Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES – Ruth Handler, the entrepreneur and marketing genius who co-founded Mattel and created the Barbie doll, one of the world’s most enduring and popular toys, died Saturday.
Handler was 85 and died at a Los Angeles hospital of complications following colon surgery about three months ago.
The longtime Southern California resident defied prevailing trends in the toy industry of the late 1950s when she proposed an alternative to the flat-chested baby dolls then marketed to girls.
In the late 1950s, her husband, Elliot – the “el” in “Mattel” – was so preoccupied with the development of a talking doll, eventually marketed as Chatty Cathy, that he was of little help to Ruth when she came up with an idea of her own.
Handler’s dream made its debut at the 1959 American Toy Fair in New York City. “Barbie Teen-Age Fashion Model” had a girl-next-door ponytail, black-and-white striped bathing suit and teeny feet that fit into open-toed heels. Mattel sold more than 350,000 the first year, and orders soon backed up for the doll, which retailed for $3. “The minute that doll hit the counter, she walked right off,” Handler said.
Barbie, a teen-age doll with a tiny waist, slender hips and impressive bust, became not only a best-selling toy with more than 1 billion sold in 150 countries, but a cultural icon analyzed by scholars, attacked by feminists and showcased in the Smithsonian Institution. Barbie was named after Handler’s daughter, Barbara; Ken was named after her son.
Later in life, Handler said she did not take offense at the feminist broadsides toward Barbie, and often noted that successful women played with Barbie and told her the doll helped them enact their aspirations. Even artists’ tortured interpretations of Barbie didn’t bother her. “More power to them,” Handler said.
“My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be,” Handler wrote in her 1994 autobiography. “Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.”
Although best known for her pivotal role as Barbie’s inventor, Handler devoted her later years to a second, trailblazing career: manufacturing and marketing artificial breasts for women who had undergone mastectomy.
Herself a breast cancer survivor, she personally sold and fitted the prosthesis and crisscrossed the country as a spokeswoman for early detection of the disease in the 1970s, when it was still a taboo subject.
She led a sales team of eight middle-aged women, most breast cancer survivors, into department stores, where they fitted women and trained the sales staffs. She fit former first lady Betty Ford after her mastectomy. Her aggressive tactics included talk-show appearances and handwritten invitations to breast cancer patients.
By 1980, sales of the Nearly Me artificial breast had surpassed $1 million. In 1991, Handler sold the company to a division of Kimberly-Clark.
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