Biography of Ruth Handler
Ruth Handler was born November 4, 1916. She was the youngest of ten children born to a couple who had earlier traveled by steamship from Poland to settle in Denver. Ruth’s father was a blacksmith and she was primarily raised by her older siblings considering her mother was tired after bearing ten children (“Ruth Handler,” 2002).
At nineteen Ruth went to Hollywood, took a course in industrial design, met Elliot Handler in the same course and married him (“Ruth Handler,” 2002). Shortly after, Elliot and his business partner Harold “Matt” Matson formed the company now known as Mattel. Originally the company made picture frames. Later they began to make dollhouse furniture out of the scraps. The furniture was more profitable than the picture frames so the company decided to concentrate on toys. Ruth began observing that her daughter, Barbara, preferred playing with adult dolls as opposed to baby dolls (Wikipedia, 2008) and suggested that the company manufacture and market an adult doll for children, but Elliot claimed that it would never sell.
In 1956 Ruth and her family were travelling through Germany when she came across an adult doll that was made for adults, and later modeled Barbie after that doll (Wood, 2002). Ruth took a sample doll home and recreated it to make a similar doll that would be appropriate for children. Three years later Barbie, named after her daughter Barbara, appeared for the first time at the American Toy Fair in New York. Some people were concerned about the dolls figure, specifically the fact that it had breasts, but the doll went on to become a success anyway selling 350,000 Barbie’s in the first year. Since then Barbie has become the most profitable toy for Mattel and more than a billion have been sold in more than 140 countries (Wood, 2002). Ken, Barbie’s boyfriend, was introduced in 1961 and named after her son Kenneth.
In 1967, Ruth became the president of Mattel. In 1997 she was inducted into the Junior Achievement United States Business Hall of Fame for her contributions of Barbie, the marketing of Barbie, and her overall achievements in the business world (Wikipedia, 2008). Ruth eventually developed cancer resulting in a mastectomy. She then found it hard to find a realistic prosthetic and ended up inventing a more realistic prosthetic that would suit her. That was the only other thing that Ruth ever invented. Ruth died at the age of 85 on April 27, 2002 due to complications from of surgery.
