After investing heavily in advertisements that ran during The Mickey Mouse Club, sales of the Barbie doll elevated Mattel to levels of success beyond both Ruth’s and her husband’s wildest dreams.Mattel Inc. was created by Ruth’s husband Elliot Handler and his partner Harold Matson in 1945.
It instantly dawned on Handler that make-believe and pretending about the future is an important part of growing up.
Spread too thin, the firm began to experience losses.
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.
Although Handler and her colleagues pleaded innocent, they were fined, and by 1975 Handler was forced out of the company she had started.Ida Mosko was forty when her youngest child was born, and she became ill soon after. Returning to California, Handler encouraged her husband to drop the stereotypical “Izzy” in favor of his middle name, Elliot.During World War II, President Roosevelt announced that plastics would be restricted to military use. I shall have a career. Her parents, both Jewish immigrants from Poland, were named Jacob and Ida Mosko. As she explained in a 1977 interview,Printed from American National Biography.
Demand for the doll was so great that it took several years for the supply to keep up with the demand. Ruth Handler Helping other women became the answer to helping myself. By the mid 1950s, Ruth and Elliott had bought out Harold, and the company had grown to USD 6.5 million revenue.
She was born in 1916 in Denver, Colorado.
She served as the president of the toy manufacturer Mattel Inc., In 1959 she invented the Barbie doll, which sold over a billion copies worldwide. Ruth Moskowicz was born into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants in Denver, Colorado in 1916. 1994.The turning point for Mattel was Handler's decision, opposed by most of her male staff, to produce a doll in the form of an adult woman.
Its product was, according to the company's statement, “the first breast form that specifically fit the right or left side of the body, came in familiar bra sizes and followed the natural slope of the actual breast” (www.nearlyme.org). Barbie has been a … The fully formed plastic doll could wear clothing made from real fabric, rather than the ill-fitting paper clothing used for traditional dolls.In 1970, Ruth Handler was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ruth Handler Barbie Doll Invention.
When Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler first proposed that the company make a grown-up doll, the marketing staff at Mattel balked at … Because of her illness, she spent less time at Mattel. Fortune Magazine's 20 That Made History. The Handlers returned to California, where Elliot studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The Handlers had produced a line of plastic picture frames and were in the process of filling a large order. Barbie even got her own boyfriend, Ken, named after Handler's son.