Cabbage Patch Kids: The Folk Artist Whose Idea Xavier Roberts Took

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In the winter of 1983, parents shoved and fought in department store aisles for a soft doll with a plastic head. The man credited with inventing it, Xavier Roberts, had not invented its core idea. In 1976 and 1977 a Kentucky craft artist named Martha Nelson Thomas was hand-stitching what she called doll babies and selling them at craft shows with birth certificates and adoption papers. Roberts, a 21-year-old art student in North Georgia, bought her dolls and resold them at a markup. When she cut him off, he had a cheaper version made in Hong Kong, kept the adoption papers, and secured his own copyright in 1978.

This episode traces how that borrowed concept became an empire. Roberts turned an old medical clinic in Cleveland, Georgia into Babyland General Hospital, where staff in scrubs charged adoption fees from $60 to $1,000. Licensing agent Roger Schlaifer supplied the name Cabbage Patch Kids and a strange backstory of bunnybees and a villain with a gold mine. Coleco signed on in 1982, shipped 3.3 million dolls in 1983, and helped drive $2 billion in retail sales by 1984. Lawsuits, a bankruptcy, and one alarming product recall followed.

• The dolls were first called The Little People, but Fisher-Price already owned that trademark, which forced the rename.
• Coleco designer Judy Albert gave the mass market version softer bodies, toddler proportions, and molded plastic heads, at a price of about $18 to $28.
• Thomas settled with Roberts out of court in 1985 and said the corruption of her art hurt more than the money. When she died in 2013, her favorite original dolls attended her funeral.
• Roberts's company sued Topps for $30 million over the Garbage Pail Kids parody and settled for $7 million, while Coleco overproduced and filed for bankruptcy by 1988.
• Mattel's 1996 Snack Time Kids used one-way motorized rollers to eat plastic food and ended up chewing children's hair, prompting a voluntary withdrawal.