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Now Out of Print

Latest Book!

A Collector's Book
of Retired Lladró ;
Genuine Figurines & Their Marks
by Peggy Whiteneck

Click here to order!

Click on the image above for a link to the web site for The Glass and Pottery Review from Old Line Publishing! The inaugural issue has my feature article on Lladró.

GM's Symbiotic Relationship with the NAO Brand

-Peggy Whiteneck

It's fascinating that production of the NAO brand was suspended during GM production, and the original intent may have been that GM would become a replacement brand for NAO, whose unquestionable similarity to the regular Lladró brand seems always to have been a marketing nightmare for the Lladró company. First year GM models were taken right out of the NAO collection, where they had been produced as early as 1989. By the end of 1994, when GM was finally taken off the respirator, its first year models were folded back into the NAO collection. Several of these are still in retail production, testifying to the enduring popularity of the models themselves when presented in a form that consumers can recognize as Lladró. (See the table link below for NAO models made as Golden Memories.)

This charming miss is GM # 33013, "None for You," one of the first year GM models that is still in production as a NAO, #, "Puppy's Birthday." It's easy to see why the model remains popular.

It's my belief that one of the reasons the first year GM figurines never caught on among Lladró-product collectors was that there was nothing in the mark, other than the then little-understood DAISA copyright notice, to identify GM as a Lladró product. Even though Lladró has always made matte (unglazed) models, people were still focused on the more familiar glaze as characteristic of Lladró. The very distinctive unglazed finish and the deep pastels of the first year line weren't such that people would immediately think "Lladró" when they looked at them. This was also during the era when Lladró company marketing literature was downplaying the very existence of alternative brands within the company. Because the GM brand wasn't fully developed conceptually, it would have needed an overt connection to its parent for it to be successfully marketed, and no such connection was evident to retail consumers.

One of the very few animal models made in GM was # 3305, "Playful Bunnies." The model was also made as NAO # 1081, "Bunny Surpise," retired in that brand in 2001. (Photo by the author from her own collection.)

The phrase "From the Lladró Family of Products" was added to the mark by the second or third year, but, in the final analysis, this attribution was too little too late to resuscitate buyer interest in this unlucky brand. The line was withdrawn from production in 1994. First year GM models were nearly all recycled in the NAO brand, while second and third year models were deep-sixed entirely. Today, the value of GM-marked models among Lladró collectors is pretty much as curiosity pieces. (I even have a few in my own collection!)

Click on the "Next Page" link below to see a table of the first year GM models with their respective NAO counterparts. The listings are each and all catalog-linked.

(See Next Page for GM/NAO Table)