The name Mattel has become widely-known, it is the largest toy manufacturer in the world (Vaughan, 2024). Mattel has invented a number of extremely popular toys and games such as Hot Wheels and UNO (Mattel, n.d.). In 1959 they introduced the Barbie doll which quickly became very popular, making Mattel gain recognition all over the world (Vaughan, 2024).
Before Barbie’s debut, baby dolls were popular amongst young girls, they could act as mothers by playing with them (Dockterman, 2023). Tulinski (2017) argues this could help girls prepare emotionally for being wives and mothers. However, not all girls liked to play with the baby dolls, such as Barbabara, the daughter of Mattel’s cofounder Ruth Handler, who instead played with paper dolls (Mattel, n.d.). Thus, Ruth wanted to create a doll with the proportions of an adult female (Dockterman, 2023) and invented Barbie, named after her daughter . Since the 1960s when Mattel launched Barbie, she is represented a progressive self-empowered and independent woman (Engin, 2013). For the first few years Barbie lived and thrived in her female-only world where she had all the clothes and things she wanted (Lamb, 2023). However, customers wanted Barbie to be more traditional and inline with the the image of the typical nuclear family of the time (Lamb, 2023). As such, Barbie missed the ultimate accessory; a boyfriend (Lamb, 2023).
In response the critiques and their custumor’s demands, Mattel launched the Ken doll in 1961 (Mattel, n.d.; Lamb, 2023). Ken was designed to complement Barbie with a clean-cut image that could fit into any of Barbie’s scenarios (Kerr, 2021).