C
Cabbage Patch Kids
Definition Children’s dolls
Manufacturer Coleco (licensee 1982-1989)
The Cabbage Patch Kids were one-of-a-kind, soft-sculpture,
needle-art dolls that were sold with names and birth certifi-
cates. A major fad of the mid-1980’s, the Cabbage Patch
Kids recorded sales of nearly 3 million units in 1983, a
first-year doll-sale record that exceeded the previous record
by more than 1 million dolls.
Profits from the Cabbage Patch Kids and innumera-
ble tie-in products like clothing, accessories, games,
and books resulted in one of the greatest modern
rags-to-riches stories, catapulting the dolls’ impover-
ished Georgia creator, Xavier Roberts, into a multi-
millionaire. Driving consumer demand was an in-
spired marketing concept: Each doll was unique,
thanks to a computerized creation process that pro-
duced variations in hair, eye, and skin colors and
other facial characteristics. Moreover, a cabbage
patch birth story and an adoption oath accompa-
nied and humanized each doll, and each one also
featured Roberts’s signature as a mark of authentic-
ity. Through Roberts’s tireless promotional efforts,
Cabbage Patch Kids
free publicity, appearing on children’s television
programs and on network programs such as theTo -
dayshow and Johnny Carson’sThe Tonight Show. The
dolls received national news coverage when they
were presented to children at the White House and
when celebrities “adopted” them.
As demand for the Cabbage Patch Kids exploded
during the 1983 Christmas season, Coleco chartered
Boeing 747’s to airlift dolls from Asian factories, an
event that generated even more publicity but did not
fully satisfy demand. Shoppers waited in lines for
hours, and stampedes occurred in department
stores as consumers fought to grab the coveted dolls.
In one store, dolls were snatched off shelves in thirty-
six seconds. Some stores held lotteries to distribute
the scarce supply, while others placed limits on the
quantity of dolls dispensed to each customer. A fa-
ther made headlines by flying to London to buy a
doll when he could not obtain one in the United
States. Scalpers sold dolls for outrageous prices, with
one doll reportedly selling for nearly one hundred
times Coleco’s retail price of $27.99. At the height of
the 1983 buying mania, Coleco canceled all paid
advertising, resulting in an industry-low advertising
expenditure of less than $500,000 for a toy introduc-
tion. Throughout the 1980’s, sales remained unusu-A Cabbage Patch Kid is displayed with her birth certificate and
adoption papers.(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)