Calendar Girl Blog: Calendar Girl Blog: Guelph Mercury Saturday Feature

PHOTO BY DARREN CALABRESE/GUELPH MERCURY

Sue Richards, the 'Breast of Canada' calendar creator, is shown holding a number 3 sideways, which she uses in her 2007 calendar to symbolize breasts. The calendars raise awareness of breast health and breast cancer prevention.

Calendar girls (and boys)

By: THANA DHARMARAJAH

From breasts to firefighters and Mustangs to ponies, there are plenty of options. Some make money, others raise awareness. But how does one get into the calendar industry?

GUELPH (Nov 11, 2006)It can take you flying across the Canadian Rockies, on a joy ride on a Harley Davidson or through the personal gallery of Vincent Van Gogh -- the pages of a calendar that is.

Head to a mall this late in the year and you'll find calendar-crazed individuals lining up one after the other to buy calendars for their girlfriends, mothers and cousins.

"They're not just buying calendars," said John Edgar, who is the chief executive officer of the Calendar Club of Canada. "They're buying an art for their homes."

Edgar, who's also a University of Guelph graduate, is the face behind the calendar kiosks at malls across Canada.

The Paris, Ont., resident launched the concept in 1993, which would see 200 independently-run retail outlets now carry about 2,000 different calendars.

It's not just a personalized gift for your close family and friends, but also for those who are strangers, Edgar said.

"If you have an office mixer and you don't know much about somebody, but you know that they drive a Mustang car, then for $20 you can get a calendar filled with Mustang cars."

Soon after he graduated from U of G, Edgar tried a few business ventures before Barry Silverman, the owner of the Texas-based Big Horn Sheepskin Co., had him fly out to Texas to look at a calendar kiosk. Silverman wanted Edgar to try out the kiosks in Canada.

The first kiosk raked in $67,000 in sales and now the company is bringing in $20 million annually.

"If it was just a calendar, then our business doesn't have much longevity," he said.

But for a reasonable price, someone can buy another a dream. Whether you're a heritage war plane buff or a world traveller, as you flip through the months, a calendar can take you somewhere else, Edgar said.

The idea of producing calendars has been catching like wildfire.

Even Liberal leadership hopeful Scott Brison is stripping down to pose nude in a calendar to raise money for cancer.

He will be featured in the Women of Wolfville calendar, put together by a Nova Scotia theatre group. It raised $12,000 last year for the battle against prostate and ovarian cancer by featuring nude women.

Brison will be posing behind a refrigerator door, in the latest issue, which is fitting since he started out his business renting the appliances out to university students.

"My father's had prostate cancer," the King-Hants MP told the Halifax Chronicle Herald. "I mean, every family's touched by (cancer). I will do whatever I can to support efforts to fight cancer."

Guelph artist Sue Richards jumped on the calendar bandwagon in 2001 publishing the Breast of Canada calendar for the following year. Ready to launch her sixth calendar, Richards said it's been a long uphill climb to get her calendar where it is today. And it still isn't reaping in the big bucks.

"There's a myth that (calendars) are a good money-maker," she said.

When Richards dreamt up the idea, she thought it was a brilliant strategy to educate women about breast health and what is normal, natural and healthy about breasts. But Richards didn't account for the $40,000 debt she would be left with when her 2002 calendar sales did poorly.

She said what hurt was not to have the backing of a national organization.

While initially putting the calendar together, she offered to donate 40 per cent of her net profits to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation but was rejected since the organization wasn't certain of the calendar's fundraising potential.

Richards said it would've helped having more bodies to help sell the calendar and she might not have any printing expenses, since it would be done for a charity.

Now her calendar is affiliated with the Canadian Breast Cancer Network, a national organization that offers information and lobbies on behalf of breast cancer survivors. It receives the net proceeds from her sales, but she still continues to pay for the publishing costs out of her own pocket.

In the last few years, Richards has realized that selling calendars is a competitive business.

It didn't help that at first some people considered the images on her calendars featuring breasts to be pornographic.

In the pages of the 2007 calendar, there is a topless woman in a bathtub, several topless women reading newspapers on a bench, random images of topless men and women as well as a breast-feeding baby.

The idea transpired when her girlfriend mentioned a visit to a breast specialist, who examined her breast for lumps. Richards came home, typed breast health in Google and came up with 'Do you mean breast cancer?'

"I said 'No, there's got to be a difference.'"

Today, her calendar sparks conversations in homes between mothers and daughters, as well as other women who walk in the door and see Richard's work.

In 2007, there will be a handful of local organizations such as the Guelph firefighters, the Ontario Farm Animal Council and the Guelph Heritage Foundation putting out a calendar.

Our local firefighters have been publishing a calendar since 2000 to raise funds for the Firefighters Benevolent Foundation, which go toward purchasing medical and technological equipment for area hospitals. Rob Page, who spearheads the calendar, said the first year it was released all the models were fully clothed.

"The reviews I got was that they wanted to see skin . . . the next year, I showed them some skin and we haven't looked back since."

On average, the firefighters have been selling about 2,000 copies each year.

Page recently spiced up the launch of the calendar with a fashion show, where the firefighters strutted their stuff and gave potential buyers of the calendar a sneak peak of what they would be staring at on their walls for the next 12 months.

This year, the firefighters are trying something different than their usual 12-inch by 12-inch calendar and releasing a 4 1/2-inch by 7 1/2-inch day-planner that can easily fit in people's bags.

Page said sales took an out-of-the-ordinary dive last year, when they only sold 1,000 copies. He expects it's perhaps because workplaces likely frown on the calendar hanging in employees' cubicles, which is why he's hoping the new calendar style will boost sales.

Leanne Piper, chair of the Guelph Heritage Foundation, said she's hoping to sell 1,000 copies of their recently printed calendar featuring local historic churches.

"It's a keepsake," she said of the calendar. "It's a souvenir for those who're interested in historic architecture."

Certain historical dates such as when the city's founder John Galt died are noted inside the pages, including historical pictures of the churches.

Piper said the funds raised will go toward awards for property owners who restore their property and other heritage restoration activities such as the Loretto Convent.

Meanwhile, it's only been a couple years that Richards has been making money from her calendar. Last year, she raised $1,900 but said it's still not the money-maker she hoped it would be.

She's printed a slightly less ambitious 2,500 copies this year, compared to the 20,000 copies she printed the first year.

Richards still has about 750 copies left to sell this year.

Although it took her several years to get off the ground, she now has buyers from faraway places including Israel, Poland, Moscow, New Zealand and Hawaii. But she still needs the desperate backing of a philanthropist or organization.

"It's not a guarantee by any stretch of the imagination that you'll sell so many calendars. This is probably the last calendar, if I can't draw a wage."

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Calendar Girl is incredibly grateful for the coverage she gets in the Guelph Mercury.