The Doll Blog

Question number one:
Do you have a daughter or grandaughter who shares your love of dolls?

Question number two:
Of all your dolls, who is your favorite?

As you can see from my blog, I love all things “doll.” If you’re like me, this obsession probably leaves some of your family scratching their heads. Well, if you want to share a little quality / storybook time with your kids or grandkids, maybe The Best Loved Doll will do the trick.

“The Best Loved Doll,” by Rebecca Caudill with illustrations by Elliot Gilbert is a delightful little children’s book with question number two as it’s theme. It’s a ‘read aloud’ for toddlers, or an easy read chapter book for the elementary school set.

Are you a true doll lover? So much so that your significant other is complaining about how much “money you waste on dolls?” Well here’s some good news for you: it’s only pennies! How do we know?

Well first, The NPD Group Inc, released a report on the Global Toy Industry this week, and the news was pretty good:

PORT WASHINGTON, NEW YORK, September 10, 2008 –Despite a slowdown in U.S. sales and rising competition from vertical segments such as video games, worldwide toy market sales topped $71.96 billion dollars in 2007, a 5 percent increase over the $68.5 billion generated in 2006, according to Global Toy Trends and Forecasts, the most recent report from leading market research company, The NPD Group. At the current pace, NPD expects worldwide toy sales to top $86.3 billion in 2010.

Global Toy Trends and Forecasts provides a detailed and granular look at the composition of the global toy market since 2004, including a country by country analysis by age and gender, as well as the opportunities that exist for the toy industry in other parts of the world and a trend forecast of what The NPD Group expects the industry to experience within the next few years.

According to the report, North America represents 33 percent of worldwide sales, followed by Europe at 30 percent and Asia at 24 percent.

Then, using the latest available US Dept of Commerce Industry Outlook, Dolls, as a category, represents approximately 13% of all US toys. So It looks to us as if the doll industry in the US is a pretty healthy $3.12 Billion Dollar Industry!
(US Sales 33% of 72 Billion worldwide = $24B; Doll sales 13% of US Toy Sales = $3.1 Billion)

So let’s say you spend $2000 dollars a year on dolls. That’s about a half of a thousandth of a percent! Pennies! And since I assume the only readers of The Doll Blog are doll lovers, I assume you love these numbers too!

A doll collector recently visited our PattycakeDoll black collectible dolls page and then sent us this question:

“What doll magazines or books would you recommend to a collector who collects African American Dolls?”

“What a great question!”, I thought, and then realized, “I don’t have a good answer.”

IMHO there are really only four magazines that cover the industry well; they are: Contemporary Doll Collector, Dolls, The Doll Reader, and Art Doll Quarterly. And none of them do a particularly good job of addressing this market.

After all, it’s not like nobody makes these dolls… ‘Jamaica” above, is from Lee Middleton, who has a pretty good mix of Asian, Black and Hispanic Dolls. So does Berenguer and Precious Moments, Adora Doll and even Corolle. Marie Osmand does not, nor does Madame Alexander nor the OOAK and limited edition folks.

In fact the whole success of my two sites PattycakeDoll.com and SleepySoft.com has been built around supplying this market with ethnic baby dolls and ethnic collectible dolls.

But I expect that things will change, and pretty quickly I expect… After all more than 50% of the babies born in th US are ‘non-white.’ And of course about half of those are girls. The industry will wise up eventually, and then who knows? Maybe there will even be a Magazine called “Black Doll Collector!”

OK, how important could the Presidential elections be to the ‘Doll’ industry, right? I can here the groans now… Peter Please!

Well, depending on whose figures you use, Toys are a 20 Billion Dollars a year industry, with dolls about 2 to 3 Billion of that. And of course, 80% come from China. So throw big dollars, international trade, children’s toys all together into the mix, and yeah, the candidates speak up! (I’ve paraphrased and edited for conciseness… the sentiments are all theirs).

Of course every politico’s favorite bug a boo is lead in toys and recalls. Serious issues, knee-jerk comments

“I would stop the import of all toys from China” – Barack Obama

Chinese reaction : Squeal like a stuck pig

Retraction: “I meant the ones with lead”

Joe Biden wasn’t much better…

“If I were President, I’d shut down all toy imports from China”

Similar talk from McCain

“If I were President, the next toy that came from China that endangered the lives of our children, would be the last toy that came into the US”

So OK, Political reactions to a serious problem, one that the industry reacted to and Congress and Bush addressed as part of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008. It passed and it’s pretty strict. Of course neither candidate was actually there to vote; but they ‘supported it.’

So… Dolls, Chinese imports, Presidential Politics, Child Safety, Free Trade and the Doll Industry all did sort of collide in a jumble this year.

So what is my point? You gotta pay attention! And of course, VOTE!

If you are a customer of ours you are probably aware of the fact that we donate 10% of our profits to children’s charity. It is but one way for us to harness the community of doll lovers to do Tzedakah (Hebrew for charity)

Here is another way….
The Pink Artist Project: is a group of artists coming together to create two by two inch art squares, mailed in from around the world that when stitched together have built ONE magical creation, our lady Love Squared. An art doll MADE WITH LOVE and uniquely devoted to the cause of finding a cure for breast cancer. If you are interested, here is the site. The funds raised will go to the Susan G. Komen foundation.

It has been a real interesting summer for those of us who sell dolls! Lots of changes, some good, some not so good, and some… who knows?

In my last blog I talked about one of the very few downsides of being in the doll business… the fact that children love their dolls so passionately; and that occasionally they get lost, and very often we can do nothing to alleviate the pain.

How common this is, we illustrated in our last blog by printing the 150 year old poem by Charles Kingsley, The Lost Doll. Another wonderful take on ‘the lost doll’, is The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo, with the beautiful illustrations by Bagram Ibatoulline.

If you are not familiar with the story, Edward is a China Rabbit doll, who is accidentally lost at sea, found, and his adventures thereafter.

***WARNING and SPOILER*** This is not the book to read to a child who has lost a lovey or favorite doll recently. It may be too painful. And the fact that Edward does return at the end, albeit twenty years later, may inspire a false hope in your child as well.

But for every other doll lover, doll collector or parent who loves wonderful children’s books, we can’t recommend this book highly enough. It belongs on every doll lover’s bookshelf.

We got this email the other day:

“You guys are life savers. My daughter had a cloth doll that was left in a rental car. She has cried for 4 days. Continue with the business of doll making. Your dolls are so darling. I am certain that she will cherish this new one forever.”

We had the right African American rag doll in our PattycakeDoll.com store; order placed and doll delivered… Happy Ending.

But not all lost baby doll stories have happy endings, unfortunately, throughout our years in the doll industry, we’ve heard lots of sad stories about ‘The Lost Doll.’

There’s even a somewhat famous poem called ‘The Lost Doll’ written by the English poet Charles Kingsley over a hundred years ago:

I once had a sweet little doll, dears,
The prettiest doll in the world;
Her cheeks were so red and white, dears,
And her hair was so charmingly curled.
But I lost my poor little doll, dears,
As I played in the heath one day;
And I cried for her more than a week, dears,
But I never could find where she lay.

I found my poor little doll, dears,
As I played in the heath one day;
Folks say she is terribly changed, dears,
For her paint is all washed away,
And her arms trodden off by the cows, dears,
And her hair not the least bit curled;
Yet for old sakes’ sake, she is still, dears,
The prettiest doll in the world.

So, if you’re the parent of a desperately unhappy child, and you have feverishly been searching the internet and stumbled onto this blog, what do you do?

Once your world finally settles back down, here are a couple of additional suggestions:

Hope that helped. Good Luck!

So, what kind of a Doll Collector are you?

In all our years of being in the ‘Doll’ business, I’ve come across so many wonderful people with so many unique collections. I can’t even begin to define what a ‘doll collection’ should look like! Some people collect Barbies, some Jumeau’s. Some collect anything ’30′s”, some collect one of a kind Art Dolls.

I collect ‘examples.’ Let me explain…

Addie and I will be married thirty years come December, and in that time we’ve moved three times, and with our children just about all gone on to their own homes, we’re looking to move once again. I like to think that I’ve finally learned not to collect too much; I usually only have one or two ‘examples’ of a kind of doll.

So I only have one Kachina Doll in my doll collection
But for the purpose of this blog, he’s a perfect representation of his kind, and if you are trying to decide what kind of doll you’d like to collect, maybe you’d consider Kachinas.

Made of wood, turquoise, feathers, shells and stones, Kachina dolls are a style of native American Doll found mainly in the Southwestern United States. Of course with the advent of eBay they are readily collectible from anywhere in the world.

My Hoop Dancer was made by a Navajo Indian. He’s about 10 inches tall. In the Indian culture the Hoop Dancers have no religious significance…they represent the athletic dancers with their magical rings that represent the circle of life. A quick check on eBay finds Medicine Men Kachinas, Buffalo dancers, Hilili, Badger, Butterfly healers and many other Kachinas readily available.

Want to start a unique collection? Kachinas are available, relatively inexpensive and like any good collectible doll can offer you a life-long journey into beauty and knowledge!

I have a fondness for Steampunk dolls.  

The problem is, that too many people hear a phrase… think they know what it means, and declare themselves part of the movement. And that’s exactly what’s happening on the SteamPunk Doll front.

Sorry, my friends, but SteamPunk is well defined, (it is over twenty years old now), and you can’t just declare your doll ‘SteamPunk’ because you don’t know what other category of Art Doll to put it in!

It’s really pretty simple; to be a Steampunk Doll requires three things. If your doll doesn’t have all three, it ain’t Steampunk!

1. Elements of the Industrial Revolution, particularly the Age of Steam as a power source.
2. Elements of Victorian Fashion.
3. Elements of the Fantastical that reflect the genre’s roots in Science Fiction storylines.

Here’s the litmus test. If your doll could be used as a prop in the movie ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ you got it. If it couldn’t, you may have a beautiful doll, but it’s not SteamPunk!

SteamPunk Doll image courtesy of ‘notpersephone’ at flickr