Instead of reworking the doll, Shackelford implemented a market segmentation strategy, which she thinks helped Barbie achieve record sales. She did this by segmenting the market, introducing dolls wit...
In Latin America, where blond Barbie outsells all other dolls, Barbie leads a life that few of her young owners will ever replicate.
Not surprisingly, when Barbie achieved superstar status, her houses became more ostentatious. Yet even Barbie's three-story town house, with its Tara-like pillars and ersatz wrought-iron birdcage elev...
To be sure, Barbie is a toy, and in market research sessions, as Barbie's first advertising copywriter Cy Schneider has pointed out, children, presented with choices that can be characterized as taste...
Lui did not get that idea out of the air; though whether it was true or not remains a subject of debate. The supermom is fading fast—doomed by anger, guilt, and exhaustion, Newsweek reported in 1988....
In An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler tells how the studio moguls—all immigrants and outsiders—created an America that was more American than the country ever could b...
Swicord is not a New Age nut; she's a writer. And even after mega-wrangles with Mattel's management—the musical was sketched out but never produced—she is still a fan of the doll. Barbie, she said, is...
Fans of conspiracy theories will be disappointed to learn that Barbie's proportions were not the result of some misogynistic plot. They were dictated by the mechanics of clothing construction. The dol...
Barbie's similarity to Brown's brave, new, vaguely selfish and decidedly subversive heroine has more than whimsical ramifications. It
But even with her record sales, the Barbie of the late eighties was not the vibrant virago of the early eighties. We Girls Can Do Anything gave way to We're into Barbie, a slogan that suggests turning...
Toys have always said a lot about the culture that produced them, and especially about how that culture viewed its children.
Barbie is a space-age fertility symbol: a narrow-hipped mother goddess for the epoch of cesarean sections. She is both relentlessly of her time and timeless. To such overripe totems as the Venus of Wi...
Barbie has an advantage over all of them. She can never bloat. She has no children to betray her. Nor can she rot, wrinkle, overdose, or go out of style. Mattel has hundreds of people—designers, marke...
After interviewing numerous upper-middle-class, Eastern Establishment women, I can say with certainty that most do not interpret the doll as an updated Neolithic fertility icon. They view her as a lit...
The second time, Michael Milken galloped to the rescue. I believed in Barbie, Milken told Barbara Walters in 1993. I called up the head of Mattel and I told him that I personally would be willing to i...
My Barbie stuff was a mirror of her values. She never told me that marriage could be a trap, but she refused to buy my Barbie doll a wedding dress. She didn't say I loathe housework, but she refused...
Traditionally, the needs of ethnically diverse consumers had been met by smaller companies—the equivalent, in movie terms, of independent filmmakers. In the seventies, Shindana introduced two Barbie-l...
When Ella King Torrey, a friend of mine and consultant on this book, began researching Barbie at Yale University in 1979, her work was considered cutting-edge and controversial.
To look at Mattel as a relative of the Hollywood studios is to make sense of some of its contradictions. The daughter of a Polish Jewish immigrant, Ruth Handler coded with her fashion dolls the same s...
Barbie Baby-Sits appeared in 1963, a year after the publication of Helen Gurley Brown's best-selling Sex and the Single Girl. And whether it was Brown's influence or an effect of synchronicity, Barbie...
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