either. Even with our direct to collector sales offsetting our lower wholesale profit margin, it wasn't even close. We lost money. Big money.

That first year, we paid our painters per piece, at an average of about $3.25 per piece. We relied on the same philosophy that Jack went by. We found painters that just loved to paint and if there was a bit of money involved at the end, that was great. But they didn't do it for the money.

We limped along, year after year. In 2009, our painter pay was up to $8 per piece for our regular Santas and $11 per piece for the larger ones (like Sam Claus.) By 2010 we were still not making a profit and had all buy given up doing so. So I decided to change things up a bit.

One of the things that had always bothered me was our painting didn't match the level of artistry of the actual wood carving. Out of financial necessity, our painters could not spend more than what was necessary on each piece, which precluded them from doing what amounted to more than a nice paint by numbers job on the piece. Instead of creating an amazing work of art with shading and depth. So I changed our process so that now our pieces are truly remarkable, not only from the carving standpoint, but from the painting, too.

Great American Collectibles now produces limited and beautiful works of American folk art. Art that you would be proud to hand down to your children and grand children.

In order to do this, however, we had to raise our prices. But we can now pay our people a decent wage for the great work they do (even though they still do it because they love to paint), and still make a slight profit, in the process. But most importantly, we're making a product that 100 years from now will be highly coveted for it's amazing artistry.

Welcome to the new Great American Collectibles. It's been quite the journey and it's only just beginning.

Dan Sherman
President and Head Santa Maker
Great American Collectibles, LLC