German manufacturer Greiner & Hausser and rival toymakers Louis Marx and Company also apparently flipped. The dolls no sooner landed on the counter than they were snatched up by the women buying them for their daughters.” Women, on the other hand, instantly flipped for that doll. Men felt that their wives would not want it and that it wouldn’t be right for a child to have that. “The men felt that women would not buy a doll with a woman’s body-with breasts and narrow waistlines and narrow ankles, this adult sexy-looking doll. “Half of our buyers really didn’t like it,” Ruth Handler told the BBC in a 1997 interview. It was a massive hit, reportedly selling around 350,000 units in its first year alone. Handler and Mattel tamed “Lilli” into Barbie, releasing their own version of the doll in 1959. Toys became the main event for the firm, and Ruth was inspired by their daughter, Barbara, (the namesake of Barbie) to create a doll who was a grown-up-not a baby-so that young girls could use them as projections of their own future selves. The company was called Mattel, a combination of their partner’s last name and her husband’s first. Using the same materials, they branched off into another enterprise creating smaller furnishings-this time for dollhouses. In the 1940s, they entered a partnership with industrial designer Harold Matson to create a new business manufacturing picture frames, according to the Los Angeles Times. In the real world, Ruth married her husband, Elliot Handler, in 1938, and they started a business making home goods, often utilising plastics. Various Barbies and Kens exist in a separate dimension where life is idyllic and the problems of the real world seldom interfere. Handler’s creation of Barbie isn’t closely documented in the movie, which takes a more fanciful approach to the toy universe.
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