Episode #182: The Captivating Timeline of Barbie: From Ruth Handler to Rebirth (1959-2023)
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Have you ever wondered about the captivating history of Barbie, the world's most iconic doll? Get ready to traverse the captivating timeline of Barbie, the world's most iconic doll. Discover the story behind this revolutionary toy, from the innovative mind of Ruth Handler to its evolution, significance, and controversies. Listen as The Toy Coach discusses Ruth's battle to persuade an all-male design team to develop Barbie, the struggles and triumphs of representation, the controversies around the doll's body shape, and the rebirth of the brand in recent years.
Beyond the historical aspects, we discuss the Barbiemania of today as well as the Barbie movie, driving the doll's resurgence and captivating fans worldwide. Tune into this episode for a deep dive into the fascinating world and history of Barbie, a timeless doll that has left an undeniable mark on generations of toy people.
EPISODE CLIFF NOTES
[01:40] Discover the inspiration behind Barbie's design: Ruth Handler's observation of her daughter playing with dolls, which led to a fashion doll with an adult-inspired body.
[03:45] Learn how Ruth Handler navigated the challenges of marketing an adult-looking toy in a conservative 1950s America and how she cleverly positioned Barbie as a teenage fashion model.
[06:47] Dive into the issue of representation and the introduction of black Barbies into the line, influenced by events like the Watts riots and efforts by organizations like Shindana Toys.
[13:20] Explore Barbie's journey through the 1980s and 1990s, facing struggles with changing demographics, competition from Bratz dolls, and the rise of technology.
[16:50] Celebrate the success of the Barbie movie and upcoming ventures, such as the rumored Mattel adventure park, global Barbie conventions, and the continued popularity of the doll.
[19:19] Takeaway: Sign up for The Toy Coach's YouTube channel and watch her review of the Barbie movie, offering your thoughts in the comments.
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At the end, Mattel was required to pay MGA $309 million in damages in addition to attorney's fees and other costs.
You are listening to making it in the toy industry episode number 📍 182.
Hey, there type people Azhelle weighed here. And welcome back to another episode of making it in the toy industry. This is a weekly podcast brought to you by the toy coach.com today's episode. As I promised last week is going to be focused on the history of Barbie. Based on the numbers that the Barbie movie has raked in. There's a pretty good chance. You've already seen the Barbie movie that's out. So if you have seen that movie and you're interested in my thoughts on the movie, head over to youtube.com/the toy coach, I just released a video all about it.
So you could check that out. Today we are going to talk about the history of Barbie, because if you've seen the movie, you know, that they have Barbie meeting her creator, Ruth handler. So today we're going to talk about the entire history of Barbie and we will start with the creator Ruth handler. By the end of this episode, you're going to learn about the rise and fall and then rebirth of Barbie. And we're going to start from 1959. When that first idea was created by Ruth handler and go on the journey of the doll's initial marketing success. Its struggle of representation, the 90 sales slip, and then the eventual rebirth that we all are witnessing right now today.
The creator of Barbie was Ruth handler. She was best known for inventing the Barbie doll in 1959 and being the co-founder of Mattel with her husband Elliott. It is said that the idea of Barbie came from Ruth watching how her own daughter played with her dolls. She wasn't just nurturing them. She was using the dolls to role play that she was different things.
And the way that her daughter Barbara was playing with her dolls, inspired her mother Ruth to come up with a different play pattern for a doll. Eventually it would become a fashion doll, but the design of the body of that fashion doll Was actually inspired by an adult toy. The Barbie doll design itself has a tiny waist and a large bosom. So that is where that initial design came from .
So that's the basis you need to know about where the idea of Barbie came from. Let's talk about Barbie's initial marketing success, how it got started.
When Ruth handler first created Barbie, she knew the doll would be a success with little girls, but she had a hard time selling her vision to the, at the time entirely male design team. Now eventually Ruth was able to persuade them of the Dallas potential. And Barbie went into development.
The next struggle, however, was figuring out how to market such an adult looking toy. In 1950s, America was a super conservative place, especially for women. Most women got married directly after high school or college and popular media stress. The importance of having this nuclear family with moms, staying at home to take care of their kids and run the household.
So the idea of Barbie, this independent young woman with a career, no husband, it just went directly against many of the expectations for women at the time now, additionally, the dolls figure and body shape meant that many people considered her as two grown up and not really age appropriate for kids. Ruth knew that she would have to come up with a creative way to market the doll. If she was really going to sell it.
Ruth went on to hire Dr. Ernest Dichter a psychologist and marketing expert. Dichter was a controversial figure in the marketing world, but he also got results. Now, one of his favorite techniques, which he had invented himself was conducting focus groups to explore how consumers felt about different products. For Barbie, ditcher interviewed 191 girls and 45 mothers. He found that many mothers considered Barbie to be too sexy, but girls loved her.
They saw her as someone to look up to. Now the point of compromise for mothers and girls was the dolls wardrobe. The mothers were almost as fascinated by the tiny garments with their. Attention to detail the miniature accessories. They were almost as impressed with it as the little girls were. So Ditcher came up with the idea to present Barbie as a teenage fashion model? This would allow kids to play out the fantasy of a real adult with a career, and it would be a natural explanation for Barbies expansive wardrobe, and then mothers could use the doll to help girls learn about dressing well and being well-groomed.
Now in this way, Ditcher positioned Barbie, not as a toy that subverted societal expectations for women. But as a toy that would actually help girls fit in. So Mattel began running TV advertisements for Barbie during the Mickey mouse club, starting in the spring of 1959 and Barbie debuted at toy fair in March of the same year. Now buyers were skeptical about this doll With most of the buyers leaving the Barbie showroom without placing an order. Sales were slow throughout the spring prompting, Ruth to cut production of the doll. Mattel kept running advertisements and come the summer. Barbie sales began to skyrocket. So Mattel sold $300,000 the first year, and it took three years for production to catch up with all that demand. As the first team fashion doll, Barbie was breaking barriers left and right.
Now let's move into the issue of representation and the introduction of black Barbies. Over the years, The Barbie line had been criticized for its depictions of black dolls. And it took a while before they actually would introduce a black doll into their line. Now let's get into the introduction of black Barbies into the Barbie line and what prompted that. Back in 1965 in LA, what is known now as the Watts riots sometimes referred to as the Watts rebellion occurred. So it all started with a traffic stop where a, an African-American man was pulled over. He failed a sobriety test and in the process of trying to be arrested a fight broke out between the cops and him. Onlookers we're involved fighting with this man and others. There were reports that police kicked a pregnant woman who was present at the scene just overall civil unrest followed. In 1965, Los Angeles was rocked by a summer of protests and riots. And that summer of riots ,is known as the Watts riots after the neighborhood where most of the unrest took place. As a result of the riots and in an effort to rebuild the community, two men, Louis Smith and Robert Hall founded operation bootstrap, an organization to help residents of the Watts neighborhood enhance their professional skills and find career opportunities.
And in 1968, the civil rights activists, Lewis Smith, and Robert Hall actually added a toy company as a division of their nonprofit. It was called Shindana toys. now this new company focused on fostering self-love and empathy by creating black toys for black children and others.
Through my research. I found a lot about Shindana toys so we will have another episode on that, but what's interesting is through that research, I found that Mattel provided factory training supplies, industry contracts, and capital with so far seemingly no strings attached.
Haven't done deep dive on this, but seemingly no strings attached. As a result, Shindana toys had a helping hand to get started.
While Mattel was working with Smith and Hall to Aid them in the building of Shindana toys.
Mattel was also rushing to get a black friend for Barbie to market. Considering everything that had gone on. So the deadline for them, the goal was 1960 sevens toy fair, but they were unable to finish a doll with authentically African American features in time. At least that's what are, what is reported from what I know in the toy industry, I'm sure that at the time they thought let's just make it a darker doll. That will be enough. And they quickly found out that it wasn't. So in 1967, Mattel presented the African-American version. Of Barbie's cousin and they called her Francie and she had used the same molds and the same hairstyles as the white doll, but just, darker skin and black hair.
So people weren't feeling that doll as much. By 1968, Mattel produced Christi a barbie sized friend with a unique sculpted faced curlier hair and a brown skin tone. Christy was followed by the release of Julia in 1969. Adult based on the character, played by Diane Crowell in the TV show of the same name. Both Christie and Julia were successful. Dolls. Christie continued to be a part of the Barbie line until around the mid two thousands. Keep note that they weren't called Barbie. They were all her friends, other dolls. So it wasn't until 1980, when the first official doll named Barbie came out. In 1991, Mattel released the marvelous world of Shawnee, a line of African-American dolls. Mattel conducted research to determine the best way to design and market this doll line to accurately represent African-American culture. And the line initially launched with three characters, Asha Shawnee, and the shell. A fourth character Jamal was released in 92 and the line saw four waves of releases before it was discontinued. And Mattel also released another line of exclusively black characters Asha the African-American collection in 94. And that line was discontinued after three dolls. Third line featuring exclusively African-American characters. Called the so in style line was released in 2009. And that line was available in just the us until 2014.
So let's move on to 2016. In 2016, Mattel really went through an overall Barbie rebrand unveiling Barbies at different Heights, tall, short, they had different body types, curvy and skinny. They had petite dolls and the goal was to move away from that doll signature shape. The new line also included a much wider range of skin tones, darker Browns, warmer Browns, lighter peach tones, and a ton of different hairstyles.
Around the same time. Mattel did release a Misty Copeland doll, but there were many articles. One specifically by the Washington post that asked why does the Misty Copeland Barbie doll look so white? So they still were struggling to get the right skin tone. And Mattel did say that the skin color looks faded in the photos because of lighting.
And I don't really totally believe that. So then the most recent launch that I would love to put a spotlight on is the inspiring women doll line. So that doll line started in 2018 to honor historical female role models. And this doll line started with Amelia Earhart. Ms. Doll line started with an Amelia Earhart Barbie doll, a Frida Kahlo Barbie doll, a Katherine Johnson, Barbie doll. But in August of 2019, Mattel released a Rosa parks doll into this line. And later we would see a Madam CJ Walker and several other historical women in the inspiring women's series, which is really nice because it almost takes on an air of American girl history type doll. But they are all within a package that says Barbie, inspiring women and not being skirted off to an entirely different line names.
So that's really beautiful. And I also have to say this face sculpts of these inspiring women dolls are really beautifully, accurate. So I do love the Rosa park stall in particular.
So now we did just go from kind of the eighties realm of representation for Barbie into the two thousands, but let's go back a little bit and look at the nineties. There was a big drop in sales that happened. Let's talk about what happened there. So Barbie was hugely successful until about the mid nineties. When sales of the doll began slipping strategies that had been working previously, like adding different styles into the line and colors for the hair and some skin tones that was no longer working. And it wasn't increasing Barbie sales to reach new market.
Instead, they were over producing product. Overestimating sales, like in the case of the 1997, happy holidays, Barbie, where production was up to $3 million in anticipation of high sales. Only for the doll struggle to sell through and still be on store shelves through 98. Now part of Barbie struggle was the growing disinterest of that target market. When Barbie was first released, she was marketed toward nine to 12 year olds. But in the nineties, she was being played with by girls as young as three, who saw Barbie, not as an aspirational figure or a big sister, but like a mom.
The older girls who had been playing with a doll for years were bored. Looking for something new, technology was big at the time, but also, so were edgier role models enter Bratz, Bratz, where the girls with a passion for fashion. MGA's doll line brats were diverse, trendy teenagers who reflected what girls were seeing in the media at the time they hit the market. In 2001, Bratz sales quickly began cutting into the sales of Barbie . Executives at Mattel were completely blindsided by the success of the line since Barbie had recently celebrated 40 years of being the number one fashion doll in the world. But then things got interesting. In 2002 Mattel received an anonymous letter stating that Bratz dolls were not created by the team at MGA, but by Carter Bryant, a former Mattel employee. Mattel sued Bryant. Claiming he violated a Mattel employment agreement by taking his designs to MGA while still being employed at Mattel Mattel proceeded to Sue MGA for the exclusive rights to the Bratz line and for theft of trade secrets. Of course MGA countersued claiming design infringement. The lawsuits were combined and the case went before a jury in 2008.
The case was decided in favor of Mattel. And then Mattel was awarded a hundred million dollars. Now the district judge making the final verdict, also ordered MGA to be stripped of the rights to brats and to cease manufacturing and distribution of the dolls. However in 2010 MGA appealed the case and the decision was reversed. At the end, Mattel was required to pay MGA $309 million in damages in addition to attorney's fees and other costs. But that amount was later cut in half by the appeals court Wilde. So MGA attempted to bring another suit against Mattel claiming corporate espionage, but it was dismissed in 2018 and the California state appeals court denied MGA's appeal to reinstate the case.
Okay. Let's move on to talk about the resurgence of Barbie today. We've all been aware of Barbie mania. If you haven't listened to my previous episode, go listen to it now I dive into the amazing marketing behind the Barbie movie, but let's just quickly talk about the doll sales. According to kia.com in 2022 Mattel's Barbie brand generated a gross sales of $1.4 billion in the us. And that was actually a drop compared to the $1.6 billion sales in 2021. Now we all know the 20 21 year. Was really projected by the pandemic. Barbie had a ton of content come out on Netflix in the pandemic, which people are attributing to the sales that were happening end of 2020 into 2021. So that's likely where that 1.6 billion comes from.
According to business, insider.com that $1.6 billion of gross revenue equates to 86 million dolls from the Barbie family. And that equates to 164 dolls being bought every minute. I wild.
So, what are we seeing coming, coming forward from the Barbie movie? What are we expecting? Well, there are already rumors, about a Mattel adventure park. Being built in Arizona, there's actually a live stream where you can watch the park being built. I will add that into the show notes. The toy coach.com forward slash 1 8 2.
The movie just about five days after release a global phenomenal success generating over $330 million.
And this Barbie core movement has been taking over at theaters worldwide, and there have been many Barbie conventions taking place that have been promoted more and more right now, the Barbie conventions that I have found are not associated with or sponsored by Mattel, but I could see that changing a Barbie Khan sponsored by Mattel with some Barbie core attire.
So that is all I have to share with you for Barbie history for today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We dove into the rise and fall of Barbie. We talked about representation we talked about representation within the Barbie line. Before I let you go today, I have got to give a shout out to someone who has left a review for this podcast. If you love this podcast and you haven't left a review.
What are you waiting for? Your reviews are what keeps me motivated to keep coming week after week with these episodes. So if you love these episodes, please give me a wonderful rating and review. Wherever you're listening to your podcast. So I've got a call out. This review left by Liz Renee. Liz says really appreciate Azhelle's perspective in the toy. game industry, which like many industries is an underrepresented industry as a black woman who is new to the industry. It's so important to hear the perspective of another black woman. Who's not only thriving, but also leading in this space. I really appreciate the quick summaries at the beginning of each episode that give you a glimpse into what the episode will be about. I also love the tangible action and takeaways at the end of every episode. The entire podcast is so well, curated and thoughtfully produced. . Thank you, Liz. It is. I work really hard to do that, so I appreciate that. So let's talk about today's takeaway today's action item for the week. I want you to go sign up from a YouTube channel. Because I did a review of the Barbie movie. There it is a spoiler filled review. So don't watch it until you've watched the Barbie movie. When you're ready go to youtube.com/the toy coach. Look for my most recent video, subscribe to my channel, turn on notifications, watch that video and leave a comment. Let me know what you thought of the Barbie movie. As always, thank you so much for spending this time with me today. I know your time is valuable and I know there's a ton of podcasts out there. So it really means the world to me that you tune into this one until next week. I'll 📍 see you later. Toy people.
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