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Encourage Big Ideas at Your Small Biz
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Who would have thunk that a paper doll could have created so much fuss and turn a small business into a global behemoth?
Back in the early 1950s, Ruth Handler owned a small toy manufacturing business named Mattel (MAT). No one had ever heard of it, that is, until she began making paper dolls for her daughter.
Back then, all dolls, save paper dolls, were made to resemble babies, because the conventional wisdom was that all girls wanted to grow up to be mommies. In contrast, paper dolls were not babies at all, they were women -- stewardesses, nurses and so on.
Ruth Handler's daughter (yes, that's right, her name was Barbara, and yes, she had a brother named Ken) loved those paper dolls. It turns out that Barbara wanted to pretend to be something besides a mommy, and it was only the paper dolls that afforded her that opportunity.
And that was how Ms. Handler got her big idea: If Mattel could make a doll that was a woman and not a baby, it just might have a breakthrough product on its hands. It took many years and millions of dollars, but Mattel finally did it, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Big ideas can turn small businesses into big business.
So it is no wonder that Mattel takes its intellectual property and doll products seriously.
