Once a year, as the holidays approach, I engage in a ritual well known to men of a certain demographic ilk. Armed by my wife with a shopping list detailed enough to thwart paternal cluelessness, I enter American Girl Place off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. And there, amid the madding throngs of little girls and their mothers, I rush to score the season's must-have accessories for Felicity and Samantha. Those would be my daughters' beloved dolls.
It is not my favorite shopping experience. But then, American Girl Dolls wasn't created for fathers. And if you are a little girl or her mother (or grandmother, or aunt), American Girl is, at most times, a quite breathtakingly attractive amalgam of education and entertainment, all of it rooted in storytelling.
American Girl Doll was created in 1986 by Pleasant T. Rowland. Her ambition was to create a line of high-quality dolls based on historically correct characters, then bring them to life in a series of kid-friendly mininovels. Mattel, which acquired the Middleton, Wisconsin, catalog company in 1998, has added showplace stores in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, and turned the sweet little outfit into a nearly half- billion-dollar business with 24% operating margins.
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