The story of Barbara Roberts, who the whole world knows as Barbie

She is the first association at the mention of the word “doll”. She is already 64 years old, but she is still young and fashionable. Many professions and images, books, comics, magazine covers, cartoons and, finally, his own feature film, which was released on July 21st. It’s all about Barbie. However, her story has not always been rosy and rosy. For decades, the most popular doll in the world has been at the center of scandals more than once.

Birth of a legend

Mattel was founded in January 1945 by Harold Matson and Elliot and Ruth Handler. Today it is one of the largest toy manufacturers in the world. But then Mattel looked more like a flea market. Aspiring entrepreneurs sold only picture frames in a garage in Los Angeles. Later, seeing that they always had pieces of wood to throw away, they began to make furniture for dollhouses from them. So the company entered the world of toys.

Matson soon left Mattel, and the business became exclusively family-owned. Handlers focused on toys. Their first success was the Uke-A-Doodle, a ukulele marketed as a musical instrument for children. Good sales helped the company move from a garage to an office building in 1948.

The couple complemented each other perfectly in business: he was good at designing and designing toys, she also had a flair that turned a tiny company into a global giant.

Ruth came up with a way to promote the toys through a TV show. In those years, toy advertising was aimed primarily at parents, because it was they who chose toys for their children. But Ruth decided to appeal to the end consumer – the child.

In 1955, Mattel sponsored the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse television show, which showcased the company’s new toys. The move worked: it was no longer the parents who took the children to the shops, but the children dragged them there, begging them to buy the toy they had just seen on TV.

During a family trip to Switzerland in 1956, Ruth saw a plastic doll in a shop window. In those days, the spectacle was extremely unusual for Americans, who were used to the fact that dolls were either baby dolls that girls were asked to nurse, or cardboard mommy dolls, with the help of which girls learned to nurse their future children. The same thing that Ruth saw in the window was far from her usual image. It was a Lilly mannequin doll with a defiant appearance and emphasized sexual forms of the heroine of comics drawn by cartoonist Reinhard Beutin for the German tabloid Bild. Ruth bought the doll and took it home to test its suitability for the local market on her daughter Barbara.

The doll liked it, and Ruth decided that Mattel should have its own plastic doll. Not a baby doll, not a mommy, but strong, stylish and independent, so that, as Ruth herself said, “through this doll a little girl could try herself in any role she wants.”

At first, Mattel refused to launch the toy in production, not believing in commercial success. But Ruth was able to persuade her husband, and he – the board of the company.

In 1959, at the International Toy Fair in New York, Mattel introduced her doll. She was named Barbie, after Ruth’s daughter. The novelty did not impress retail chains. Perhaps because it was not little girls who came to such exhibitions, but seasoned business tycoons. And Ruth took matters into her own hands. Mattel launched a massive advertising campaign and began selling the new toy itself. The doll became a hit. However, problems started almost immediately.

Sex is not a toy for children

When Ruth Handler was inspired by the German doll Lilly when creating Barbie, she understood that it would not be possible to preserve the features of the original. Lilly was the heroine of comics for adults, which depicted far from children’s adventures. To try to sell something like this to American children was to doom oneself to scandal and possibly bankruptcy.

Ruth redesigned it to be Barbie. But even though she was sold as a teenage doll, in the early years she still looked very adult. This was emphasized by her bright makeup. And Louis Marx and Company, an American toy manufacturer that had a license to sell Lilly in the United States, considered that Handler’s creation was a copy of the German original. And in March 1961 Mattel was sued.

After lengthy proceedings and mutual accusations, the parties came to an out-of-court agreement in 1963. And already in 1964, Mattel simply bought the rights to the doll from Greiner & Hausser (the manufacturer of the original Lilly in Germany).

The deal cost the Handlers $21,600. In those days, it was a serious amount for a small company, equivalent to the current $212,500. But frankly ridiculous compared to the billions of dollars that Mattel earned from Barbie.

In its first year, the company sold 350,000 Barbie dolls, generating over $1 million in revenue.

However, accusations of plagiarism turned out to be only the first link in the chain of problems, scandals and litigation that Mattel faced because of Barbie.

The company began to build a whole universe around Barbie. So, in 1961, she got a boyfriend, Ken, in 1963, a friend, Midge, and in 1964, a younger sister, Skipper. In 1962, Barbie got her own house, which (along with furniture and everything else) became an important source of income for the company.

Parents were wary of the new hobby of children. The figure of Barbie seemed too defiant to them, given the size of her breasts. The look is overly playful or even vulgar.

Ruth Handler worked on the bugs, and since 1971, Barbie stopped looking coquettishly to the side: now she looked straight ahead, like all dolls. It was Ruth’s last design decision. In 1975, two important events happened for the company. Handlers left the company (they were accused of fraud with reporting), and a new version of Skipper entered the market, which provoked a serious scandal.

Mattel decided it would be great to show girls that their breasts will start to grow during adolescence. In the case of the doll, it was enough just to twist Skipper’s left hand, as breast size increased in front of the children and their parents.

Adults did not appreciate the realism. The media published devastating articles about Skipper. The company, as if mocking, released for Skipper also a girlfriend Ginger growing up in the right places. The public was not happy. In 1977, the company removed both from the market.

Parents did not appreciate another attempt by Mattel to play realism – the 2002 collection “Happy Family”. It included friend Barbie Midge, her husband Allan and son Ryan. At the same time, Midge was “pregnant” baby doll. It was attached to the stomach with a magnet. Mattel believed that the topic of pregnancy is an opportunity to prepare children for the arrival of a new child in the family. Parents have found that the toy promotes teenage pregnancy. The collection was removed, and Midge in the 2013 version was neither pregnant nor a mother.

Problem Diversity

Having created a unique doll, Ruth Handler also came up with a marketable model for her. The company sold the basic version of the doll for $3, and additional clothes and accessories for a fee.

One of these kits caused another scandal. It would seem that what could go wrong with the theme of a pajama party? Mattel gave Barbie a pink dress, pink pajamas, pink shoes, a mirror and a pink scale, and a book. There were no complaints about clothing. Scales and a book became a problem. The scales showed 110 pounds (about 50 kg), and on the cover of the book there was a question: “How to lose weight?” and the answer is: “Don’t eat!”.

Diet from Barbie, many parents found it inappropriate. After all, it was addressed to little girls who were not ready to make decisions on their own.

“Barbie has always reflected the fact that a woman has a choice,” wrote Mrs. Handler in her autobiography. And Mattel knew the importance of diversity. Already in 1967, the first black doll appeared. She was dissatisfied: she was a repainted version of Francie, Barbie’s cousin from England. The original black doll – Christie appeared in 1968. In 1980, a latina doll joined the company.

But Mattel ended up getting into a scandal anyway, trying to play on diversity. In 1997, the company decided to release a doll in honor of the most popular cookie in the US – Oreo. First, the canonical Barbie appeared on the market with a bag in the form of cookies. Sales were going well, and Mattel decided to release a black Barbie with Oreo. But the toy manufacturer did not take into account that “oreo” is also a pejorative slang term for a black who denies his culture, adopting the habits and traditions of whites. When Mattel was told about this, it was too late – scandalous dolls were already on the shelves. They were hastily withdrawn from stores.

The company has often been criticized for a long time for imposing a stereotype of beauty, which is hardly possible to comply with without harm to health. And Mattel gave up.

Over time, eye color, skin tones and doll hairstyles have multiplied, and now buyers have the opportunity to choose from dozens of Barbie doll options. And in 2015-2016, Mattel moved away from the canonical forms of the doll. On the market appeared tall, short and curvaceous Barbie.

Mattel has tried very hard to demonstrate its commitment and inclusiveness. But even here it was not without embarrassment. Back in 1997, a doll appeared in a wheelchair. However, a 17-year-old schoolgirl from Tacoma with cerebral palsy soon found out that Becky, as the doll was called, was not really expected in the Barbie world: her toy wheelchair simply did not fit through the door of Barbie’s $ 100 dream house. This fact was immediately replicated by the media. The company promised to redesign the house to accommodate dolls with disabilities, but instead discontinued the doll.

No matter how many claims against Mattel and Barbie herself, she remains the most popular doll in the world. They bought it, they buy it, and, as analysts are sure, they will buy it. Over the years, more than 1 billion Barbie dolls have been sold. And a new film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling will provide years of strong sales growth for everything related to the puppet icon.

Kirill Sarkhanyants