The E-Comm Show
The E-Comm Show
Turning Art Into an Empire: The Business Behind Mary Engelbreit’s Beloved Brand | EP. #194
On this 194th episode of The E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff sits down with Nicki Ball, COO of Mary Engelbreit Studios, the powerhouse behind one of America’s most recognizable illustrators. For decades, Mary Engelbreit’s artwork has appeared everywhere—from Hallmark cards to home décor—and now, thanks to Nicki’s leadership, it’s scaling across eCommerce, licensing, and even Amazon.
Nicki shares how she balances legacy and innovation, why creative brands need operational clarity, and how Mary’s influence still drives product decisions, marketing success, and community trust 50 years later. From email to brick-and-mortar, this team uses every channel to build demand—and a loyal customer base that spans generations.
If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to turn creative work into commercial success, this episode is a masterclass in creative business strategy, licensing management, and multichannel brand growth.
What You’ll Learn:
- How Mary Engelbreit’s name recognition fuels marketing across every channel
- The trick to forecasting inventory with a licensing-heavy business model
- Why email and social are their highest-converting sales drivers
- What it really takes to scale a legacy brand through eComm and retail
- Why their Amazon play is about real estate—not conversion
- How to navigate creative subjectivity when working with external marketing partners
Why brand trust still outperforms paid traffic in legacy-driven businesses
Watch the full episode below, or visit TheEcommShow.com for more.
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Yeah, for Mary's name and her fans. And what we do on our website, our E commerce site, we fully depend on our email list, our Facebook following, our Instagram following. So it's very social heavy from our side now, because it's a license, we don't do any of the sales for wholesale.
Andrew Maff:Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm show. As usual. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by the amazing Nicki Ball, who is the COO over at the Mary Engelbreit shop. Nicki, how are you doing? You ready for good show?
Nicki Ball:Ready for a great show?
Andrew Maff:Awesome. I'm super excited to have you on the show. I know you asked already before we even started. Why? Why did we want to have you on the show? And so I'm going to tell you, because I'm super excited to hear this very interesting story, as I mentioned when we were talking before. So we've had people on the show that you know, the CEO, the founder, was an influencer in one way or another, and then they got into a product line that they were passionate about, and that was their story. In your scenario, you are I love that your cat actually did join. That is fantastic. So if you are listening to the podcast now, you got to go to YouTube, because we, we've got company adamant, what's his name?
Nicki Ball:Reggie.
Andrew Maff:Reggie sup buddy. I don't even hear but, uh, so in your scenario, your influencer Mary Engelbreit is also the designer of everything. So she's also, like, actually creating more or less, at least the designs for everything. So it's a very interesting story. And I always, like, started these out kind of stereotypically, and just kind of give you the floor to tell us a little bit about your background, how you got involved with Mary, and we'll take it from there.
Nicki Ball:Yeah, my background is kind of all over the place as I started in hospitality worked for okay Fairmont Hotel, Chicago, San Francisco,met a boy moved to St Louis, and my husband actually grew up with Mary's sons. So I met Mary 11 years ago when I moved here and without knowing that I'd eventually join her in her business, um, just got to know Mary a little bit, and then did a little venture outside of the hospitality industry with heavy machinery and Caterpillar, where I served as a executive assistant to the COO and his five vice presidents. And then actually went back into fine wine, which did have a little bit of E commerce attached to it, but only for private collectors. So it was just like a very small group, closed website, password only thing, and then healthcare broker, why not? Right? Gotta learn that part. And that's when I eventually landed with Mary. She was looking for someone to kind of run the business, oversee licensing and sales and website design and E commerce, Amazon, Target, all the fun stuff, all the fun stuff. So that how I landed with Mary over you know, I've been there three years in June, so I just had my three year anniversary.
Andrew Maff:Happy anniversary. Very interesting background. You've been all over the place, so the business in itself. So Mary Engelbreit, an amazing illustrator, creates these awesome designs and then essentially puts them on many different types of products, and that's effectively what the the offering is on the website. Correct?
Nicki Ball:Yes. So we do a ton of licensing, collaborations, partnerships, we do a little bit of manufacturing and wholesale, but not a ton. Mostly licensing. You know, Mary was named Top license, or think it was a 2002 only to like be right under Winnie the Pooh. Wow, really, yes, number two. Um. Yeah, at that point in time, which is really wild, that was like, peak Mary. When everyone, I feel like, at least every like, Midwest mom and I grew up outside Chicago, so like, we always had her have her stuff, whether it was magnets or posters. My mom was a teacher, so of course, we had the read poster, and, like, you know, everybody's kitchen, we're cherries and checkers, you know?
Andrew Maff:Yeah, very interesting. So tell me a little bit about like, the business. And the approach is, is it kind of, you know, Mary comes up with some, like, awesome design, and then it gets implemented onto all the existing products. Is it you find good products, and then she designs it like, what's what's kind of the overall approach to it?
Nicki Ball:I would say it's a little bit of both. Mary consistently creates. So every Monday we have our team meeting, she brings us a portfolio of work she's just been working on.
Andrew Maff:Wow.
Nicki Ball:And it could be drawings. It could be, you know, like hand painted chairs or bangles, it could be felt embroidery, kind of really anything. And we take that art, because she still does everything by hand, so nothing's done digitally. So we have two in house artists that then take her art and digitize it,and from there, we put it in our database, and so it's open, kind of, to any of our licensees to do what they wish with it. Sometimes we know why she's creating it like typically calendar drawings, right? She has to do those. She has to do 13 of them. She has to do them every year. So those ones, we specifically know what they're for. But other times, she just kind of creates and then we say, you know, that'd be perfect for this licensee, like, let's talk to them. Let's do some more product development. Let's maybe phase out an older collection and phase in this new design. But it really, our licensees are so different, and they operate on such different timetables that we really get to do a lot of fun projects. Because, you know, our calendar license, we're talking about drawing 2028 right now, and 27 is dumb.
Andrew Maff:Oh, wow, really? So you're that far out?
Nicki Ball:Yeah, for like, calendars. But then there's like, other projects who are like, you know, cross stitch kits. And she'll be like, you know, I really want to do a collection of mermaids. And we're like, All right, here's all of our mermaid art you choose,you know, she will just make them and do them, and that's like a two to three month lead time. So we work in, like, reallydrastically different timelines depending on the licensee and the product.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, it is pretty cool though, that you have stuff that's prepped that far out. I mean, you don't know how many brands I work with that have no idea what they want to do next month half the time. So it's pretty cool to hear like we're prepped for 2027 and we're two years early to it.
Nicki Ball:People want their calendars early. You know, we just dropped the first two skews of our 2026 calendar, and we have two more coming in two weeks, and then two more coming two weeks after that. So we'll have 2026, calendars out and ready to buy.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, and I know with calendars, I've done some work in there before, I think they get, like, kind of complicated, right? Because you really don't want to, you don't want to over order, because then, like, No one's buying them after pretty early in the year, and then they're gone. So is it kind of like a limited run, and you just do it as, like, kind of a push sort of thing.
Nicki Ball:It is, you know, we've placed our order for 27 calendars already, so we have to forecast that pretty far in advance. And obviously, like, we go off past sales, but so does the publisher, yeah, so that's pretty crazy. Sometimes we can get more in, you know, if we sell out early, early December. But other times, they're like, Nope, there's none left. Yeah, and that's it. And it's funny, like working with different marketing firms or agencies, they're like, hey, but this is your top seller. Like, why don't you have any more? And I'm like, because it's December 28 we don't need anymore, because we're not selling calendars into, you know, January of then, yeah, the year that you have your calendar doesn't make any sense. Yeah, the day to day calendars we can do like we had. We still have a couple of those. That's the only thing we didn't sell out of this last year, and we sold out super early the year before. So we have like, 10 left, and there's 365, days in drawings of that calendar. So at least you could still get, you know, pretty good amount of your money's worth, still buying into June or July.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, what's, um, you know, with that point? Because obviously that you. That immediate cliff of not selling something makes a ton of sense for calendars. Everything else, obviously very different. And to your point, the calendars are prepped way in advance. But everything else, it might not be as quick. So like, I can see how that, from a project management standpoint, sounds super fun. What's the what is the marketing approach to it? Because I know, in in my opinion, like anything that is very design heavy. It's, it's one of those, like, beauties in the eye of the beholder. If you could be in front of the right person at the right time with the right product, but they don't like the design, they're not going to purchase it. So do you lean in real heavy on Mary's name and like her influence? Or is it also, is there anything in terms of, like, educating a new market?
Nicki Ball:Yeah, for Mary's name and her fans. And what we do on our website, our E commerce site, we fully depend on our email list, our Facebook following, our Instagram following. So it's very social heavy from our side now, because it's a license, we don't do any of the sales for wholesale. So we primarily rely on our licensees, our publishers, to do that part. With that being said for something like calendars of books, we've been with the same publisher for 30 years, so they know their buyers, and their buyers know Mary and so we can pretty much forecast that, you know, very accurately, and in other, you know, collaborations where it's just like us and another artist, right? So we have dropping this Friday hand spun cotton figurines, and she is an Etsy store. She's another artist. She's interpreted Mary's work as these figurines, and,you know, we'll drop them, and it'll be primarily social, and our email following, yeah, which is, you know, sometimes scary because you don't, you don't you know, especially when it's new. You don't really know, like, how it's going to, how it's going to, to hit your customers. But we celebrate Mary's, um, 50th year in business in 2027
Andrew Maff:Wow.
Nicki Ball:So our base is very loyal.
Andrew Maff:I would imagine your bases, yeah, bases getting older too.
Nicki Ball:They are getting older, so hitting that new demographic is really interesting for us. We have, like, teamed up with some younger influencers, especially like in the political space and just makers in general, a lot of younger artists. So like, Crystal from New York is a bit younger than Mary. We're teaming up. I'm dropping a new notebook line with may designs, and that's in like, I would say the demographic there is, like 25 to 45 versus our core demographic is like 45 plusmost of Mary's, like private face group, buy, sell, trade groups, I would say, are, you know, and those, those Facebook groups alone, have like 45,000 members,
Andrew Maff:Wow, yeah. And they're all buying and selling with any between each other, for the most part?
Nicki Ball:Only Mary Engelbreit products.
Andrew Maff:Very interesting. That is quite the community.
Nicki Ball:It's a community, for sure, and they are very opinionated. So if they don't like something, they definitely tell us. But we ask, you know, we get to ask them a lot, especially when we're doing designs, like we're working on a new pillow, like, um, throw pillows, um, that we're going to manufacture ourselves. And, you know, we just, like, we make redesigns, and then we just straight up ask our audience, what would you buy?
Andrew Maff:Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, like, the, it's a, it's a wide product line, like, I know you, like, you've mentioned calendars, you've mentioned throw pillows, I know you've got, like, active wear and the figurines. So, like, it's, yeah, we have teeth. How many skews do you have here?
Nicki Ball:Oh my gosh
Andrew Maff:Geez.
Nicki Ball:Um, because we also have so many fine art prints, the SKUs are crazy, like we have 1059 fine art prints right now available on the website, so total SKUs right now on our website, which we are shifting a lot of our apparel over to Amazon only, and on our Amazon storefront. But right now we have about 2700 SKUs.
Andrew Maff:Wow, interesting. Why? Why move all the apparel to Amazon only?
Nicki Ball:Well we can offer a better rate on shipping and free shipping on Amazon, which. We can't do from our warehouse because we don't physically have the product, because it's printed to order.
Andrew Maff:Okay, so are you, is it going to be are you doing an FBA? So basically, you're getting it printed and then shipping it off to FBA and just letting them fulfill it, and kind of maintaining those same designs.
Nicki Ball:Yes,
Andrew Maff:Gotcha. So basically, taking some of your top sellers to kind of keep the real estate on the Amazon side, but then using the website as more of a here's the special stuff that you can't get anywhere else kind of thing?
Nicki Ball:Correct.
Andrew Maff:That makes a lot of sense put anything else on Amazon, or is it just the apparel side?
Nicki Ball:Just the apparel now are all of our books through Andrews McNeil publishing and HarperCollins. Those are all on Amazon. Obviously, it was bookstore at one point. Calendars are all on there. We have a few other licensees that sell through Amazon. So you could get our products either from our website or Amazon, and obviously, with Amazon, you want to offer free shipping to be competitive, and so getting those listings up on Amazon and moving through that channel, I hope that We can reach, honestly, a broader audience who are looking so funny shirts or funny mugs or funnywater bottles, you know, something with a saying, or something with a pretty design that, like, maybe, don't know Mary, but are shopping on Amazon, whereas, like keeping them on our website only is a pretty narrow and not that narrow. I mean, her Instagram page had like, 4 million views in the last 30 days. So okay, that's super narrow we want to be broader.
Andrew Maff:Yeah.
Nicki Ball:We need to be in everyone's home to make it themselves.
Andrew Maff:I would agree, is that, are you thinking, uh, going elsewhere besides just Amazon? Are you like, have you ventured into, like, the Walmarts or targets?
Nicki Ball:Yeah, we also sell on target, plus
Andrew Maff:Gotcha! Anywhere in retail?
Nicki Ball:Like, stores like brick and mortar, yeah? I mean, our products are in Barnes and Noble, Books in million, Costco, Sam's Club, tons of small, independent boutiques across the country.A little bit of Ireland, so and Canada.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, no, so you are all over the place. What? Tell me a little bit about like, your trick to inventory management and the operational side, because, as a COO, I mean, you must have that pretty nailed down, considering it's all over the place and you've got that many different channels that you're selling to.
Nicki Ball:Yeah, because most of the product is licensed, we actually have a pretty easy job at maintaining our own warehouse inventory and forecasting with our licensees. Now, they have to do a bit more forecasting because they're out. They're the ones selling to Barnes and Noble. Yeah, Costco Books a Million TJX, but in terms of like our inventory management and making sure that we're usually with our licensees, like the number two or number three spot of their sales deck,
Andrew Maff:Yeah, wow!
Nicki Ball:Yeah. Like next to Barnes and Noble, that feels big. For an e commerce store without a brick and mortar. With that being said, Mary had 16 stores in the 90s and early, 2000s nationwide. So you know, up in Chicagoland, down here in St Louis, where we're based, Georgia, Texas, California, New York, yeah, all over. She had, it was kind of like a hallmark store.
Andrew Maff:And I imagine there's none of them left.
Nicki Ball:None of them left. I think the last one closed right around, like that 2008 market.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, that makes sense.
Nicki Ball:Debacle, you know, year I graduated college, like the best year to leave school, yeah, really in a recession, exactly.
Andrew Maff:Very interesting. So what's the, what's the growth plan? Like, what's, I mean, you're already licensing to a ton of people, you're already selling in a bunch of places. You've got 1000s of products you sell. Like, what's the, what's the plan going forward?
Nicki Ball:So when we are looking for collaborators or licensees, we are doing a lot of smaller women owned businesses. We want to be able to use Mary's platform to also, like, lift up their businesses. So we have a paint by number licensee out of Oregon. She's amazing. Elle Cray is the name if anybody wants to check them out. Sustainable women owned businesses is really what we're looking for. Obviously, if someone comes to us and they're, you know, like working with somebody locally in St Louis, we're going to do that like we just did a collaboration with mind flowers. Women Owned Business. Woman owned business. She's in her, you know, early 30s, late 20s, somewhere around there, and she hand pieces like acrylic clocks, wall art, light switch covers, outlet covers. She grew up with Mary in her house. She like how we found her was that she just made a reel on Instagram, and then I happened to know a friend of hers, and they sent it to me, and at the end of her reel, she goes, maybe a possible collab, and that was last year, of course, now it's come full circle into this year. You know, we've got earrings with her and keychains. They're so cute, and it's totally a different demographic subset. So that's the other thing we're looking for. Is the bringing Mary to a new generation who remembers her because of their moms and grandmas. And it just feels good and right, you know, for them, it just feels like a nice, you know, kind of big hug from the women in their lives who they grew up with that loved Mary or still love Mary.
Andrew Maff:That's a very, very good move that makes a lot of sense to kind of pull on that that like nostalgia, emotion A little bit, which is always a hot thing.
Nicki Ball:But 90s are back in Yeah, that's perfect.
Andrew Maff:Works out!
Nicki Ball:Yeah, we always say that was peak Mary.
Andrew Maff:Yeah. Nicki this was great. Reggie, thank you as well. Wherever you went, really appreciate having you on the
Nicki Ball:Yeah, well, you guys can find us online@MaryEngelbreit for Facebook, Instagram, blue sky, Pinterest, we're on all those platforms, LinkedIn, of course, and you show. I don't want to take up too much more your time. I know know, watch out for Mary. She's just on hometown on HGTV in March. If you didn't catch that episode, we designed tile for Aaron Napier. It was a super cool experience. So check out that episode. You could see us on QVC as well. We just dropped you're super busy. I'd love to kind of let you wrap stuff up an exclusive with them earlier in June. So we just have big things coming. And we'll be exhibiting for Mary's 50th here in St Louis. If anybody's ever around, we'll be making that announcement on social media, where that's going to be it's tell everyone where they can find out more about you, and, of going to be very cool. So we're very excited.
Andrew Maff:That's awesome. Nicki, thank you so much for being on the show. Of course, everyone that tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff and whichever podcast course, more about Mary Engelbreit. platform you prefer, or head over to Ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you all next time, have good one!
Narrator:Thank you for tuning in to the Ecomm show. Head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The Ecomm Show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth, go to bluetuskr.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the Ecomm Show1
