Elliot Handler Remembered Elliot Handler (April 1916 — July 2011) Elliot Handler, founder of Mattel, Inc., the world's largest toy company and well-known as the creator of the Hot Wheels® mega-brand, died at the age of 95. With his wife Ruth Handler, Elliot transformed what began as a home-based business into the largest global toy company, with a rich portfolio of popular brands beloved by generations of children around the world, including Hot Wheels®, Barbie®, Fisher-Price®, and American Girl®. The Handlers started Mattel Creations in 1945 with Harold "Matt" Matson, whose name was fused with Elliot's to form "Mattel." Originally a small business enterprise headquartered in the Handlers' garage in suburban Los Angeles, Calif., the company launched with three pieces of shop equipment purchased on installment from Sears. The first Mattel products produced from that location were picture frames, and Elliot soon developed a side business in dollhouse furniture made from picture frame scraps. Elliot's product development talents were complemented by Ruth's marketing savvy, and the company turned a profit in its very first year.

The Uke-A-Doodle®, a child-size ukelele, was the first in a line of musical toys that gave Mattel its first 'staple' business. After the Uke-A-Doodle introduction in 1947, Matson sold his share of the business. Encouraged by their success, the Handlers soon shifted the company's emphasis to toys. A popular jack-in-the-box followed the Uke-A-Doodle, and by 1955, the company was valued at $500,000 and well on its way to becoming the world's number-one selling toy brand. In 1955, a new television series produced by The Walt Disney Company called the "Mickey Mouse Club" was set to debut, and Disney and ABC Television asked if Mattel would consider sponsoring a 15-minute segment of the show. The drawback was that Mattel would be obligated to sponsor the program for one entire 52-week season, which would cost Mattel $500,000 - nearly its entire net worth.

The campaign was an unabashed success, and Mattel instantly revolutionized the toy industry by turning a 'mom-and-pop' business with a seasonal focus on Christmas into a large-scale business enterprise that garnered impressive sales year-round. In fact, annual sales grew from $5 million to $14 million in just three years. Advertising on television was one of two key decisions that the Handlers made during the 1950s, which transformed Mattel from a profitable business into an industry leader. The other key turning point was the invention and marketing of a three-dimensional doll through which little girls could act out their dreams of growing up. An instant sensation upon its introduction in 1959, Barbie® has since grown into a multi-billion dollar brand. In the late 1960s, Mattel eagerly was in search of a toy hit that would capture boys’ imaginations the way that Barbie® did for girls. Elliot had an idea for miniature die-cast vehicles that would incorporate speed, power and performance, as well as cool car designs. Introduced in 1968, Hot Wheels® were distinguished with customized designs and outrageous paint jobs, and also became a number-one selling toy brand.

Known as the "whiz kids of the toy industry," the Handlers were renowned for inventing some of the world’s best-known toy brands. In 1973, Elliot was named Mattel’s Chairman of the Board, a position he would share with Ruth until 1975 when, after having helped nurture Mattel from a dollhouse furniture shop into a leading manufacturer, the Handlers left the company after more than 30 years. Elliot and Ruth became the first living inductees to the Toy Industry Hall of Fame in 1989. Employees also held the Handlers in high esteem, due to their thoughtfulness and ability to make every employee feel that his or her contribution to the organization was valuable. In fact, the Handlers insisted that all of their employees call them by their first names at a time when such informality was unprecedented. Elliot, the second of four brothers, grew up in Denver, Colorado and met Ruth Mosko at a charity dance in 1932. Five years later, the couple married and moved to Los Angeles, where Ruth found a job at Paramount Studios as a stenographer and Elliot worked part-time at a lighting fixture company while also attending art school.

Elliot is survived by his daughter, Barbara Segal. His son Kenneth, after whom the Ken® doll was named, died in 1994 of a brain tumor. His wife Ruth died in 2002 at the age of 85. Elliot Handler, Co-Founder Of Mattel Toys, Dies at 95 - The New York Times The New York Times Business Day |Elliot Handler, Co-Founder of Mattel Toys, Dies at 95 Search Continue reading the main story Elliot Handler, who co-founded the Mattel toy company and designed the plastic playthings that have filled millions of Christmas stockings, made dinner parties possible by occupying otherwise fidgety children, and stubbed countless parents’ toes, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95. The cause was heart failure, his daughter, Barbara Segal, said. Mr. Handler helped introduce Barbie , helped design the talking doll Chatty Cathy and popularized Hot Wheels toy cars. He began Mattel in 1945 with his wife, Ruth, and a short-term partner.

Until the Handlers were forced out of Mattel in 1975, they oversaw a toy empire that is among the largest in the world today. Elliot Handler was born April 9, 1916, in Illinois. He was a struggling art student and designer of light fixtures when, in 1939, he began making costume jewelry and dollhouse furniture in his garage in Southern California. Eventually, he designed a realistic-looking miniature piano that caused a furor at the New York toy fair. Stores ordered more than 300,000 of them — but the Handlers had mispriced the toys, losing about a dime on each one. Photo Elliot and Ruth Handler, co-founders of Mattel, assembled a two-stage plastic rocket in this photograph from Feb. 7, 1959. Credit The New York Times They fell into debt until a music arranger approached them with an idea for a new way to manufacture cheap, tiny music boxes. Previously, such musical devices were luxury items manufactured almost exclusively by European artisans. The Handlers started putting the devices into jack-in-the boxes, plastic ukuleles and dolls. The products were an almost immediate hit, earning millions.

Eventually Mattel released a talking doll — Chatty Cathy — that tutored generations of children in the lilting intonations of “I love you,” and “May I have a cookie?” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Ruth Handler drove Mattel’s business decisions while her husband nurtured new toys. When Mrs. Handler said that Mattel needed to develop a plastic doll that looked like a mature woman — with a small waist, long legs and a bosom that could put an eye out — her husband and others demurred. She insisted, and named the product after their daughter, Barbie. Later came Ken — named after their son, who died of a brain tumor in 1994. Years later, Mr. Handler became focused on die-cast toy cars. The company recruited designers from auto companies like General Motors, and perfected a manufacturing process for plastic wheels that could spin fast. Since then, more than 10,000 different Hot Wheels models have been manufactured, including “King ’Kuda,” “Evil Weevil” and the “Beatnik Bandit.” “He loved coming up with new cars,” said Sid Handler, his brother. “He loved the design part, and Ruth loved the business. It worked pretty well.

He was a quiet, kind man. I think that’s why he liked toys so much. They make people happy.” After retiring from Mattel, Mr. Handler devoted himself to painting, particularly in the photorealistic genre. His wife died in 2002. Mr. Handler is survived by his daughter, his brother and five grandchildren. A version of this article appears in print on July 23, 2011, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Elliot Handler, Co-Founder Of Mattel Toys, Dies at 95. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Great Leaders Series: Ruth Handler, Co-founder of Mattel and Inventor of Barbie | Inc.com CAREER WOMAN: Ruth Handler, executive of Mattel Toy company, posing with collection of Barbie dolls, 1961. Advertisement Best known as the inventor of the Barbie doll, Ruth Handler should perhaps be even more noted for her influence on the development of modern advertising and branding. As the co-founder of Mattel with her husband Elliot, Handler tapped into the power of television, and was one of the first companies to use the medium to advertise directly to children year round.

When Mattel bought a $500,000 annual sponsorship for the Mickey Mouse Club in 1955, toy advertisements were still relegated to the weeks leading up to Christmas. Mattel's ads for its "Mouse Guitar" -- part of the toy ukulele fad of the 1950s -- proved to be a huge hit. Handler continued to use television to not only build future brands, including Barbie, but also ensure that the Mattel name was engrained in the brain of every TV- watching kid in the country by running slogans like, "You Can Tell It's Mattel, It's Swell." Handler, who was born in 1916, married her high school sweetheart Elliot and moved with him to southern California. She worked as a stenographer at Paramount Pictures while encouraging her husband's creative handiwork of plastic mirrors and bookends, among other things. When the couple started Mattel in 1945, they produced picture frames. But the company quickly expanded to manufacture toy furniture, toy pianos, music boxes, and ukuleles.

Handler's idea for Barbie--the first doll with adult features that was aimed at kids--emerged from a combination of watching her own daughter, Barbara, play with dolls, and from seeing dolls marketed to adults in Europe. At first, Barbie wasn't any easy sell to Mattel's male executives, who initially thought that the anatomically-advanced doll was too risqué for young girls. Those execs were soon proved wrong. Barbie debuted at the New York Toy Fair in 1959 and Mattel sold 351,000 dolls in the first year alone. The company went public in 1960. Barbie was later joined by Ken (her "one and only boyfriend," according to Mattel corporate history) and friends of different ethnic backgrounds. She embarked on new careers like fashion designer, astronaut, and even American Airlines flight attendant. The different Barbie personalities were featured with a slew of outfits and accessories that needed to be purchased separately. Some women's groups spoke out against Barbie's unrealistic waist-to-bust measurements, but Handler looked at her creation in a different light: "Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices," she said.

Manufacturing went global under Handler's watch and she became president of Mattel in 1967. But her run as a toy entrepreneur wasn't untarnished. A series of bad investments in non-toy industries, including the Ringling Bros. Circus in the early 1970s, led to poor earnings and, eventually, an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Handler and her husband resigned from Mattel in 1975 and she later pled no-contest to charges of preparing false financial statements. She paid a fine and performed community service. Despite her record, Handler went on to found Ruthton Corp., a breast prosthesis manufacturer. The venture had a deep personal connection for Handler who underwent a radical mastectomy during her own cancer battle. Handler's innovations and advocacy helped galvanize the movement for the early detection of breast cancer. Handler died in 2002 but her legacy in the Barbie brand continues. Despite a recent dip in sales, Mattel still sells more than $1 billion worth of Barbie dolls and assorted accessories every year. Lately, the company has pondered ways to reinvigorate the Barbie brand. Mattel clearly believes it is a name worth fighting for.

Last year, it successfully pursued a $100 million lawsuit against the look-alike Bratz dolls. And in 2009, Handler's baby turned the ripe old age of 50, prompting a slew of retrospectives in newspapers and magazines, and on the morning news programs, proving that Barbie can still make headlines. Ruth Handler - Inventor of Barbie & Mattel Co-Founder Ruth and Elliot Handler co-founded Mattel Creations in 1945, and 14 years later in 1959, Ruth Handler invented the Barbie doll, or as Ruth Handler refers to herself, "I'm Barbie's mom." Inspiration for the Barbie Doll Ruth Handler watched her daughter Barbara and friends playing with paper dolls. The children used them to play make-believe, imagining roles as college students, cheerleaders and adults with careers. Ruth wanted to invent a doll that would better facilitate the way young girls were playing with their dolls. Ruth Handler and Mattel introduced Barbie , the Teen-Age Fashion Model, to skeptical toy buyers at the annual Toy Fair in New York on March 9, 1959. The new doll was very unlike the baby and toddler dolls that were popular at the time.

continue reading below our video What to Do If Your Identity is Stolen This was a doll with an adult body. During a family trip to Switzerland, Ruth Handler saw the German made Bild Lilli doll in a Swiss shop and brought one. The Bild Lilli doll was a collector's item snd not intended for sale to children, however, Ruth Handler used it as the basis of her design for Barbie. Barbie Doll’s first boyfriend, Ken Doll , debuted two years after Barbie in 1961. Ruth Handler on Barbie Doll “Barbie has always represented that a woman has choices. Even in her early years, Barbie did not have to settle for only being Ken’s girlfriend or an inveterate shopper. She had the clothes, for example, to launch a career as a nurse, a stewardess, a nightclub singer. I believe the choices Barbie represents helped the doll catch on initially, not just with daughters - who would one day make up the first major wave of women in management and professionals – but also with mothers.” - Ruth Handler Ruth Handler - Other Inventions After fighting breast cancer and undergoing a mastectomy in 1970 Ruth Handler, one of the creators of the Barbie Doll, surveyed the market for a suitable prosthetic breast.

Disappointed in the options available, she set about designing a replacement breast that was more similar to a natural one. In 1975, Handler received a patent for Nearly Me, a prosthesis made of material close in weight and density to natural breasts. Elliot Handler, co-founder of Mattel, died at 95 - latimes July 23, 2011 |By Andrea Chang, Los Angeles Times Elliot Handler with his wife, Ruth, who invented the Barbie doll, shown… (United Press International ) Elliot Handler, a pioneering toy maker who co-founded Mattel and invented Hot Wheels, has died. He was 95. Handler died Thursday from heart failure at his Century City home, according to his daughter, Barbara Segal, after whom the Barbie doll was named. In 1945, Handler and his wife, Ruth, founded Mattel out of a garage workshop in Los Angeles with their friend Harold "Matt" Matson. They called it Mattel, a name fashioned from Matson and Elliot. The first Mattel products were picture frames, but Handler soon developed a side business making dollhouse furniture out of picture frame scraps.

After the Handlers bought out Matson, they turned Mattel's focus to toys. Handler's product development and design talents were complemented by his wife's marketing savvy. Early successes were musical toys, such as the Uke-A-Doodle, a child-size ukulele, and a cap gun called the Burp Gun, which the Handlers advertised on the new medium of television. The company's biggest hit was Ruth's invention of Barbie, a teenage doll with a tiny waist, slender hips and impressive bust who debuted in 1959 wearing a black-and-white striped swimsuit. Ruth had been inspired by her daughter's fascination with cutout paper dolls and named Barbie after her. At first, Handler and male toy buyers were skeptical of the doll's potential. "Ruth," Handler reportedly told his wife, "no mother is ever going to buy her daughter a doll with breasts." He was wrong, and Barbie became the top-selling fashion doll in the world, beloved by young girls and collectors alike. The stylish and buxom doll also prompted controversy: Many critics attacked the doll for being anti-feminist and said Barbie — with her 39-21-33 proportions — promoted unattainable body expectations for young girls.

By 1965, sales topped $100 million and the company joined the Fortune 500, due largely to massive sales of Barbie. Today, Mattel is the world's largest toy maker and is headquartered in El Segundo. In the late 1960s, Mattel was looking for a toy that would appeal to boys as Barbie had to girls. Handler came up with an idea for miniature die-cast vehicles that would incorporate speed, power and performance, as well as cool car designs. Introduced in 1968, Hot Wheels featured customized designs and eye-catching paint jobs and went on to become a No. 1-selling toy brand. But the couple faced a downside of success. Daughter Barbara and her brother Kenneth were said to be teased incessantly because of their affiliation with the famous dolls (Ken, Barbie's longtime boy toy, was introduced in 1961). Kenneth died in 1994. In 1975, Elliot and Ruth Handler were ousted from the company by new corporate managers. Three years later, Ruth was accused of having doctored Mattel's books to deceive shareholders and was sentenced to community service and heavily fined.

Elliot Handler was born April 9, 1916, in Chicago and grew up in Denver. He moved to Los Angeles after high school and, in 1938, married Ruth, his high school sweetheart whom he had met at a charity dance. He studied industrial design at the Art Center School in Los Angeles (now Art Center College of Design in Pasadena) while she worked as a secretary at Paramount Studios. Before founding Mattel, he was drafted to serve stateside in the Army. In recent years, Handler lived a quiet life, renting out a studio space where he would often go to paint, his daughter said. "They were something — my mother was ahead of her time, that's for sure, and he was such a great designer. He had such a great flair for creativity," she said of her parents. A soft-spoken man, Handler was known at Mattel for his thoughtfulness and insistence that all employees call him by his first name at a time when such informality was unprecedented. Bob Eckert, chief executive of Mattel, said Friday that Handler had remained an important part of the company and was invited every year to meet with employees at its headquarters, where he showed a continued fondness for toys.

"He's so motivating to people, particularly in our design center where we create toys," Eckert said. "He was the creative juice for the company and really our inspiration." In addition to his daughter, Handler is survived by a brother, Sidney Handler of Woodland Hills; five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Ruth died in 2002. A funeral will be held at 11 a.m. Tuesday at Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary, 6001 W. Centinela Ave., Los Angeles. Ruth Mosko Handler Ruth Mosko Handler (1916-2002) Ruth Mosko Handler was an American entrepreneur, toy manufacturer and inventor of the Barbie doll and the Nearly Me breast prosthesis. Handler was born in Denver, Colorado , on November 4, 1916, to first generation Jewish-Polish immigrants, Jacob Joseph Mosko and his wife, née Ida Rubenstein. She married her high school boyfriend, Elliott Handler, and the two moved to Los Angeles in 1938. The Handlers started their first business, plastic furniture, in their garage and Ruth sold products to Douglas Aircraft.

During World War II a partner, Harold "Matt" Matson, and Elliot combined letters in their names to form another company, Mattel. They originally sold miniature picture frames but found dollhouse furniture to be more profitable. After Matson sold out to his partner, Elliot and Ruth Handler concentrated on manufacturing toys. In 1955 the Handlers pioneered a new way to market products directly to children by buying a year's worth of advertising on the new Mickey Mouse Club television show for which they created "Mouseguitar." Still it was the Barbie doll that would be their most successful product. During a trip to Europe Ruth bought a German doll, Lilli, for her daughter, Barbara. After buying the rights to market Lilli, Ruth made a few changes and put the Barbie doll on the market in 1959. Although Ruth Handler believed it was important for girls' self-esteem to play with a doll with breasts, critics have said that the doll's unrealistic measurements, translated to human size, 39ʹʹ-18ʹʹ-33ʹʹ, could have the opposite effect. Mattel did adjust the doll's measurements over the years, but the proportions remained out of reach for most women.

The enormous appeal of Barbie, her ever-changing wardrobe pieces and her entourage, including boyfriend Ken (named for the Handlers' son Kenneth), Midge, Barbie's best friend, and Allan, Ken's pal and Midge's beau, led Mattel to become a publicly owned company in 1960, and by 1965 Mattel was on the Fortune 500 list. Ruth Handler, who became Mattel's president in 1967, was indicted in 1978 for fraud and securities violations from the early 1970s. Handler, who was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy in 1970, pled no contest, saying she wanted to work on her new business, based on the breast prosthesis she designed and called Nearly Me. She did public service to serve her sentence. Handler published an autobiography, Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story in 1995. Handler died in California from complications of colon cancer surgery on April 27, 2002, at age 85. At the time of her passing, more than a billion Barbies had been sold in 250 countries.

The phenomenal success of Barbie found the doll among items buried in the official Bicentennial time capsule. BIBLIOGRAPHY: M.G. Lord. Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll (1994). [Sara Alpern (2nd ed.)] Ruth Mosko Handler | Jewish Women's Archive by Julie Altman Best known as the inventor of the Barbie doll, Ruth Mosko Handler combined her marketing genius with her husband Elliot Handler’s creative designs to form the toy company Mattel, Inc. Starting in their garage in 1939, the Handlers produced Lucite gifts, wooden picture frames, and dollhouse furniture before developing their first toy, the Uke-A-Doodle, in 1947. The success of the Uke-A-Doodle was followed by a series of rubber-belt-driven musical toys, including the Jack-in-the-Box, as well as toy guns such as a Winchester rifle replica. Yet it was the Barbie doll, created in 1959, that “ran off the counter.” Thirty years later, sales of the doll that Handler named after her daughter exceeded one billion dollars.

Ruth Mosko Handler, the youngest of ten children, was born in 1916 in Denver, Colorado, to Polish-born parents. Her father, Jacob Mosko, arrived at Ellis Island in 1907. Informing immigration officials that he was a blacksmith, he was sent to Denver, the center of the railroad industry. In 1908, Ida Mosko arrived in America with their six children and joined her husband in Colorado. Ida Mosko was forty when her youngest child was born, and she became ill soon after. At the age of six months, Ruth was sent to live with her older sister Sarah and Sarah’s husband and stayed with them until she was nineteen. It was in Sarah’s drugstore/soda fountain that she first developed her enthusiasm for business. Ruth preferred work to play, and grew up in a family where the idea of women working outside of the home was not unusual. In Poland, where antisemitism had fueled impoverished conditions, everyone had had to participate in earning a living. She attributes her family’s entrepreneurial spirit partly to such circumstances. In 1932, she fell in love with a poor art student named Izzy Handler.

Her family was terrified the teenagers would marry. During her sophomore year at the University of Denver, Handler vacationed in Los Angeles and landed a job at Paramount Studios. Izzy soon joined Ruth in California, and in 1938 the two married in Denver, with her family’s reluctant blessing. Returning to California, Handler encouraged her husband to drop the stereotypical “Izzy” in favor of his middle name, Elliot. Handler returned to her job at Paramount, and her husband enrolled in the Art Center College of Design while working as a lighting fixture designer. He also began to sketch designs for Lucite accessories. Handler encouraged him to produce the pieces and agreed to do the selling. She also negotiated a very large order with Douglas Aircraft: die-cast models of the Douglas DC-3 airplane to be given to corporate customers for Christmas. At the age of twenty-two, the Handlers were in business. During World War II, President Roosevelt announced that plastics would be restricted to military use. The Handlers had produced a line of plastic picture frames and were in the process of filling a large order. Desperate, they changed the materials to a low-grade wood. The wooden frames were a success, and the order was doubled.

That night the Handlers and their colleague Harold “Matt” Matson (whom they had hired as the production expert) celebrated. A name was chosen for the company: “Matt” plus “El” (from Elliot) became Mattel. Although it was Ruth Handler’s idea to make picture frames and her selling was critical in landing the accounts, it never occurred to them that her name should be part of the company name. In search of a new product, the company decided to follow up on entertainer Arthur Godfrey’s new popularity and the public’s interest in the ukulele. The Handlers created the Uke-A-Doodle and sold eleven million by 1957. The Handlers were also successful in producing toy guns based on popular television shows. Capitalizing on the western craze, Mattel became a sponsor of a soon-to-debut television show. The Mickey Mouse Club became a hit series, and the fifty-two-week, half-million-dollar investment paid off. By 1958, Mattel sales climbed to fourteen million dollars. In 1956, while vacationing in Switzerland, Handler and her fifteen-year-old daughter Barbara became transfixed by a window display of six eleven-inch dolls in different ski outfits.

They looked very similar to an idea that Handler had envisioned five years earlier—a child’s doll with an adult body and multiple outfits. Handler pushed the idea for three years, and in 1959 the Barbie dolls were put on the market. The Ken doll, named for her son, who had been born in 1944, soon followed. By late 1964, the Saturday Evening Post reported that Barbie products supported five thousand workers in Japan, eight hundred workers in California, and numerous press agents and advertising executives. Barbie had a secretary to answer twenty thousand fan letters a week. By 1968, the Barbie Fan Club grew to 1.5 million members in the United States. In 1993, a “second issue” Barbie in its original box was sold at auction for over five thousand dollars. In 1970, Handler lost a breast to cancer. Because of her illness, she spent less time at Mattel. Her loss of self-esteem affected her leadership, and she lost control of the business. Major decisions had been made without her consent, and by 1973 Mattel was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Although Handler and her colleagues pleaded innocent, they were fined, and by 1975 Handler was forced out of the company she had started. During her unhappy search for an adequate breast prosthesis, she realized that she should be making them for other women. Through her company Nearly Me, she has helped thousands of women. As she explained to a reporter in the early 1980s, “When I conceived Barbie, I believed it was important to a little girl’s self-esteem to play with a doll that has breasts. Now I find it even more important to return that self-esteem to women who have lost theirs.” Ruth Mosko Handler has received numerous awards for her accomplishments in business and philanthropy. Among her honors, she has been named Woman of the Year in Business (Los Angeles Times), been inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame (Toy Manufacturers of America), received the Volunteer Achievement Award (American Cancer Society), and was the first “Woman of Distinction” of the United Jewish Appeal. Ruth Handler died on Saturday, April 27, 2002 at Century City Hospital in Los Angeles. Bibliography Handler, Ruth Mosko.

Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story (1994); Lord, M. G. Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll (1994). Inventor Ruth Handler Biography Inventor: Ruth Handler Criteria: First to invent. First to patent. Entrepreneur. Birth: November. 4, 1916 in Denver, Colorado, Ruth Mosko Death: April 27, 2002 in Los Angeles, California Nationality: American, of Polish immigrant parents.. Invention: Barbieï¿½ doll in 1959 Function: noun / Trademark (Reg, U,S.) Definition: A small-scale anatomically improbable molded plastic figure of a human being used especially as a child's plaything. Collectable doll. Trademark: Reg. No. 0689055 issued December 1, 1959 Milestones: 1916 Ruth Mosko was born November. 4, 1916 in Denver, Colorado 1938 Ruth married Elliot Handler 1945 Mattel founded by Harold Matson, Elliot Handler and Ruth Handler to make picture frames 1946 Matson sells his interest to the Handlers.

Mattel makes and sells doll house furniture 1959 Ruth invents a three dimension doll named Barbie 1960 The success of the Barbie doll led Mattel to become a publicly-owned company 1967 Ruth Handler becomes President of Mattel, Inc. 1974 The Handlers leave the Mattel company 2002 On April 27, Ruth Handler dies in Los Angeles, California after a long fight against cancer barbie, barbie doll, Ruth Handler, Elliot Handler, Harold Matson, Mattel, inventor, biography, profile, history, inventor of, history of, who invented, invention of, fascinating facts. STORY: Since its debut in 1959, an anatomically improbable molded plastic statuette named Barbie has become an icon. Ruth Handler undeniably invented an American icon that functions as both a steady outlet for girls' dreams and an ever changing reflection of American society. This can be seen in the history of Barbie's clothes, and even her various "face lifts" to suit the times; in her professional, political and charitable endeavors; and more recently in the multi-culturalizing of her product line.

The Mattel company traces its beginnings to 1945, when a fledgling Mattel began operating out of a garage workshop. The original founders were Harold Matson, Elliot Handler and Ruth Handler, who coined "Mattel" by combining letters of their last and first names. The first Mattel product was picture frames, but Elliot soon developed a side business in doll house furniture made from picture frame scraps which led to an emphasis on toys. Matson soon sold out to his partners, and Elliot and his wife, Ruth, steadily expanded Mattels product line. Encouraged by the success of the doll furniture, they turned the companys emphasis to toys. The Uke-A-Doodle, a child-size ukulele, was the first in a line of musical toys. A hand-crank, patented music box gave Mattel its first "staple" business, and versions of this product helped generate much of the companys revenue in the 50s and 60s. In 1955, Mattel also introduced another highly successful product, the Burp Gun, an automatic cap gun based on a patented mechanism.

Also in 1955 came another, even more important turning point for Mattel. In a move that would eventually revolutionize the way toys were marketed, the Handlers bought 52 weeks of advertising on the new "Mickey Mouse Club" television show, marking the first time toys had been advertised on a year-round basis. In conjunction with the companys sponsorship of the show, Mattel introduced a child-size "Mouseguitar," which became an instant sensation in the industry. Mattel followed its musical toy success with a line of replica rifles and guns that reflected the 1950s popularity of Western-themed television shows like "Bonanza" and "Gunsmoke." In 1959, Ruth Handler became convinced, from watching her daughter, Barbara, play with paper dolls, that girls use dolls to act out future, rather than current, roles. (Barbara consistently preferred teenager or career women cutouts to babies or children.) I believed it was important to a little girls self-esteem, Handler has said, to play with a doll that has breasts. Ruth Handler suggested making a three-dimensional doll through which little girls could act out their dreams.

She named the doll "Barbie," which was the nickname of her real-life daughter. The doll was loosely based on a racy German comic-book character named Lilli, Barbie was introduced at the 1959 toy fair in New York City. By that summer, the doll had rocketed to the top of every American girls wish list. The success of the Barbie doll led Mattel to become a publicly-owned company in 1960. Within five years, Mattel would join the ranks of companies on the Fortune list of the 500 largest U.S. industrial companies. The early 60s also saw Mattel entering the worldwide toy market. The Barbie doll and other products were first test-marketed overseas in 1963, and were received so favorably that many products began to be manufactured under licensing agreements arranged by the company in England, France, Germany, South Africa, Italy and Mexico. In 1964, a wholly-owned subsidiary, Mattel S.A., opened its first sales office in Switzerland as a headquarters for the companys worldwide marketing program.

During the 60s, the company created some of its most successful early products, including Thingmaker (featuring Creepy Crawlers) and two classic talking toys, Chatty Cathy and See N Say. In 1968, Mattel introduced Hot Wheels miniature vehicles, another landmark product that helped the company reach out and capture boys imaginations the way the Barbie doll did for girls. In 1998, Hot Wheels celebrated its 30th anniversary and reached a milestone when the two-billionth car was produced. That makes Mattel the producer of more vehicles than Detroits big three car manufacturers combined. By the early 70s, Mattel was generating $300 million in annual revenues. During this time period, the company began to diversify, acquiring a number of non-toy companies.

These included Ringling Brothers And Barnum And Bailey Circus; Circus World, a theme park; Metaframe, a pet products company; Turco, a manufacturer of playground equipment; Western Publishing Company, publishing under the popular Golden Book name; and even a motion picture production companyRadnitz/Mattel Productionswhich produced the Academy Award-nominated feature film "Sounder." The Handlers left Mattel in the mid-70s. TO LEARN MORE Ruth Handler facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Ruth Handler COPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. Ruth Handler American businessperson Ruth Handler (1916–2002) changed the face of the toy industry with her introduction of the Barbie doll in 1959. Co–founder of the Mattel toy company, Handler was also noted for her marketing innovations. She later went on to a successful second career in the prosthetic breast business. At the time of Handler's death, there had been over a billion Barbies sold in 150 countries. Child of Immigrants Handler was born on November 4, 1916, in Denver, Colorado.

She was the youngest of ten children born to Jacob and Ida Mosko, Polish immigrants who had traveled to the United States on a steamship. Her father was a blacksmith who had fled Poland to avoid serving in the Russian army and her mother was in frail health, leaving much of her youngest's rearing to the child's older siblings. Interestingly, the young Handler did not like playing with dolls. She did, however, learn the benefits of a job well done as her parents fortunes improved and she earned tips working in their drugstore. At 16, Handler met her future husband, Isadore Elliot Handler, at a B'nai B'rith dance in Denver. Three years later, she moved to Los Angeles, and he soon joined her there to attend the Art Center School of Design. The couple briefly returned to Denver to be married at the former Park Lane Hotel in 1938, but Southern California was home to them for the rest of their lives together. Business Began Handler first took a job as a secretary at Paramount Studios, while her husband studied and began designing household products such as bookends and candle holders.

Before long, the couple's first company, Elzac (named for Elliot and a financial partner named Zachary), came into being. Elzac's line was expanded to include giftware and costume jewelry, and the company gradually became a $2 million business, but the Handlers were not satisfied. In 1942, the Handlers joined forces with another designer, Harold "Matt" Matson, to manufacture picture frames. That business, started in the couple's garage, branched out to include doll house furniture made out of scraps from the picture frame enterprise. Using yet another merger of the name Elliot and a partner's name, the company was called Mattel. It turned a profit in 1945 and the Handlers found themselves in the toy business. One of Mattel's first successful products was a toy ukulele called the Uke–A–Doodle. Its release in 1947 was also a learning experience for the Handlers, as they discovered ways to attain patent protection and thwart imitators. They played to their individual strengths as well, with Handler in charge of marketing and her husband heading up product design. (Matson was bought out very early in the game).

Together, the talented couple managed a series of innovations that helped put Mattel on the map. For example, Mattel was the first company to make toys out of a mixture of materials. Additionally, the Handlers were quick to realize the advantages of recycling components in a variety of toys, such as placing a music box in a jack–in–the–box. Paul Lukas of Fortune Small Business quoted Handler from her 1994 autobiography, Dream Doll, "We'd developed a basic mechanism around which new products could be designed year after year." But it may be that Mattel's most revolutionary advancement was the use of television in its advertising. In the 1950s, television was still in its infancy. The advertising of toys was still primarily through catalogs and trade shows, and generally focused on the Christmas season. The Handlers changed all that in 1955 when Mattel offered to buy a year's exclusive sponsorship of ABC's new program, The Mickey Mouse Club. The show was a hit, and sales of Mattel's Mouseguitar and Burp Gun went through the roof. A brand new toy advertising style was born, and Handler's later wry characterization of herself, cited by the Economist, was hardly an exaggeration.

"I was a marketing genius," she said. Barbie Baby dolls had come into vogue in the late 19th century and remained in fashion in the 1950s. Handler, however, had noticed that her daughter had little interest in playing with them, preferring instead to dress up adult paper dolls and pretend to be grown up. Thus inspired, she pitched the idea of a manufacturing an adult doll to her company, but met repeated resistance from Mattel's predominately male sales force and executives. "Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future," Handler said in a 1977 New York Times interview quoted by Sarah Kershaw in the same paper in 2002. "If she was going to do role playing of what she would be like when she was 16 or 17, it was a little stupid to play with a doll that had a flat chest." Then in 1956, she found a voluptuous German doll in Switzerland. Unbeknownst to Handler, the doll was intended for an adult male audience, but its original purpose was to be far overshadowed by its evolution at Mattel.

Using the German doll as a model, Mattel designers spent three years creating the doll of Handler's dreams. The finished product, an 11 and 1/2 inch blonde with an improbable figure and permanently high heels, made her debut at the American Toy Fair in New York City in 1959. Officially called "Barbie Teenage Fashion Model" (Barbie was the Handlers' daughter's name), the doll did not thrill the show's buyers. But Handler was vindicated by the delighted reception of little girls. 351,000 Barbie dolls were sold that first year, a sales record for Mattel, and it took the company a full three years to begin to keep up with demand. The fortunes of Barbie and Mattel had become inexorably entwined. The success of Barbie soon led to the creation of her boyfriend, Ken (named after the Handlers' son). With time, other friends and family were produced, along with hundreds of outfits and accessories. The latter were no small part of the business, as Handler's husband pointed out in the Barbie Chronicles (cited by Lukas). "You get hooked on one, and you have to buy the other.

Buy the doll, and then you buy the clothes. I know a lot of parents hate us for this, but it's going to be around a long time." And right he was. Barbie's popularity continued to grow so that by the year 2002, over a billion dolls had been sold in 150 countries. She had been showcased in the Smithsonian Institution and included in the official U.S. bicentennial time capsule. Fan clubs, magazines, and collectors obsessed about her. Yet, Barbie did have her detractors. Handler's hit doll drew fire from feminists and others, who were concerned that Barbie's unlikely proportions sent the wrong message to young girls. Her measurements, if translated to a woman of 5–foot–6, would have been 39–21–33, an extremely rare occurrence in the natural world. But Handler maintained that Barbie, whose numerous "careers" had ranged from ballerina to surgeon to rock star, was all about giving girls options. The Times of London quoted her thoughts on the matter from her autobiography: "My whole philosophy of Barbie was that(,) through the doll(,) the little girl could be anything she wanted to be.

Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices." Whatever her faults, Barbie became an American icon. Triumphed, Failured, and Challenged Mattel continued to be a market leader throughout the 1960s. The company scored wins with such toys as 1960's Chatty Cathy, who talked, the educational toy series, See 'N Say, and the Hot Wheels miniature car line, introduced in 1968. Investors were pleased as the $10 share price of 1960 zoomed to $522.50 at the stock's pinnacle in 1971. Such heady times did not last, however. Business woes began with the failure of a battery–powered miniature car line called Sizzlers. This was compounded by Mattel's expensive acquisitions of such diverse enterprises as a pet supply company and the Ringling Brothers–Barnum & Bailey Circus. Combined, the troubles caused the company to post its very first loss in 1971, and yet another the following year. The losses led to shareholder lawsuits and an SEC (Security and Exchange Commission) inquiry that revealed accounting irregularities.

In 1975, the Handlers were forced out of the company they had founded, although they denied any knowledge of wrongdoing. Difficulties came to another peak in 1978, when Handler was indicted for fraud and false reporting to the SEC. Still maintaining her innocence, she pled no contest, and was fined and sentenced to community service. Disappointing as all the business upheaval undoubtedly was though, it paled against the parallel challenges facing Handler. In 1970, just as Mattel was heading for problems, Handler was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a modified radical mastectomy. She later blamed the worry and distractions of the disease on her trials at work. Luckily, Handler was able to turn even such a devastating experience as serious illness into a positive. Second Career After her mastectomy, Handler was frustrated in her efforts to find a suitable prosthetic breast. The unappealing and limited options ranged from rolled up gloves or stockings to shapeless blobs that bore little resemblance to the real thing. According to Veronica Horwell of the Guardian, Handler concluded that "the people in this business are men who don't have to wear these." So, she set about to change things.

With the help of expert craftsman Peyton Massey, Handler designed a line of realistic artificial breasts fashioned from foam and silicon. She called the product "Nearly Me" and formed the Ruthton Corporation to sell it. Intent on demystifying what was a taboo subject in the 1970s, Handler became an outspoken advocate for early detection of breast cancer and offered her prosthetics as a way for women to feel good about themselves again. One rather unorthodox method she used to get her point across was to open her blouse during interviews, demanding that the interviewer physically determine which of her breasts was real. She also arranged showings of Nearly Me at upscale department stores and made certain that sales staffs were properly trained in fitting the product. As Elaine Woo of the Newark Star–Ledger quoted, Handler's unabashed goal was to enable breast cancer survivors to ". . . wear a regular brassiere and blouse, stick her chest out(,) and be proud." Handler made the business a successful one, counting former First Lady Betty Ford among her many customers, before selling it to a division of Kimberly–Clark in 1991. But profit was not really her motive in this second career.

Horwell quoted her saying, "I didn't make a lot of money in it. It sure rebuilt my self–esteem, and I think I rebuilt the self–esteem of others." And she was not unaware of the ironic connection between Barbie and Nearly Me. As Lukas noted, Handler was fond of saying, "I've gone from breast to breast." Handler spoke of her life's challenges at a luncheon for the Allied Jewish Federation Women's Department in her hometown in 1996. One of the things she said, according to Joanne Davidson of the Denver Post, was, "I like to think of my life as an impossible dream. We've had a lot of nightmares, but we've always been able to pick up and move on." Perhaps even more to the point was her husband's comment to People Weekly upon Handler's death on April 26, 2002. "She was brilliant and brave," he said. Periodicals

Question: Which toy company did Ruth and Elliot Handler found?
Answer: Mattel