Barbie
Call her the preternaturally perky perennial preteen product with a past.
Don’t tell the millions of Barbie devotees that have made Mattel’s doll a billion-selling global sensation since 1959, but Barbie’s original name wasn’t Barbie — it was the far more staid “Barbara.” Ruth Handler, who founded Mattel in 1945 with her husband and another investor, named the doll after her own daughter.
Handler’s real inspiration was, however, the realization that young girls didn’t really want to play with baby dolls. They wanted grown-up figures upon which they could project their dreams of love and romance. Handler developed and marketed the first adult woman doll and revolutionized the toy industry. Today three Barbie dolls are sold every second somewhere in the world.
Of course, Barbie isn’t exactly a normal adult woman, and her unlikely physical proportions reflect a lineage Mattel would rather forget. Handler modeled the doll on a German gag gift for men, a toy derived from a risqué comic strip character named Lilli, a practitioner of the World’s Oldest Profession. Barbie is, to put it bluntly, a recycled German hooker.
No wonder her boyfriend Ken (created in 1961 and named after Handler’s son) always looked a bit anxious. Sadly (at least for Ken), Mattel announced just before Valentine’s Day 2004 that Barbie and Ken were breaking up after 43 years of going steady. Russell Arons, vice president of marketing at Mattel, explained that the pair “feel it’s time to spend some quality time apart,” and denied rumors that the split was caused by the arrival of a new male doll, Blaine, described as “an Australian boogie boarder.”
Häagen-Dazs
Sometimes all it takes is one brilliant idea. Reuben Mattus (1913-1994) was a Polish immigrant who began his career peddling his family’s ice cream from a horse-drawn wagon. After more than 30 years of selling his wares on a small scale to restaurants and stores in the Bronx, Reuben noticed something about American consumers. They wanted good ice cream, but they also wanted something exotic.
So Reuben put on his thinking cap and came up with the name “Häagen-Dazs” for his new line of premium, high-fat ice cream. Although it sports an umlaut and sounds Scandinavian, the name “Häagen-Dazs” is pure nonsense — it doesn’t actually mean anything in any known language. But consumers took the bait, and “Häagen-Dazs” was an immediate hit with everyone (except dieters, of course). An ironic footnote: Hedging his bets after he sold Häagen-Dazs to Pillsbury in 1983, Reuben Mattus went on to develop and market “Mattus’ Lowfat Ice Cream.”
Maxwell House
Joel Cheek was a little obsessed with coffee. Working as a traveling salesman, Cheek sold a variety of groceries, but it was with coffee that he spent his spare time, trying different mixtures and convinced that eventually he would come up with a better blend than those on the market.
Apparently, Cheek was right. In 1892, Cheek convinced the management of one of Nashville’s best hotels, the Maxwell House, to give his latest blend a try. The reaction of Maxwell House guests to the new coffee was so enthusiastic that the hotel owner decreed that no other brand be served in his dining room, and Maxwell House brand coffee was born.
A few years later, in 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt was staying at The Hermitage, the historic Nashville residence of Andrew Jackson. Served a cup of Maxwell House coffee, Roosevelt proclaimed it “Good to the last drop,” thereby providing Cheek and his company with an endorsement to die for and a slogan still used by Maxwell House today.
A minor and not entirely serious ruckus, however, erupted at the time when a few pundits pointed out that the standard meaning of “to” in such a context was “up until,” raising the question of what was wrong with that last drop in Roosevelt’s cup. Only when a Columbia University English professor was enlisted to testify that “to” in this case could also mean “including” did the pundits quiet down and drink their coffee.