“I’ll never forget going over with the first models of Polly Pocket, which we wanted to license to them [Mattel]. I rang up Jill Barad [Mattel’s chief executive] and I said “Look, I’ve got something which I think is quite important and I think that we’d like to ask you to be our worldwide distributors, with the exception of Japan and the UK.”… “And so I went over there, I had the entire first year of Polly Pocket, it would have fitted in a box about yea big [gestures, a foot square]…”
“I’d said “give me five minutes before” so I’d set everything up, and I put the whole lot, the entire range underneath my pocket handkerchief. So they came in, they saw this slightly grubby handkerchief sitting on the table (laughs) and .. they looked at each other and thought “The man’s gone completely mad.” So I picked up a corner of the handkerchief and inside it was this tiny figure… So I said “I’d like to introduce you to Polly Pocket” and they said “I can’t even see it,” .. so I held it up, and then I slowly uncovered the other bits and there were little rings with Polly in bed or in the bath or in the car.. that you could put on your finger. .. and by the end they were saying “You know, there may be something in this after all.”
The first year they didn’t sell that many. But the second year in February Torquil got a phone call from Jill Barad asking “How quickly could you get us four million Polly Pocket compacts?”[1]
“We licensed Polly Pocket to Mattel as sales agent for most of the world, but retained all the manufacturing rights (it was made in China) and the sales rights for Great Britain. At one point Polly Pocket was Mattel’s second largest toy range for girls (although far behind the legendary Barbie).”[2]
Mattel went on to license Polly Pockets in the US and the restof the world except Japan and the UK, and then in 1998 when a takeover bid was made for Bluebird, Mattel took over the Polly Pocket Brand. Under Mattel, Polly Pocket changed in scale and focus, she became bigger, had her own racing cars along the Hot Wheels model. She grew again, the focus then became her as a doll, made out of flexible plastic and came with clothes and accessories.
Big dreams come in small packages © Mattel
In 2018 Mattel relaunched the Polly Pocket Brand, with Garrett Sander (of Monsters High fame), taking Polly back to her original scale, with a new range of compacts.
Sky Brown, the world’s youngest female pro skateboarder is now the brand ambassador for the relaunched Polly Pocket brand. Just like Polly Pocket, reads a statement from Mattel, she embodies the brand’s message that Tiny is Mighty.
In June 2019 Mattel marked the 30th anniversary of the original Polly Pocket line with a special anniversary reissue of the 1989 Partytime Surprise Compact.
[1] quotes above from British Toy Making Project: Mr. Torquil Norman, Bluebird Toys, interview transcript, p23-25 interview conducted by Ieuan Hopkins and Sarah Wood, September 2010, edited by Torquil Norman and Sarah Wood, August 2013
[2] Torquil Norman, p60 “Light the Fires, Kick the Tyres: One man’s vision for Britain’s future and how we can make it work” published by Infinite Ideas, 2010: UK
A portable pocket-sized room of one’s own