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She did this by "segmenting the market," introducing dolls with different themes and then "creating whole worlds around them." Beginning about 1980, Mattel issued separate dolls for each of the major play patterns. There was a "hairplay" doll that came with styling paraphernalia; a "lifestyle" doll that came with sporting equipment; and a "glamour" doll that came with a gaudy dress. The strategy benefited Mattel in two major ways: because the costumes were sold on dolls, Mattel could charge more for them, and the variety encouraged girls to own more than one doll.

Shackelford got into the toy and novelty business as an entrepreneur, where her unusual combination of talents—Ruth Handler's business sense and Elliot Handler's art background—served her well. After graduating from Southern Illinois University with a degree in art, she moved to New York and taught grade school. "I was in this smock going from room to room with my paintbrushes—not my idea of a career," she said. So she took one of her art lessons, turned it into a toy, and sold the idea to a toy company, which led to more ideas for more companies. Later she went into manufacturing, inventing and producing an inflatable boot-tree designed to hold the knee-high footwear worn with miniskirts. But when hemlines fell, sales slowed, and to recoup her $100,000 investment, she wound up loading the trees into a truck and selling them herself across the country.

Shackelford learned the toy business from industry veterans, but not in a formal seminar. "When I started designing toys, I was twenty-four years old, and the only way I could get an appointment was to get one at four o'clock for cocktails," she said. "It was me and my partner—who was very voluptuous, like Barbie." When they showed a design, they'd ask for criticism, and the male executives would share what they had learned on the job. "I got stories from back in the 1940s. People were telling me what toys worked, why they didn't work," she explained. "And I was like a sponge. You pick all this stuff up. And suddenly you begin to perceive what 'market niching' is—you don't know the right words for it, but you begin to see." Working at Mattel was, for her, the culmination of this apprenticeship; she felt she "knew how to drive" but had finally gotten into "a really good car—one that didn't shake and you were sure wasn't going to run out of gas halfway there."

Working her way west after the boot-tree fiasco, Shackelford took a job with the Chicago-based toy design firm of Marvin Glass & Associates, which, until its demise in 1988, was preeminent in its field. Like Barbie marketing director Rita Rao, who left Mattel in 1979, Shackelford does not describe herself as a "feminist." But she does acknowledge a commitment to hiring and promoting women. She feels Mattel, for purely practical reasons, offers great opportunities to women: "They have more girls' volume than any other toy company . . . and no matter what anybody says about the marketers, you can't have that much girl product run by nothing but men. You need a balance." Yet given her own history, when it came to advancement in a male-run field, she could hardly pretend that a woman's appearance meant nothing.

Perhaps even more than Shackelford, Jill Elikann Barad, who joined Mattel in 1981 and was made its CEO in 1992, understands the value of appearance—and how to create a look that sells. While still an undergraduate at New York's Queens College, she traveled around the East Coast as a beauty consultant for Love Cosmetics. A drama major who graduated in 1973, she briefly flirted with an acting career, landing a nonspeaking part as Miss Italian America in Barbarella producer Dino De Laurentiis's film Crazy Joe; but she renounced greasepaint for Coty Cosmetics—ascending, in a record three years, from a lowly trainer of department store demonstrators to brand manager of its entire line. Nor did marriage to Paramount executive Thomas Barad detour her rise. When she relocated