A Lively Babe : Backers Hope Laughing-Crying Doll Will Grow Into a Mega-Hit
When a little girl cradles her new Cheerful Tearful doll, she had better be prepared for what comes next. It could be cries. It could be coos. The doll may laugh, wet its diapers or burp.
Talking dolls are nothing new. But Cheerful Tearful’s makers are hoping to cash in on renewed interest in girls’ baby dolls by taking an age-old idea and giving it a high-tech twist.
The new twist is a computer microchip embedded inside the doll that will allow it to digitally reproduce recorded sounds in a random sequence. Cheerful Tearful is billed by its creator, a year-old Newport Beach company called Curiosity, as one of the most lifelike dolls ever created.
“I’ve heard a lot of good things about this doll from retailers,” said John G. Taylor, an industry analyst for L.H. Alton & Co. in San Francisco. “This was mentioned as one of the more innovative of the larger dolls.”
He added, however, that Cheerful Tearful can expect to face a bevy of competitors. After years of a preoccupation with such male-oriented toys as Nintendo and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, toy makers are rediscovering the girls’ market.
They are each trying to wed the simplicity of the basic baby doll with sophisticated technology to produce a mega-hit like the Cabbage Patch Kids of the 1980s.
“The manufacturers are putting a lot of emphasis on girls’ toys this year,” said Frank Reysen Jr., editor of Playthings, a toy industry publication. “Just about every major manufacturer has a new entry in the doll market.”
Tyco Toys Inc. scored a surprising success last Christmas with its motorized crawling doll called Oopsie Daisy, selling 400,000 of them. Perennial favorite Barbie celebrated her 30th year--though she hardly looks a day past 18--with $600 million in worldwide sales, up $100 million from the year before.
Shipments of baby dolls rebounded to $135 million last year from $112 million in 1988, although they fell short of the $149 million in sales recorded in 1987 near the end of the Cabbage Patch doll craze, according to the Toy Manufacturers of America, a New York-based trade group.
Those figures have not been lost on Barbie’s manufacturer, Mattel Inc. of Hawthorne, which has introduced a series of new dolls starting with Li’l Miss Makeup, which sprouts what appears to be facial makeup when the doll is dabbed with warm water. The renewed interest in dolls reflects “a trend in the industry of returning to basics,” said Glenn Bozarth, a Mattel spokesman.
The re-emergence of the baby doll caught the attention of the group of investors and veteran toy industry executives who founded Curiosity in Newport Beach and who hope to build it into a medium-size toy maker.
Curiosity Chairman Joseph V. Delaney said the baby doll market has been growing twice as fast as the overall toy market, making it a prime target for the fledgling company’s first product.
Delaney took the top post at Curiosity after his financial holding company, American Patriots Inc., invested more than $1 million in the venture. The 20-employee company, which manufactures the Cheerful Tearful doll in Hong Kong, is starting with little more than an office, a tall stack of orders and some working prototypes of its doll.
But its board of directors reads like a who’s who of the toy industry. They include Elliot Handler, the founder of Mattel; Arthur Taylor, former president of CBS Inc. and Creative Playthings, and Howard Moore, former executive vice president of Toys R Us. Other directors include Roger Johnson, chairman of Western Digital Corp. in Irvine, and Daniel May, retired chairman of Republic Airlines.
The company got off to a fast start last February when Cheerful Tearful made a big splash at the American International Toy Fair in New York, the industry’s major trade show.
“We had people (standing) four deep at the booth,” Delaney said. The sales staff wrote more than $11 million in orders after the New York show. Sales are projected this year at $18.2 million.
Joseph S. Whitaker, Curiosity’s senior vice president for marketing and a 16-year Mattel veteran, said the doll is expected to bring out the “nurturing” instinct in young girls. The crying sounds the doll emits were recorded in a maternity ward. It will not stop crying until its “mother” places a bottle in its mouth.
Curiosity officials talk lovingly of the way the tears “well up” in Cheerful Tearful’s eyes--the result of a special ducting system and special eyelashes.
Toy retailers and industry analysts give the toy doll high marks.
“We expect her to do well,” said Toys R Us spokeswoman Angela Bourdon, who says the giant toy retailer has ordered 150,000 of the dolls, which it expects to sell for about $40 each.
DOLLS AND DOLLARS
Shipments of girls’ baby dolls in the United States rebounded last year.
1987 1988 1989 Dollar value (in millions) $149 $112 $135 Units (in millions) 11 8 10
Source: Toy Manufacturers of America
