![]() Handler, at 73, still devotes herself to running her business full-time, worldwide. Her company, Nearly Me, now does sales in the millions of dollars. ![]() Her prosthetics conformed to standard bra sizes. With the help of sculptors and engineers, she shaped fake breasts, the left and right shaped differently just like on real women. So she went on to revolutionize the prosthetic breast industry because, as she says simply, “Nobody else was.” This was a woman who knew plastics, who knew breasts, who knew manufacturing. I had no self-confidence.It was horrible,” she says, still shuddering slightly at the memory of the humilitating search for clothing and prosthetics. After that, the husband and wife team branched into toys, making history and a fortune.īut Ruth Handler hit bottom in the 1970s, first losing a breast to cancer and then losing Mattel in a corporate shakeup. They went from plastics to making picture frames, before hitting on the idea of turning frame scraps into toy furniture. “We were both gutsy, and nothing was impossible,” she says. It wasn’t like that when she first crashed through the male gates of big business 52 years ago, and she and her husband, Elliot Handler, founded Mattel. ![]() ![]() “I went from breast to breast,” Handler says with a grin, clearly delighted at being able to say the word, breast, freely. This tiny gray-haired mogul talks about the long bumpy ride from making Barbie to making prosthetic breasts. “Barbie was the first doll with breasts,” she says bluntly. Handler, on the other hand, loves talking about her hand in shaping modern American womanhood. “They’re both very happy,” says Ruth Handler, proud mother of the real Barbie and Ken, as well as their toy namesakes.īarbie, it seems, never liked being the inspiration for the most beloved piece of plastic on earth. ![]()
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