The forgotten brand that inspired The Six Bells
A middle-market design empire and the afterlife of “country”
Hello. This is a Substack where we (me, Audrey Gelman, owner of The Six Bells, and the people who work with me) will write about design and hospitality as well as the books, places, and businesses which influence how we think about building The Six Bells.
About ten years ago, I caught what you could call the country bug. Country design comes in a lot of flavors, and I don’t like all of them. I’m not drawn to “cold sparse country” which can have an austere restraint that feels like a room is grading you about whether you’re pure enough to be in it. “Western ranch country” is not my world because I’m so east-coast rooted. I’m not into French country which is fussy and makes me think of lavender sachets and crystal chandeliers and Provence-by-way-of-HomeGoods.
My tastes run toward a slightly kitschy, 90s-inflected country, almost a “catalogue copy” version of colonial country. I love it because it evokes a disappearing feeling, and has a weird dog-whistle quality for millennials. You see it and you’re suddenly eight years old again in your grandmother’s kitchen. Braided rugs, rocking chairs, baskets, gingham, wall stencils, crocks, American spongeware - this is my shit!
In the 80’s and early 90’s for a brief but influential period, this kind of country was everywhere. There was a middle-market commercial country boom that was designed for ordinary American homes, accessibly priced. Longaberger, Vermont Country Store, Laura Ashley, Ethan Allen are still going concerns or household names but not the brand I am writing about today.
NEW COUNTRY GEAR moved an enormous amount of product yet now feels strangely absent from the internet and from public memory ($2 billion in sales by some accounts) and then disappeared. There’s no archive. All that’s left is an occasional eBay listing. But this forgotten brand was the reference point I kept coming back to when I started building The Six Bells. (My original Pinterest board can be found here.)
The brand began with a coffee table book: American View: New Country Gear, published in 1984 and credited to Raymond Waites with Bettye Martin and Norma Skurka. There are a million interior design books from that era that will tell you how to display patterned plates, but what drew me in wasn’t just the book itself, it was the business Waites built around it.
The coffee table book’s commercial success became the foundation first of GEAR HOLDINGS, a marketing firm, and then of New Country Gear, a product universe and licensing brand founded by Waites with his co-author Bettye Martin and marketing executive Judith Garb. Before publishing American View, Waites had worked for Marimekko, Martin for a Louis Vuitton executive, and Garb had been an executive at Bloomingdale’s with a Harvard M.B.A.
Working out of a converted barn in Buck’s County that served as a design laboratory, they studied traditional American quilts, crockery, and furniture as source material, developing a design language rooted in vernacular American design traditions. The concept expanded through licensing, with New Country Gear products including textiles, wallpaper, kitchen goods and a line of paint which were sold in retailers across the country.
In a 1981 piece The New York Times declared New Country Gear a “runaway success. The Times quoted Marc Balmuth, Macy’s senior vice president of merchandising, ‘‘In its first year, Gear became our most productive area in home furnishings.’
The Times piece chronicled the brand’s growth in two short years:
This past spring in its second year, Gear introduced, among other new products, 186 additional wall coverings, 40 new cotton prints, 24 brand-new woven fabrics and three new sheet designs. The new merchandise blended seamlessly with that already in the line, and the stores received the new designs with open arms.
According to Waites, Gear was founded with $4,000 and now has done more than $2 billion in product sales and had 24 stores in Japan. (Waites was a fabulist and this is somewhat hard to confirm). A towel from the Gear collection was used in the movie E.T. (!)
But around the early 90’s, New Country Gear just…ends. In 1994 Raymond Waites moved on to found Raymond Waites Vintage Home Collection which was hideous - heavy on chintz and pattern and dinnerware inspired by “Tuscan fruit.” He died in 2023.
As for New Country Gear, it’s almost like the internet memory of it closed, but its afterlife stayed with me. But I kept seeing it in the real world. It kept finding me in thrift stores and antique malls - Used books, wallpaper tubes, terracotta mugs, utensil holders, even these weird cookie molds.
I wanted The Six Bells to honor New Country Gear - At The Six Bells, you’re time-traveling twice: Back to old country design, and back to the 90s version of it.
Fun read. Looking forward to your Substack!
Great that you are on Substack!!!