The Doll Blog

As promised, the story of how a doll saved our business.

Back in 2002, the dot.com crash had hurt our ability to give as generously to charity as we liked, and we were looking for a new ‘stream of income’ from which to rebuild our charity gifting. So Addie and I started our first eCommerce stores, one of which we called The Happy Baby Basket, and which featured various themed baby gift baskets.

We had an Irish themed basket with a stuffed Irish Setter with a four leaf clover hanging from it’s mouth; a New Jewish baby  Basket, with a Blue Teddy Bear in a kippa and the Star of David embroidered on its paw, and a basket for a newly adopted child with Ling, (shown above, wasn’t she cute?) etc. And for a year an a half we failed to sell a single basket. In fact, we couldn’t even find our site in the search engines!

So after a year and a half, we decided eCommerce wasn’t in the cards and decided to shut that portion of the business down. But since everything was already paid for, and our licenses had another 6 months to run, we decided to take the various items out of the baskets and sell them individually; to see if maybe we could recoup some of our inventory expenses at least.

So we listed all the items separately, the dolls, the silver piggy banks, the cute little 6 months custom tee shirts we had made up, etc. Now we had also been learning more about SEO and page ranks and everything else in that year and a half, and we must have done something right, because all of a sudden our Asian dolls were selling. ( Not for a lot mind you, maybe $12.95?… I don’t remember anymore).

Well, one of my favorite phrases is “you don’t learn a heck of a lot from the second kick of the mule!” and that was the case here as well. After a year and a half, something had happened, but what? So we called a few of the customers who had purchased with…”hi, this is the Happy baby Basket customer service follow up call. Thank you for your purchase… did everything go OK… and by the way, why did you buy that doll?”

And we kept hearing the same thing: ” We just came back from China with a newly adopted little girl, and we went into our local stores, and we couldn’t find Asian faced dolls. So we went online and found you!” We had found a niche market. Underserved customers with a need.

Today we have both PattycakeDoll.com and the SleepySoft.com as well as BooksAndDolls.com and MyAdoptedChild, selling Asian Baby Dolls, African American Baby Dolls and Hispanic Baby Dolls, and contributing thousands of dollars every year to children’s charities.