ANKE MORGENROTH, founder of Bear Essentials, describes her day
I MOVED FROM Germany to Ireland in 1984 and fell in love with the Cavan countryside.
I started out designing teddy bears five days a week, but now the tourism element has grown so much that I spend four days organising tour groups and workshops and get just one day a week to make bears. Still, it’s great to be so busy.
As well as a showroom and gift shop we run all sorts of events. Yesterday we had a teddy bear’s picnic for 60 schoolchildren, which was brilliant. They have such a strict regimen at school that it’s nice for kids to be able to run wild a bit here, although I’m always exhausted at the end of it.
Most mornings I spend on the laptop, trying to generate tourism business and working with hotels and BBs to organise accommodation.
We run a mohair-bear collectables summer school each year – the only one of its kind – and at the moment I’m spending a lot of time organising that. We’re in the middle of nowhere, and, as anyone in rural tourism knows, you have to keep coming up with ideas to get people to visit.
I run teddy-bear barbecues, where people come and make their own bears and then we all eat afterwards. We very often get families coming to do them together.
What’s lovely about the family workshops is that parents and children can put messages into their bear and learn how to get them out when they are older.
I grew up with the Steiff teddy-bear tradition all around me, so bears were always a big deal. I also love real bears, and in fact bear bones have been found in this region, so we know they did exist here.
One of our most popular events is a wildlife discovery tour, where we bring kids out with a wildlife expert to see various creatures and then they come back to the centre and make the creatures themselves.
My own kids are quite grown up now, and they all help out. We have huge gardens with greenhouses and orange and lemon orchards. Happily, one of my children is a landscape designer, another is a wood turner and my daughter helps with the centre.
My other son is a DJ, so that’s not quite as much use to me, but he’s studying computers, so maybe in time!
We are surrounded by bears here, including valuable antique bears and a childhood bear of my own, which I keep in a glass case.
At 7pm I shut up the centre, shut down the computer and try to have an evening. Even in the bedroom, though, there are seven or eight bears around the place, so there’s no escaping.
* Anke Morgenroth is founder of Bear Essentials, Bawnboy, Co Cavan, 049-9523461, www.bearessentials.ie