Relaunch of Cabbage Patch Kids banking on retro toy craze

<p>To find out whether Cabbage Patch Kids can make a comeback more than 20 years after their heyday, there's no better place to start than the town where those chubby-faced dolls never went out of style.</p><p>This homey town in the northeast Georgia mountains was where creator Xavier Roberts first started stitching together cloth dolls with yarn hairdos and infectious smiles.</p><p>A Cabbage Patch Kids museum here, called Babyland General, has remained open _ long after moms stopped clawing for the dolls _ sometimes attracting only collectors and travelers who wandered in out of curiosity.</p><p>But there's a new mood in town as Cabbage Patch Kids prepares for an August relaunch, a hope that a doll that become one of the symbols of the 1980s can be revived for today's kids.</p><p>Cabbage Patch fans have reason to hope. A spate of '80s toys, from Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, are enjoying a profitable comeback.</p><p>Marketers say toy companies are drawn to the brands because they have a ready made familiarity with the parents who buy toys, many of them young enough to have played with them as children.</p><p>Tack on a retro, kitschy line of babydoll T-shirts and accessories for teens, and a once-dusty toy brand can turn hot in a hurry.</p><p>"It's far easier to reintroduce a toy than to create a new one," said Tim Coffey, CEO of WonderGroup, a firm that specializes in marketing to children. "Seventy percent of today's parents are Gen-X parents. They grew up with these products so they're receptive to them."</p><p>For inspiration, Cabbage Patch employees point to people like Pat Betz, an Aurora, Colo., woman who came to Babyland General on a recent morning to "adopt" a doll for her granddaughter.</p><p>Betz remembers scrambling for a Cabbage Patch Kid in 1983 for her daughter, now 30.</p><p>"We couldn't find 'em in Denver, so I got my sister in Wyoming to get me one. Nobody could believe I found one," Betz recalled. Now Betz has a 3-year-old granddaughter and wants her to have her own Cabbage Patch Kid.</p><p>"They're just so ugly that they're adorable," she said, throwing herself into the full Babyland General act by watching a "delivery" from the magic Cabbage Patch, a fake tree surrounded by cabbage leaves that are pulled back to reveal the dolls.</p><p>After the birth, the Cabbage Patch "nurse" weighed and measured Sierra and gave the doll her first shot, an injection of TLC. The whole thing is a pretty saccharine affair, but some people love it. The museum is a 20 minute drive from a major interstate but still draws more than 200,000 visitors a year.</p><p>"People have a special connection to Cabbage Patch Kids," said museum publicist Margaret Strong. "When you talk to people, they always still have them. How many toys do you keep from your childhood? It's a pretty cool thing."</p><p>But industry experts say the Cabbage Patch brand needs careful management if the dolls are to return for more than a short retro splash. Even the company leading the revival, 4Kids Entertainment, concedes the doll line is scarred from many years of neglect.</p><p>No one knows better than Al Kahn, CEO of 4Kids Entertainment. Kahn was an executive at Coleco in the early 1980s when that now-defunct toy company bought the rights from Roberts for a mass-market Cabbage Patch Kids.</p><p>In those heady days, when the one-of-a-kind dolls flew off shelves so fast even Barbie was scared for her life, company executives hustled to make more and more Cabbage Patch Kids. The result was that more than 90 million were sold worldwide, and market saturation followed. By the end of the decade, few bought Cabbage Patch Kids because most people already had one.</p><p>"This is a brand that could've been sustained for a long, long time, but there was oversupply at some point," Kahn said.</p><p>After Coleco folded, the brand was sold to Hasbro, then to Mattel. Sales slowed even more, and industry watchers considered Cabbage Patch Kids an '80s fad not to return.</p><p>Now 4Kids hopes to establish the dolls as perennial favorites for little girls.</p><p>"Kids don't really change that much over time," Kahn said. "I still believe that the desire to be a mommy is as strong as it was 20 years ago."</p><p>Back at Babyland General, three youngsters recently showed a long-term revival might be possible.</p><p>Five-year-old Alyssa Harding was there with her parents, older brother and baby brother to pick out a doll to adopt. The kids, along with parents Denise and Pete Harding, were downright mesmerized by the hundreds of dolls of display. Alyssa was so overcome she could hardly answer questions about what kind of baby she wanted.</p><p>"She wants a girl, right?" Denise Harding prompted. Alyssa could only nod, eyes glued to the doll in her father's hands.</p><p>___</p><p>On the Net:</p><p>www.cabbagepatchkids.com</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2004/6/167357