Cabbage Patch Kids
American toy brand
Cabbage Patch Kids are a line of cloth dolls with plastic heads first produced by Coleco Industries in 1982. They were inspired by the Little People soft sculptured dolls sold by Xavier Roberts as collectibles. The brand was renamed 'Cabbage Patch Kids' by Roger L. Schlaifer when he acquired the exclusive worldwide licensing rights in 1982.
The doll brand set every toy industry sales record for three years running, was one of the most popular lines of children's licensed products in the 1980s, and has become one of the longest-running doll franchises in the United States. Additional Cabbage Patch products include children's apparel, bedding, infants' wear, record albums, and board games.
Production history
Creation and development
According to court records, Roberts, a 21-year-old art student at a missionary school in North Georgia, discovered craft artist Martha Nelson's Doll Babies. They came with a birth certificate and adoption papers. With the help of artist Debbie Moorehead, he hand-stitched dolls called "The Little People". Roberts modified the look of Nelson's dolls, birth certificate and adoption papers sufficiently to get a copyright, and told potential customers his Little People were not for sale; however, they could be "adopted" for prices ranging from $60 to $1,000.
The Little People were first sold at arts and crafts shows, then later at Babyland General Hospital, an old medical clinic that Roberts and his friends-turned-employees converted into a toy store, in Cleveland, Georgia.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cabbage Patch Kids” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.