On this day in New York · March 9, 1959
Barbie Debuts at the Toy Fair
A three-dollar doll with a grown woman's figure landed on a Midtown showroom floor, and the men running the toy industry had no idea what to make of her.
The facts
- Date
- March 9, 1959
- Location
- American International Toy Fair, New York City
- Launch price
- $3, with a first wardrobe of 22 outfits priced $1 to $5
- First-year sales
- About 350,000 dolls
On March 9, 1959, Mattel unveiled the Barbie doll at the American International Toy Fair in New York City. Ruth Handler, who co-founded Mattel with her husband Elliot, had watched her daughter Barbara play with paper dolls of grown women and pushed the company to build a three-dimensional version, over the objections of male colleagues who thought no mother would buy it. The first Barbie wore a black-and-white zebra-striped swimsuit and a topknot ponytail, came in blonde or brunette, and sold for three dollars. Toy buyers who saw her that week doubted the idea. Inside a year, they were proven wrong.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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The doll made its debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York City on March 9, 1959.
Wikipedia's entry on Barbie
Source: Wikipedia -
My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be
Ruth Handler, in her 1994 memoir Dream Doll, as quoted by Smithsonian Magazine
Source: Smithsonian Magazine
Why it still matters
Handler bet that girls wanted to imagine being a grown woman, not just a mother, and won: the buyers who doubted her that week at the Fair were proven wrong within a year. Toy Fair still runs every year in New York, still the room where the next decade of American childhood gets previewed first.
Sources
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