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.

I’ve commented before on the Barbie vs. Bratz case, and followed it with interest, but even I was surprised with the severity of the final judgement:

If this is your first exposure to the story, let me summarize:

What was the crime? Getting paid by one company to design a doll, and then selling that doll to another company. Why is it a story? Because the Bratz dolls started beating the crap out of Barbie Dolls. What is the result? See above. But what I really want to know, now that they’ve won, is Mattel going to start selling Bratz?

Nude Barbie

It is so easy to offend… and yes I am talking dolls. For instance, two little words, nude, and Barbie. Ten little letters in the English language. Yet put them together — Nude Barbie — and whole treatises could be written about feminism, pornography, nudity, little girls self image…. it goes on and on. And has in fact, in blogs other than mine.

Here’s another Barbie causing waves… Tefillin Barbie by Doll Artist Jen Taylor Friedman. Why controversy? Well until very very recently, Jewish women didn’t wear tefillin, or for that matter study Torah (Yentl the Yeshiva Boy by Isaac Bashevis Singer is set in the late 19th century).

Tefillin Barbie by Doll Artist Jen Taylor Friedman

So is this a feminist statement? A religious one?

But if you gave either of these dolls – without any explanation – to any average four year old girl anywhere in the world, (well maybe not in the Middle East), what would happen? She would take the dolls, and play. End of story.

So I guess I should rephrase my opening line.

It is so easy to offend… adults. How about you? Offended?

It seems doll designer Carter Bryant worked for Mattel. His job was to design dolls. He also signed an agreement that gave Mattel the rights to his designs… basically, the agreement says “we’re paying you to come up with doll designs for us; when you come up with something it belongs to us.” Mr. Bryant signed it, nobody was twisting his arm. Now it seems he takes a break from the company for a while, and claims to have thought up the Bratz idea while on that break. OK so far?

But then he goes back to Mattel, and while there, he continues to work on the Bratz Dolls designs; builds models of the doll using some Barbie parts, makes new Bratz drawings, works with other Mattel employees on parts of the Bratz designs, and then leaves.

After he leaves he sells the rights for the Bratz dolls to a company called MGA for $30,000,000 (thirty million), and MGA goes on to make an estimated Billion dollars a year selling Bratz.

Mattel cries foul, and the court agrees. Mr Bryant and MGA have done a no-no.

Now the thing that bothers me, is that in the blogosphere afterwards, so many people attacked Mattel and the court’s decision. It seems that a lot of people don’t think Mattel should have the rights to Mr Bryant’s designs. Intellectual property and the creative rights of artists and all that. Pretty nasty name calling going on. Orwellian mind control and 1984 and Gulags. And I mean lots of people.

And I just don’t get that. If I pay you to dig a hole, and you take the money, isn’t it my hole? If I pay you to design a doll, and you design a doll, isn’t it my doll? And if you willingly sign a piece of paper that says ideas you have while working for me are mine… well aren’t they mine?

In our four e-tail stores, Addie and I don’t sell either Barbies or the Bratz. Barbies are too ‘white-bread’ for our ethnic customer base, and although we applaud the ethnic skin tones and multi-cultural feel of the Bratz, they are a little too ‘slut-puppy’ for us. So we don’t have a finacial ax to grind, and thus just our 2¢.

The first imported dolls in colonial America were the Fashion Dolls. The European dress makers dressed dolls in the latest fashions and sent them to America. The wealthier Americans studied the new designs and then imported the dresses they liked best; the less wealthy made their own best copies of the dresses on the fashion dolls. Obviously as fashions changed, the doll’s clothes changed as well. The Barbies of today are not all that removed from those times!

And of course the Collectible Doll industry of today needs to keep changing the sculpts and the outfits and the wigs and everything on their collectible dolls,  because the collectible doll folks don’t want a room full of the same dolls; they want the variety, and the thrill of adding the new.

But I don’t quite get the need for the baby doll manufacturers to constantly change their dolls. After all, if you give a three year old a baby doll, she will play with it for a few years ’til it’s raggedy and dirty and then she’ll want a new doll more suitable for a five year old. Meanwhile the doll manufacturer’s have churned out two whole seasons of new styles and designs. If our hypothetical family has a younger little girl, she won’t care how many millions of dollars the industry has wasted creating a fresh new look for her… she just falls in love with the doll she gets! And the process starts all over.

What makes this whole thing interesting, is that Addie and I have an e-tail store full of dolls that don’t change; and that does very well ‘thank-you-very-much,’ because they are classics. Raggedy Anns and Madeline Dolls and Cat in the Hat Dolls and Sesame Street Elmo Dolls. Our customers on that site don’t want the dolls to change! They want them to be exactly like they’ve always been.