Toys of Past Holiday Seasons

Having spent around 15 years of my varied career as a Buyer, Merchandise Manager and Executive in the Toy Industry, I have seen a lot of fads, crazes and hysteria over toys.  I remember the intro of Trivial Pursuit, Rubik's cube, Transformers, and the electronic and video game categories.  How lucky were my kids to have a Dad that was a Toy Buyer! None of those toys, including Atari, Nintendo, Mattel handheld games, Simon, Intellivision, ColecoVision or Furby were as crazy as the introduction of Star Wars Action figures and Cabbage Patch Dolls.  

The original Star Wars Movie was introduced to audiences in May, 1977, and to say that Kenner Toys was unprepared was an understatement.  Up to this point, toys based on movie properties historically did not sell very well.  But, toys based on television shows were hot!.  Legend has it that, Bernie Loomis, President of Kenner Toys desperately wanted the license to a TV show called "The Man From Atlantis" starring Patrick Duffy of "Dallas" fame.  In order to get that license he agreed to take the license for an unknown Sci-Fi movie being made by George Lucas, whose most famous movie up to that point was "American Graffiti".  Needless to say, Atlantis was a bomb and Star Wars a tremendous success! 

But the toys were not ready for the Christmas Season of 1977, and in fact barely on the drawing board.  So, Christmas Season of 1977 rolled around and there were no Star Wars Toys. And due to the demand, Kenner had to come up with something!  The answer was to sell an EMPTY BOX with a coupon inside that could be exchanged for the first 4 action figures when they were finally produced...which turned out to be in February of 1978...and we sold a ton of those empty boxes for $19.99!!

Star Wars merchandise has generated over $20 Billion in sales since 1977 and the original Kenner action figures sold over 300 million units of little Hans Solos, Luke Skywalkers and others.

In the mid-1970's an out of work artist, Xavier Roberts of tiny Cleveland, Georgia developed and handmade soft sculptured dolls and began selling them at craft fairs as Little People Dolls, marketing them with adoption papers and birth certificates.  Shortly thereafter, they became all the rage among all the kids in the area.  Word started spreading and they migrated from Appalachia and arrived in Atlanta around 1978 or 1979.  I found about these dolls, because my daughter, Lisa, HAD to have one!  But they were expensive...at retail they were well over $100.  But, I had a friend who had an "Adoption Center" within his Baby Store, and he agreed to make me a deal!

So, for her birthday, we took Lisa to the Adoption Center and she picked out her baby, raised her right hand and took the oath of adoption.  After the adoption ceremony, that "baby" went EVERYWHERE with us..to restaurants, on vacation and wherever we went, the baby went!  Besides being the most adorable thing you have ever seen, a bright light went off in my Toy Buyer brain.  I went to the President of Richway Stores and asked for some funds to buy a few of these dolls to send over to our agent in Hong Kong to knock off these dolls to sell in our stores.  After checking with the Legal Department, I was stopped in my tracks after we found that Roberts had already sued and obtained injunctions against others who had the same idea.  

Well, if there is a good idea out there, somebody in the Toy Industry was going to eventually find it and Coleco licensed the Little People Dolls from Xavier Roberts and his Original Appalachian Artworks Company in 1982 and began producing the dolls under the Cabbage Patch name.  At their introduction at Toy Fair 1983, in NYC, I convinced Coleco's President, Leonard Greenberg to let Richway, in Atlanta, get the first shipment for our Atlanta Stores...promising him a full page ad in The Atlanta newspaper and assuring him a success story to tell., since the dolls were already known in the region.  So, we received the first shipment in the Spring, a typically bad time to be selling a doll.  But, we ran the ad anyway with a picture of the doll, which looked just like the original Little People, for a fraction of the retail price.  People started lining up at the stores at 5 AM to be first in line for those dolls and the rest is history.  Up to that point, the best selling doll in the industry was Baby Alive and its total first year sales were around 1 million dolls.  It is estimated that over 3 million Cabbage Patch Dolls were sold that first year, 1983, over 20 million dolls in 1984 and more than 350 million dolls over history. 

Wishing all a Happy Holiday Season and a Healthy and Happy New Year!

And The Journey continues.....