The Most Impossible Rise of a Company Ever: Barbie

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store In 1956, Ruth Handler walked into a shop in Lucerne, Switzerland, and bought three plastic dolls sold as gag gifts for men in German tobacco shops. Three years later, her version — Barbie — debuted at the 1959 American International Toy Fair in New York. Every buyer rejected it. Mattel, the small Hawthorne, California toy company she’d co-founded in a garage, sold 350,000 dolls in the first year anyway. This is the story of how a copied German novelty called Bild Lilli became the best-selling doll in history — and how a $500,000 bet on the Mickey Mouse Club, a Pentagon missile engineer named Jack Ryan, and one woman’s refusal to listen to every expert in the American toy industry turned a picture-frame business into a Fortune 500 company. It’s also the story of what happened to the people who actually created the original doll, and how much Mattel paid to make them disappear. The rise of Barbie is not a fairy tale. It’s a business story — about television advertising, razor-and-blades pricing, a lawsuit settled out of court, a $21,600 buyout that ended a German company, and a financial scandal that destroyed the founders but never touched the doll. Sources: M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll (William Morrow, 1994) Ruth Handler with Jacqueline Shannon, Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story (Longmeadow Press, 1994) “All’s Swell at Mattel,” Time, 1962 G. Wayne Miller, Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie, and the Companies That Make Them (Times Books, 1998) Sydney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus, Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry (Contemporary Books, 1990) Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University — Ruth Handler receipts and correspondence, 1956