The weird, rabid history of the Cabbage Patch craze
Parents fighting in the aisles…over dolls
In 1983, a Wisconsin radio announcer joked that a B-29 bomber would drop 2,000 Cabbage Patch Kids into Milwaukee County Stadium. People should bring catcher’s mitts, and whoever grabbed a doll needed to hold up their credit card to be photographed.
At least a dozen people actually showed up.
Such was the epic Cabbage Patch Kids craze of 1983. The doll was in such rabid demand that shoppers camped overnight at toy stores, stormed displays, and mobbed parking lots. One report from the time featured a Texas woman gripping her doll tightly even as another shopper’s purse strap was wrapped around her throat.
“It was as if an army had been turned loose on the nation’s shopping malls, ravaging the ficus trees, sloshing through the fountains, searching for the legendary stockrooms said to be filled with thousands of the dough-faced, chinless, engagingly homely dolls,” wrote Newsweek.
It was the country’s first instance of total consumer anarchy. Sure, malls had sold out of items before — Etch-a-Sketch factory employees worked until noon on Christmas Eve 1960 to fulfill demand, and elusive Star Wars figurines were all but urban legend in 1977 — but this year was different. A months-long marketing scheme, a nostalgic product, and old-fashioned supply-and-demand climaxed into unprecedented holiday hysteria. The Cabbage Patch frenzy became the blueprint for Tickle Me Elmo, Furby, and Black Friday marketing campaigns that we’re all so familiar with. It was engineered mania.
The December 12, 1983, Newsweek cover story pictured a young girl with a shiny bowl cut. She squeezes a ginger-haired doll, with a dimpled smile tucked between loafy cheeks. The girl’s sly wink at the camera pleads, “Buy this for me, sucker. Buy it now.”
By the 1950s the toy industry had discovered the purchasing power of kids and teens. Eager to provide kids with what they couldn’t afford during the Great Depression, American consumers scrambled for Lego, Rubik’s Cube, and Barbie. As technology improved into the 1970s parents purchased Atari games and Walkmans. To have the right toys was a status symbol — for both kid and parent.
When Cabbage Patch arrived in 1983, materialism had reached a new high. At the same time, people were becoming fatigued by electronics (the last popular doll, Baby Alive, ate “food” and pooped it into a diaper). The Cabbage Patch doll promised a return to simplicity. It was something you could just…hug.
Of course, the genius wasn’t in the design — Cabbage Patch was described by many as the ugliest doll in the world — it was in the messaging.
Inspired by the folk art movement of the late 1970s, 21-year-old art student Xavier Roberts began experimenting with hand-stitching and quilting techniques to create fabric sculptures. When he gave them human shapes in 1976, Roberts called them “Little People.” Roberts toured craft shows around the country and ultimately offered his Little People for sale at a converted medical clinic in Cleveland, Georgia, which he renamed “Babyland General Hospital.”
More a gallery than a retail shop, Roberts instructed salesclerks to dress in nurse’s uniforms and interact with the dolls, who slept in incubators and cribs throughout the space. Each doll came with a birth certificate, adoption papers, and a name pulled from 1938 Georgia birth records.
Roberts finally licensed the doll to toy manufacturer Coleco in 1982. He changed the name to Cabbage Patch Kids, based on the childhood fable that new babies were plucked from cabbage gardens. This “discovery legend” was printed on every product:
“Xavier Roberts was a ten-year-old boy who discovered the Cabbage Patch Kids by following a BunnyBee behind a waterfall into a magical Cabbage Patch, where he found the Cabbage Patch babies being born. To help them find good homes he built BabyLand General in Cleveland, Georgia where the Cabbage Patch Kids could live and play until they were adopted.”
Until they were adopted. Genius marketing. Each Cabbage Patch Doll was totally unique, ready to be brought home by a totally unique girl or boy. A special baby for a special kid.
It was perfect timing for such a doll. Manufacturing technology made it so Cabbage Patch would be the first postindustrial toy. No longer was there one mold for a product. The recent computerization of the assembly line had introduced infinite randomized customization. No two Cabbage Patch dolls were alike — they varied in skin color, hair style, clothing, smile, freckles, and even dimple location.
Only now the dolls’ names were chosen by a computer, not curated from charming old birth records.
In its press packet, Coleco included testimony from two child psychologists. They not only endorsed the dolls but said Cabbage Patch Kids conjure a “releasing mechanism” that plays on humans’ nurturing instincts. It’s the same chemical that makes people want to pick up a baby from its crib and cuddle.
Inside their boxes, Cabbage Patch dolls reached toward the cellophane with cozy, open arms. Their adoption papers were there too, just waiting to be signed.
To kick off its publicity circuit, the company held a press conference at the Boston’s Children Museum in June 1983. Local schoolchildren attended and performed a mass adoption ceremony in front of the media cameras. Each kid got to take home a free doll.
From there, Cabbage Patch Kids were sent to every major media outlet and women’s magazine in the country, even to pregnant television host Jane Pauley. The dolls got a full five minutes on the Today Show.
Still, retailers did not predict the colossal demand. With early Christmas shoppers buying an average three dolls each, stores had massively under-ordered. By October 6, Coleco said all 2 million dolls it had manufactured were gone. According to Newsweek, “By Thanksgiving what had been sellouts became the great Cabbage Patch Panic.”
Store managers tried to curb chaos by stocking the dolls in the front of the store. But as soon as they paid, customers were afraid to face the throngs pushing through the doors, spilling from the parking lots. People ripped boxes from strangers’ arms without a second glance at the style of doll itself. One man even flew to London to buy a doll for his five-year-old daughter. Harrod’s had received 1,000 dolls but they were gone within hours — “although the customers queued quietly, to be sure.” Scalpers were reselling the $25 dolls for $150. At the same time, knockoffs called Flower Kids were pouring in from overseas. Sometimes the only way to tell the difference was by the lack of bellybutton.
The Cabbage Patch phenomenon finally exposed the envious underbelly of the American adult. One psychologist even told Newsweek that the subversion of one’s individuality to a “higher power” like Cabbage Patch sounded a lot like Nazism.
By New Year’s, Coleco had sold more than three million Cabbage Patch Kids. Even so, the company used a withholding strategy to ensure Cabbage Patch would sell reliably year-round, not just during holidays. It worked. The dolls — along with a growing line of accessories such as lunchboxes, bikes, pajamas, and cereal — generated $2 billion of Coleco’s $4.5 billion in 1984.
The Cabbage Patch phenomenon became a cultural touchstone. That year’s manic mall shoppers inspired the 1996 movie Jingle All the Way, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It preceded American Girl Dolls, which kids could customize to look like them. And just this year, the current toy-of-the-season is the Hatchimal, a robotic bird that hatches from its own egg after you cuddle it for 10 to 40 minutes.
Their marketing line? “Every Hatchimal is different and each hatching experience is unique…Hatchimals need you to hatch and bring them to life!”
