Barbie Forever: Her Inspiration, History, and Legacy (Official 60th Anniversary Collection)
176
Barbie Forever: Her Inspiration, History, and Legacy (Official 60th Anniversary Collection)
176Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780760365779 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Epic Ink |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2019 |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.50(w) x 11.50(h) x 1.10(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
INSPIRING FANS SINCE 1959
There are endless ways to play with Barbie, and for sixty years, girls have loved the fantasies that the doll helps them create. Barbie lets them see themselves as women of action, women in the world doing interesting jobs and having amazing adventures. Girls see her as a blank slate that can reflect and embody their ideas about growing up and creating exciting futures to live into. And surely, if they have read the story of Barbie's "mom," the woman who first imagined the doll, they would want to play at being her as well. Barbie sparks inspiration likely because her creator, Ruth Handler, embodied it herself. In a 1994 book titled The Story of Barbie, author Kitturah Westenhouser asked this thought provoking question that still intrigues fans and experts today:
"Is it the doll or her mother, Ruth Handler, who is really the legend?"
The idea of the doll that would become Barbie started in the early 1950s. Ruth Handler had an idea for a toy forming in her mind. This was unusual for her. She was usually busy running the day-to-day operations of Mattel as executive vice president, and was known for her skill at marketing and managing the young business — but not at creating toys.
Ruth spent her days making the hundreds of small and large decisions that kept Mattel growing. Behind a large wraparound desk — her black rotary phone on one side, an ashtray near her right hand — she ran the business side of Mattel. She had employees to hire and manage, products to inspect, budgets to approve, and a young family to tend to at home. Her life left little time for dreaming up new toys, yet an idea had flashed into her mind, and she had a strong feeling that it was a good one. This new idea was nothing like the popular toys that Mattel had become known for — like their burp guns and musical toys.
Ruth was a person who followed her instincts. Diving into the competitive world of toy sales had been part instinct, part drive, and part good fortune.
It was a good time to be making toys in the United States. Soldiers had returned home after World War II ended in 1945, and they were eagerly starting families. Americans' standard of living had been rising as well, and that trend was continuing. Families had more money, and more leisure time to spend it. Ruth saw herself as a leader in growing a company that would fit in with parents' dreams of raising their children in a peaceful and carefree world.
Ruth focused on hiring the best and the brightest employees. Her detailed understanding of budgets and her extraordinary marketing sense had made her a recognized leader in an industry dominated by men. She knew she was far ahead of her time, as few women went into business after the war. But Ruth had an inner drive that left her unconcerned with what other women were doing. She knew what she had to do, and though she loved her children, she once told a reporter that she could never be a stay-at-home mom.
Ruth had a secret weapon for Mattel's success: her husband, Elliot. He was a playful man with a love of toys and a wonderfully creative mind. The toys that launched Mattel had come from Elliot's fertile imagination and his skill at design. "You have to be able to spot trends," Ruth told a reporter in 1957. "My husband has a sixth sense. He's a great idea man." Research and design was Elliot's side of the business, while Ruth handled everything else. They had offices next to each other. People said there was "magic between them," both personally and in their work. Elliot said of Ruth, "She could do anything."
Elliot preferred drawing to engaging in conversation. He was known for sketching on tablecloths, napkins, or whatever was at hand. Throughout the 1950s, under Elliot's leadership, Mattel came out with the Mousegetar, the Musical Egg, the Musical Clock, a Bonneville racing car, holster sets, Jack- and Popeye-in-the-Box, and more. On the strength of his innovative products, Ruth and Elliot had built a fast-growing toy company that was challenging its larger competitors: Kenner Products and Louis Marx and Company.
At a time when a woman needed her husband's approval to open a bank account, Ruth stood out as a boundary breaker. Elliot loved and admired her for her skills and determination. But her idea for a new toy tested his support, even as it broke boundaries that she had not imagined.
Ruth and Elliot had met as teenagers in Denver. He was the shy, quiet, brilliant artist. She started working at age twelve and was soon running the cash register at her sister's lunch counter. They met at a dance and were immediately drawn to each other. Little did they know that their storybook romance would lead to a business partnership that would exceed their wildest expectations and delight millions of people worldwide.
As Mattel grew, Elliot put together a large design team that had started to favor toy guns based on the popular cowboy shows of the 1950s. Elliot loved "cowboy stuff" and riding horses. He enjoyed going to the desert and chasing coyotes on horseback and taking the family to dude ranches, so toy guns were a natural extension of his personal interests. But it was the musical toys that grew from Elliot's boundless imagination that put Mattel on the toy-company map.
Mattel's first hit toy was a miniature ukulele, called the Uke-a-Doodle, which came to market in 1947. Elliot had designed it to look like the ukulele played by Arthur Godfrey, a popular radio and television star. The original Uke-a-Doodle was a plastic ukulele with steel strings and tunable pegs. In 1949, Mattel added a crank that turned to produce different children's tunes. Mattel's success with the toy ukulele led to a group of toys based on the unique mechanism designed by Elliot.
The mechanism Elliot had designed was a small box with tiny wires that were plucked when a crank was turned. The toys would play a variety of short tunes. The box could be inserted into any number of toys, from an organ grinder's musical barrel organ, to a hurdy-gurdy, to a Jack-in-the-box. Over the next very profitable years, the same music mechanism was put inside several toys, including musical books. Within two years, the music box toys had brought in nearly nine million dollars.
There was one toy genre that Mattel had not fully entered: dolls. Mattel had created a small baby crib and baby doll in the late 1940s, and also had created doll furniture. But they had not yet created anything like the fashion doll that Ruth had in mind. Ruth and Elliot always looked for new toy ideas that were unique. Their originality and rigorous, precise production techniques were the special combination that had brought them far in just a short time within the toy industry.
The mainstay doll for girls in the 1950s was the baby doll. World War II had ended in 1945, and soldiers had returned from the Pacific and European battlegrounds anxious to marry, obtain civilian employment, and start families. Many women had worked at traditionally male jobs during the war, but they returned home to run their households and raise their children.
Mothers took care of babies, while fathers went off to work. Little girls were given baby dolls so they could play at what they saw in their own homes: cloth diapers that went in diaper pails for later cleaning, because disposable diapers didn't yet exist; glass baby bottles needing thorough sanitizing; and clothes-washing sets for growing families that included gear for line drying. Little girls watched the household work and cuddled their own Snookie, Plassie, and Tiny Tears — all baby dolls for girls to play at one thing: being mothers.
But Ruth saw something in her home that she felt sure other toy makers had missed. In the book Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story, Ruth says, "It dawned on me that this was a basic, much-needed play pattern that had never before been offered by the doll industry to little girls." Her daughter Barbara loved to play with paper dolls. Whether it was more about role-play or fashion play, she liked the mature paper dolls — and the fashions that accompanied them. When Ruth took Barbara to the five-and-dime store on a Saturday afternoon, the young girl went right to the paper dolls. Barbara particularly liked color cutouts of Tillie the Toiler and others like her. Tillie had several fashionable outfits in her paper wardrobe. And there were many other adult paper dolls to choose from.
There were paper dolls of Hollywood stars, like Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds; Teen Time and Teenager paper dolls; and bridal party, colonial, and comic-book character paper dolls. The girls could play at being adults or teens with these cutouts. They could act out roles, and they could pretend in a way that was impractical with baby dolls.
Ruth took notice. She knew from watching her own daughter that there was a gap in what little girls were looking for and what was offered on the market. She had also become a keen observer of children as Mattel grew. A routine part of Mattel's toy development was inviting children to the company to try out toys so that developers could understand how children would use the toys, and then take those ideas back to development, making tweaks and changes wherever necessary. After watching many of these sessions, Ruth had developed a concept she called "play value," which was a combination of both the attention and the time that a child would devote to a new toy.
After observing her daughter Barbara and her friends play with adult paper dolls for hours on end, Ruth was sure that her doll idea had great play value. The paper dolls were simply cardboard cutouts of women, often in underwear or a bathing suit, just begging to be dressed. These dolls had to be carefully popped out of their cardboard backgrounds, which could then be stood up in a cardboard stand. They came with pages of clothes that needed to be tediously cut out with scissors. Tabs jutted out from the clothes so that they could be folded and pressed down around the cardboard figures to stay on; however, the tabs worked poorly. Clothes rarely stayed on properly, and to add to the frustration, the tabs would often tear off, and then the clothes wouldn't stay on at all.
Despite all the frustrations of paper dolls, Barbara and her friends preferred them to three-dimensional baby dolls and other dolls on the market, such as Madame Alexander, Posie, and Dollikin, which represented older girls with babyish faces. Madame Alexander dolls wore elaborate dresses and were treated more as collectibles than dolls made for active play. Dollikin might wear a fur stole and pearl earrings, but she still looked prepubescent.
As she watched her daughter playing with her friends, Ruth realized they wanted more than these dolls, which were an unrealistic hybrid between babies and teens. Young girls were searching for a way to play at the reality they observed in the adult world—to play out their dreams.
Ruth listened as the girls imitated adults, acting out what they saw at home and school, speaking in grown up voices and mimicking grown-up conversation. As she watched, Ruth wondered, Why don't these girls have a real doll to act out these fantasies? How much richer would their play be if the doll they held was three-dimensional, with adult clothes on an adult figure?
Ruth felt sure she could recreate her daughter's play pattern. She also felt that an adult doll for girls would be the kind of original entry into the doll market that fit Mattel's vision. "I decided," Ruth told Good Housekeeping in 1967, "that a doll with a teenage figure and lots of glorious, imaginative high-fashion clothes would be radically different, and would appeal to today's girls who grew up faster than they used to." Her characteristic optimism ensured her that it would sell. With her own background as a young girl who had been raised by her sister, and who had gone to work in the family store at twelve years old, Ruth may have felt a personal attachment to the simple idea that she used to explain her doll: "My whole philosophy was that through this doll girls could be anything they wanted to be." Ruth took her toy idea to Elliot, who always believed in her, always supported her, and felt everything she did was just right. But this time, Elliot pushed back. Ideal Toys had the Little Miss Revlon doll on the market. Elliot thought this doll, with her babyish face, budding breasts, and high heels, was what Ruth had in mind. But sales of Little Miss Revlon, which had been a hit for years, had started to decline. Why would they enter that market just as interest was falling off? Elliot's research-and-design team agreed with him about Ruth's idea, but for a different reason. The twenty male engineers agreed on one thing: mothers will never buy their daughters an adult doll with breasts.
Elliot and his team urged Ruth to go back to running the company. After all, toy creation was not her area. While Ruth handled Mattel's overall budget, Elliot and his team were given the largest budget inside the company to develop toys. They were the "blue sky" boys, responsible for coming up with ideas. They felt that Ruth should stick to what she was good at, and they would go on creating toys in the hot new market of guns and rockets.
The research team had a major success to back up their rebuke to Ruth: the Burp Gun. Mattel had taken a huge risk by advertising the new Burp Gun. toy on television, a relatively new medium for promoting toys. In the early 1950s, toys were advertised in catalogs or other print media. Advertisements were aimed at parents, who decided what toys to buy for their children.
Ruth was willing to bet nearly the entire net worth of Mattel on television advertising. She saw the opportunity in gearing the ads directly toward children. No toy company had ever taken such a risk. But Ruth's strategy paid off when the Burp Gun advertisements aired on the new hit television show The Mickey Mouse Club.
The Burp Gun, a child-size machine gun so named for the sound of its bursting caps, became a huge success. Soon came a Winchester rifle, a Colt .45, and other cowboy-themed guns, along with real leather holsters. Mattel's realistic manufacturing and new approach to marketing made the company a growing threat to other toy manufacturers. Dolls were a risky distraction, especially the one Ruth wanted to make.
Ruth listened to the men's arguments, but she knew they were wrong. Little girls wanted to play at being adult women, and adult women had breasts. For Ruth, the men's attitudes were not roadblocks, but instead drove her passion for her idea even further. Ruth didn't know the meaning of impossible. She was sure she would find a way to make her doll. She kept going back to the men, describing a doll with long legs, high-heeled feet, makeup, and nail polish. They said it would be too difficult and too costly to make. It would have to sell at too high a price point.
This was not the first time that Ruth had been told she couldn't do what she had in mind. Sarah, Ruth's older sister who raised her, had tried to stop Ruth from marrying Elliot. After two years of trying to separate them, Sarah finally gave up. Ruth was the kind of person whose determination grew when her dreams were denied. Just as she had persevered to marry Elliot, she would hold on to her idea, believing she could make it work.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, in Germany, Reinhard Beuthien — a tall square-jawed man with a twinkle in his eye and a cigarette dangling from his lips — had just created a hit cartoon. Beuthien worked for a tabloid newspaper, Bild-Zeitung, which means "picture newspaper" in German, and the paper was true to its name. The editor asked Beuthien to come up with a cartoon to fill a space where a column had been pulled. Beuthien's first attempt featured a cherubic baby, but when his editor balked, Beuthien put the baby face onto the voluptuous body of a young woman and called her Lilli.
The reaction to Lilli was swift and enthusiastic. Soon Beuthien's Lilli was a hit across Germany. Taking advantage of his cartoon character's popularity, Beuthien teamed up with a toy designer to move Lilli off the page and to shape her into a three-dimensional doll. Although it was designed for adults, toy stores soon began carrying the buxom doll dressed in costumes ranging from a ski outfit to evening wear. As Ruth made plans for her family's first trip abroad, she had no idea that Lilli awaited her.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Barbie Forever"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Mattel.
Excerpted by permission of The Quarto Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Foreword: Ibtihaj Muhammad Introduction Chapter 1: INSPIRING FANS SINCE 1959 Chapter 2: BARBIE GOES TO MARKET Chapter 3: BREAKING BOUNDARIES Chapter 4: SHAPING BARBIE Chapter 5: BARBIE LIFESTYLE Chapter 6: FASHION AND ART Chapter 7: GOING GLOBAL Chapter 8: THE MAGIC OF BARBIE Bibliography Acknowledgements About The Author Image Credits Historic TimelineRelated Subjects
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