Scrapbook industry woos male crafters

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Apr 7, 2007 | by Kelly Crow The Wall Street Journal

Some men have hit upon another solution: outsourcing. Webb, the Atlanta firefighter, never attended another Friday-night scrapbook party. Instead, he found a local hobbyist, Jennifer Schwalbe, who finished his book for $10 a page, plus materials. Since then, she's made him five other scrapbooks, including several filled with his burned patches, old badges and matted photos of him washing the ladder truck, aiming a hose at warehouse fires and posing before smoke-filled buildings during training workshops. (He keeps his books in a fireproof safe.)

"At first the guys at the station called me Hobby Lobby," Webb says, referring to the chain of craft stores. "But everything I've done -- all the hard work -- it's in these books."

Custom services have popped up nationwide recently, though the notion undercuts the view of scrapbooks as imperfectly personal. Washington, D.C., architect Harry Martin paid roughly $1,700 to Deb Barcomb, who runs a small scrapbook business out of her home, to make five books chronicling the football career of his son Ingle Martin, quarterback for the Green Bay Packers.

Stephanie Culp, a professional organizer in Bella Vista, Ark., says commissioned albums for men need to be "clean, archival" and free of stickers, cutouts or store-bought embellishments. (She prefers to call them "career albums.") Using this approach and a $3,500 flat fee per book, Culp has built a clientele that includes Biondi, Fraser and Brett Ratner, director of movies like "X-Men: The Last Stand" and the forthcoming "Rush Hour 3." For the most part, she says, her clients don't care exactly how the finished product looks, so long as they come across well.

The method works for Biondi. The former Viacom chief executive says that ever since he received a 10-volume scrapbook set as a holiday gift from his wife several years ago, he often mails Culp ephemera for future albums, including photos of him as a center fielder in Little League and internal memos from his early days at HBO.

Some men have an altogether different word for their newfound hobby: romantic. After Mike Blanc got divorced a few years ago, the agricultural researcher from Oakland, Neb., sifted through photo negatives and decided to create a scrapbook featuring only him with his seven children. His search for supplies and help reconnected him to his high-school sweetheart, who happened to sell scrapbook goods. Two years ago, the couple married, and now they occasionally scrap on "date night" Wednesdays, he says. "It's a real aphrodisiac."