Fifty cents or a buck, whatever’s the going rate for a cup of lukewarm liquid is at a neighborhood lemonade stand, you’re usually happy to pay it. Yep, you were a young entrepreneur once, a kid with a growing piggy bank and dreams of your own business.
As you matured, so did those dreams. But as you’ll see in the new book “The Making of American Girl,” edited by Jodi Goldberg, business can still be child’s play.
When she was a small girl, Pleasant Rowland was fascinated with Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Her parents had honeymooned there before she was born, and she spent many days poring through their photos. When she was finally able to travel there with her husband years later, it was the culmination of a dream – and the beginning of a business.
Rowland had long thought about how kids learn and how men are often the stars of America’s past. History is littered with tiny stories and she knew that “there was a lot of American history that [children] didn’t learn in school.” She began to sketch out her ideas to “make a difference” by bringing those tales to little girls through books and dolls they could identify with.
She set up her “first headquarters” in Madison, Wisconsin, and contacted professionals who could see her vision, a designer to create a logo that would evoke a warm feeling of childhood, a large staff of researchers to ensure that her dolls would be as accurate as possible – right down to their clothing and hairstyles – plus catalog designers and packaging experts.
Rowland hired writers and illustrators who would create books to accompany the dolls and make history come alive and others who would help her launch a magazine, creating “a safe space where girls could be girls, with no ads pressuring them to grow up too fast.”
The very first thing you’re going to notice about “The Making of American Girl” is the book’s sheer size. It might be bigger than any other book you’ll ever own, but the dimensions allow for full-size portraits of Pleasant Rowland’s signature dolls. Those photos are just a few of the hundreds of glossy, full-color illustrations inside this book.
And though those photos are accompanied by the story of the company that makes American Girl dolls, its beginning and the small steps that created an iconic part of many childhoods, readers might notice there’s something missing.
This is a feel-good, uplifting story of the company, but the book contains little about its struggles. There’s a large, comprehensive overview of the books and the dolls, but nothing about the factory or how American Girl products are manufactured. It’s a big omission and might leave readers unsatisfied.
Certainly, this is a book for anyone who had an American Girl doll or who knows a little girl who loves one. It’s lush, gorgeous and the back half is worth poring over for fans and collectors. From a business standpoint, though, the brand history inside “The Making of American Girl” is naught but a lemon.
Terri Schlichenmeyer’s reviews of business books are read in more than 260 publications in the U.S. and Canada.