When Georgia art student Xavier Roberts was peddling his line of “Little People” cloth dolls at local folk art shows in the late 1970s, he probably didn’t have a clue they would evolve to become one of this biggest toy fads of the 1980s.
The toy manufacturer Coleco licensed Mr. Roberts’ dolls in 1982, renaming them the “Cabbage Patch Kids.” To promote the dolls, Roberts set up “Babyland General Hospital,” a part store, part theme park in Cleveland Georgia that served as a birthing and adoption center for the Cabbage Patch Kids. Employees impersonated nurses and doctors, caring for the dolls as though they were real babies.
It was weird, but it worked: the Cabbage Patch Kids were an instant, if perplexing, phenomenon. The Christmas shopping season of 1983 was flush with reports of customers waiting outside stores for hours, bribing toy store employees, and fighting in the aisles for what one TV news anchor called “a brood of ugly little dolls.” Since then, the Cabbage Patch brand has generated approximately $2 billion.
