"It's not us selling the dolls," said Executive director Trevor Timm.
Drawing on the success of other retail experiments, particularly the American Girl Place, which features in-store activities and entertainment based on American Girl dolls, Disney executives hope to bring a little bit of Disneyland to Fifth Avenue, even as they look to sell off the bulk of its retail outlets elsewhere.
A brief report in the Business People column last Sunday, about the new marketing of Barbie dolls, misstated the sex of an executive at Mattel, the dolls' manufacturer.
Melinda Ligos Correction: March 21 , 2004 Sunday A brief report in the Business People column last Sunday, about the new marketing of Barbie dolls, misstated the sex of an executive at Mattel, the dolls' manufacturer.
When Evan Bailyn, chief executive of Cartoon Doll Emporium, said that when he created the site, "I thought it would be a fun, whimsical thing".
"We've got to work our people pretty hard to guarantee that every child gets her Christmas doll on time," said T. Michael Glenn, executive vice president of FedEx.
After she battled years of prudish resistance to the Barbie concept among the male executives at Mattel, the doll was finally cleared for production.
The doll is quietly released, but the executives of Malibu Stacy have a meeting in which they agree that Lisa's doll is a real threat because it might hurt the sales of their doll.
Women in tech cheered this year when Mattel announced that Barbie, its perennially popular doll whose careers have included supermodel and executive, would have a new calling as a computer scientist (complete with her own hot-pink laptop).
It is as if Creative Loafing executives bought a shiny new doll and then once they got their hands on it, felt compelled to tear its head off.
The idea of creating a firm owned and operated by wounded veterans began with Lawrence K. Doll, a former home builder and commercial real estate executive.
