She Was the Oppenheimer of Barbie. Her Invention Blew Up.

In 1945, one of the most influential figures of the past century was building something explosive that would change society forever, the subject of a blockbuster movie that opened this week.

It’s not “Oppenheimer.”

The J. Robert Oppenheimer of Barbie was Ruth Handler, a workaholic entrepreneur with red lipstick and a pink Thunderbird convertible, and she was a groundbreaking figure worthy of a biopic of her own. As men were testing atomic bombs in the desert, this woman was starting her own company in a garage. And the most popular doll in history wasn’t even her most valuable idea.

In the early days of Mattel, the startup that Handler founded with her husband that would become the world’s biggest toy company, she made a series of bold decisions marketing something called a Burp Gun that led directly to Barbie, the “Barbie” movie and the entire Barbie industrial complex. Handler broke the rules of her business in three ways: how she sold toys, when she sold them and who bought them. 

She realized before anybody in her industry that parents weren’t her target demographic. Children were. She also revolutionized her business by spending an incredible amount of money to advertise on television shows all year round. It turns out selling millions of Burp Guns made it possible for her to sell billions of Barbies. 

So if you want to understand Barbie, you need to understand Ruth Handler. 

“She was willing to do things that no one else had done,” said Robin Gerber, the author of “Barbie and Ruth,” a 2009 biography of the woman behind the iconic doll. “The key quality of hers as a leader was the ability to take risks. What you’re risking is failure. But if you don’t do that, you can never succeed.” 

This risk tolerance required to build companies and bend markets is not the only trait Handler, who died in 2002, had in common with titans who dominate industries today. They might recognize themselves in a swashbuckling 5-foot-2 woman who climbed behind the wheel of delivery trucks in a dress, heels and perfectly styled hair. She was a glutton for data. She was obsessed with releasing new products every year. She was aggressive in adopting technology to pursue an edge. To do what she did, she had to be ruthless.

She also broke the rules in ways that weren’t exactly legal. Handler and other Mattel officers were charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1978 with various white-collar financial crimes, including fraud and false reporting. She was fined and sentenced to community service after pleading no contest. 

The beginning of Handler’s time at Mattel was more remarkable than the end. Born in 1916 as the youngest of 10 children to Polish immigrants, Ruthie Mosko married Izzy Handler against her family’s wishes and encouraged him to drop his first name for his middle name, Elliot, which sounded less Jewish in a time of virulent antisemitism. Ruth and Elliot moved to Los Angeles and lived with roaches in a studio apartment while she worked as a stenographer at Paramount and he was a poor art student experimenting with a new type of clear plastic. 

They eventually started a company in a garage with Harold “Matt” Matson that they called Mattel—a corporate portmanteau of Matt and Elliot. The founder with the most powerful role was Ruth. 

Elliot handled design. Ruth handled business. 

“If he can make it, I can sell it,” she would say. 

Then this visionary executive spotted the sales opportunity of a lifetime in an inefficient, untapped market. In 1955, three years after Mr. Potato Head made history as the first toy advertised on television, Mattel had an hourlong meeting with a sales rep from ABC, who pitched the Handlers on a way to captivate almost every child in America: a new

The catch was that Disney wanted a commitment that sponsors would advertise for a full year—and it was going to cost them about $500,000. This was such a crazy ask for a toy company that Disney hadn’t included toy companies on its list of potential sponsors for a children’s show because it knew Mattel and its rivals didn’t bother with TV advertising for more than a few months. Toy companies saw their business as seasonal and blew their marketing budgets around the holidays. Selling toys the rest of the year was like driving an ice-cream truck in winter.

“Any toy company that could figure out a year-round sales strategy would have a huge advantage over its competitors,” Gerber wrote in her book. 

Handler looked at this Disney show and saw a year-round sales strategy for Mattel. By the time she left the meeting, she had made up her mind. 

She would bet the entire value of her company on “Mickey Mouse Club” commercials. 

And she knew the product that would be worth the risk of a $500,000 investment. 

Handler asked Mattel’s advertising agency to make commercials for a jack-in-the-box, its Cowboy Ge-tar and the toy that she was especially psyched about: the Burp Gun. 

The stakes of promoting a toy machine gun on a children’s show were nothing short of existential for Mattel. “She could have lost the company,” Gerber said. And there was a period of six weeks after the premiere in October 1955 when it seemed like maybe she had. Sales were meager. She was miserable. 

But she didn’t know that it took six weeks for sales numbers to get from toy stores to manufacturers, and that lag meant the information was six weeks old by the time it finally crossed Handler’s desk. It took precisely six weeks of “Mickey Mouse Club” episodes for Mattel to realize the Burp Gun was a hit product. Despite selling one million toy guns in that first holiday season, the uncertainty had been so unsettling that she enlisted her own private army of employees who would pop into stores across the country and track sales in real time. The mission of her “retail detail” was simple: gather data and get it to her pronto. 

Soon she had better information after one day than her rivals were getting in six weeks—and Mattel could make smarter decisions faster than the competition.

She recognized that Mattel’s consumers were children, not parents, and she could reach them by advertising on the TV shows they watched. Because of her, retailers could no longer tell parents what to buy, and parents could no longer buy what they wanted for kids. She almost single-handedly wrested power away from adults and gave it to the people who coveted Burp Guns. 

And there were lots of them. Mattel’s total sales in 1954 amounted to $4 million. It sold $4 million of Burp Guns alone in 1955. 

The next summer is when the Handlers sailed to Europe on a family vacation and came home with a souvenir that would inspire the company’s biggest toy yet. 

A doll in German adult stores known as the ideal gag gift for bachelor parties was not the most obvious Mattel toy for American children. And when Handler brought her Barbies to the Toy Fair in 1959, that’s what she heard from the country’s largest department stores. Men simply couldn’t picture women buying a doll with breasts for their daughters. “Nobody thought Barbie would work,” said Fern Field, a television producer who became friends with Handler when she tried making a movie about her. “Nobody.” 

Those buyers didn’t realize that Handler had already changed their world and made it hospitable for Barbie. It didn’t matter what mothers or fathers thought now that she could bypass them and appeal to children through TV shows. 

“It used to be that parents were in charge,” Gerber told me. “Thanks to her, we lost control.”

Barbie hit stores in 1959. The next year, Mattel went public. Now the company that once placed a massive $500,000 bet is worth more than $7 billion.

The business founded by the Handlers during the Manhattan Project has been through as many changes as Barbie herself since then, but it’s oddly fitting that Mattel is trying to be the next Marvel and rebranding its children’s products as intellectual property. Today’s executives are ripping a page from the company’s oldest playbook. They’re using movies to sell more toys in the same way Mattel once sold toys on TV. 

In fact, the most important moment in Mattel’s formative years came during a commercial break of “The Mickey Mouse Club” in 1959, when—boom! For the first time, there she was: Barbie.

Write to Ben Cohen at [email protected]