In the year 1944, in the small town of Watertown Connecticut, Holly Hobbie was born. Though, she wasn’t the small pilgrim child you might expect.
Denise Holly Hobbie is an artist and author known for two main things; an adorable series of chirldren’s books named Toot and Puddle, and a series of illustrations of girls in rag dresses who would become the most popular female licensed character in the world by 1977. (Source)
Beginning in the 1960s, Denise created artwork inspired by her own children and pets which she sold to the American Greetings company for use on greeting cards and other pieces of merchandise.
If the name doesn’t sound familiar, American Greetings is second only to Hallmark today in the world of greeting cards.
The art of Holly Hobbie was massively popular, and out of all her illustrations, a girl wearing a blue bonnet would rise up to represent her artwork as a whole, and Denise herself, earning the name Holly Hobbie.
The secuss of Holly Hobbie would lead to the creation of Those Characters From Cleveland Inc., a licensing company which would also find major sucesses with the Strawberry Shortcake and Carebears lines of merchendise it would release soon after.
Thousands of products have been made featuring the character, from cards, to home goods, to replica meat grinders.
But of course today we are talking about the dolls. From the 1970s up to the 2000s Holly Hobbie dolls have existed in a sort of odd space of never being the most popular doll around, but having multiple reboots in an attempt to keep her in the spotlight.
If we are going to talk Holly Hobbie, we need to talk rag dolls.
Rag dolls are some of the oldest known children's toys in existence, with versions being found buried with children in ancient Egypt, the Roman empire, and numerous other cultures throughout human history. The act of taking scap fabric, plant material like corn husks, or whatever was available and transforming it into a small figure for comfort or play is a frankly really human experience.
And as with anything that is human; it must be mass manufactured.
While rag dolls would at different points be ways for kids to practice skills like sewing, or presents handcrafted by loved ones, in 1918 one specific rag doll would rise up to international acclaim. Raggedy Ann.
The character of Raggedy Ann was first created for a children's book series, which would go on to offer the doll alongside the book, a move that had great success. While there is some legal and copyright hubbub that would happen with the characters over the next decades, by the end of the 1940s the book series had sold over 7 million copies, and over 150,000 dolls had been sold.
In 1960, Knickerbocker Toy Company would become the manifactorer of the Raggady Ann doll lines, the 5th company to do so (Which I promise is a relevant fact.)
As the story goes, in the 1970s, as Holly Hobbie became a popular character on American Greetings cards and merchandise, one employee working alongside Denise had an idea. Robert Childers looked at the character Holly Hobbie and basiclly went “We got to make this girl into a doll”. (ME all the time)
But, apparently, no one at the company was interested, so Childers took things into his own hands, going so far as to hand sew his own rag doll version of the character he then brought into work to use to sell the idea to his bosses. And this worked, the company would reach out to Knickerbocker toys and would license the character for a line of rag dolls based around them for release in 1974.