The Woman Behind the Barbie Entrepreneurial Revolution

Ruth Handler (1916-2002), who famously invented the Barbie doll, is regarded as one of the earliest and most successful woman entrepreneurs. Her figure, recently returned under the spotlight following the release of the Barbie live-action film this year, has also been studied by Valeria Giacomin of the Bocconi Department of Social and Political Sciences and Christina Lubinski (Copenhagen Business School) in their article "Entrepreneurship as emancipation: Ruth Handler and the entrepreneurial process 'in time' and 'over time', 1930s–1980s".Published on Business History, the article aims at drawing an unbiased picture of her approach to business and providing insight into the very essence of entrepreneurship. This has been made possible by exploiting Handler's large legacy of interviews, speeches and other autobiographical accounts, which the authors have collected and indexed.

There is no doubt that Handler has radically changed the toy industry, together with her husband Elliot, the "El" in the Mattel company name - while Matt was the nickname of a third founder, who sold his stake after only one year. The revolution was the result of a drive for innovation that involved completely new ideas in both marketing and production.

While toymakers typically advertised their products in newspapers to an audience of parents, Mattel spent what were at the time extremely large sums to advertise on television (then a new media) watched by children. Ruth Handler thought that children tended to defy the meanings adults gave to toys. She broke with the conventional wisdom of the toy industry by bridging the gap between what adults designed for children and what children made of toys. This desire to emancipate and empower children can be considered a mirror of Ruth's own desire to escape the restrictions society imposed on a person who was a woman, a mother and a Jew.

The Barbie doll was also one of the first Western-designed products to be physically manufactured in Asia, which resulted in what was in effect an early example of global value chain.

Mattel eventually came under heavy criticism in the early 1970's for their policy of targeting children with massive advertising campaigns. In addition, Ruth Handler and her husband, as the company's top executives, were also prosecuted for false reporting and other corporate offences and had to leave the company in 1975, eventually selling their stock in 1980. Handler never acknowledged that the allegations were founded and indeed protested that their enemies were attacking her as a woman who had become too powerful.

Handler, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had had to undergo mastectomy, took this unfortunate situation as the opportunity to rebuild her tarnished image after the bitter years that had followed her exit from Mattel. She set up a new company and launched NearlyMe, a collection of breast prostheses which enjoyed a considerable success and allowed her to turn her reputation of ruthless businesswoman who had lied to investors into that of an activist for women recovering from a major trauma.

"Our analysis shows that Ruth Handler's ideas for changing the status quo derived from her interaction with the societal and political context, including the use of unusual and novel materials like plastics, newly available technologies like TV for advertising, new organizational structures like outsourcing to Japan, and other trends such as increased participation of women in the workforce and changing beauty ideals," says Valeria Giacomin. "Future research can expand on the idea of entrepreneurship as an ongoing act of reflection and self-critical analysis with cumulative effects over time, opening up new research areas at the intersection of entrepreneurship and biographical research. Understanding how entrepreneurs present their emancipatory activities and how they relate them to others is an important element of a more holistic understanding of how entrepreneurship ultimately contributes to collective action and, in the long run, change in society."

Valeria Giacomin, Christina Lubinski, "Entrepreneurship as emancipation: Ruth Handler and the entrepreneurial process 'in time' and 'over time', 1930s–1980s", Business History, published online 1 June 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2023.2215193.