Archival Consumed: Uglydolls

The story of the Uglydolls, as David Horvath tells it, goes like this. A couple of years ago, he was living in Los Angeles, and his girlfriend, Sun-Min Kim, had moved back to Korea to be with her family. Horvath, an illustrator, wrote her long, pining letters, and at the end he would draw one of a number of cartoon characters he had made up — a blocky, orange guy named Wage, with startled round eyes and an apron. At Christmas, Kim surprised him by sending back a plush-toy version of Wage, about a foot high, that she had sewn herself. Horvath was so excited that he showed it off to Eric Nakamura, the owner of a store in Los Angeles called Giant Robot, which sold art books and magazines as well as toys and T-shirts made by artists. ”He thought I was pitching him a product,” Horvath recalls. ”He said, ‘Yeah, man, that’s great, I’ll take 20.”’

Nakamura says that sounds right, although he has better memories of Horvath showing up with armloads of dolls over the next two years, as batch after batch sold out. Kim, who is still in Korea, eventually stopped sewing them herself; today they’re handmade in China by a Korean company. Wage is one of seven Uglydoll characters that have been bought by the thousands, not just in specialty shops but also at Tower Records, Urban Outfitters, Barneys New York and the Whitney Museum. There’s a reason that the dolls sell in places more suitable to a fashionable bit of home decor than a Hokey Pokey Elmo: at Barneys, for instance, about half the people buying Uglydolls are grown-ups who have no intention of passing their cute new companions, with names like Jeero and Babo, on to a child. It’s only lately, Horvath says, that Uglydolls started winning any nonadult audience at all: ”In the beginning, kids didn’t know anything about us.”

That’s changing, and Horvath and Kim will have a big display this weekend at the International Toy Fair in New York, a trade show at which retail distributors tend to prowl not for arty, hip creations but for potential blockbuster products with aggressively kid-focused marketing plans.

To date, the Uglydolls’ reputation has spread more like that of a new fashion designer or rock band than that of a typical toy. An article in a pop-culture magazine that Nakamura publishes, also called Giant Robot, spread early interest among adults in their 20’s and 30’s — specifically the subset of that age group that is most interested in good design and perhaps most ambivalent about adulthood. Horvath, 32, figures a certain nostalgia or sentimentality about finding some special item in a mom-and-pop toy store added to the appeal.

Uglydolls have soft, unthreatening bodies and wear vulnerable expressions. But aside from their aesthetic charms, Nakamura offers some useful context about why they caught on. Stores like Giant Robot, Zakka in New York and Kidrobot in San Francisco and New York sell toys made by fine artists — limited-edition items that can be quite costly. Uglydolls had an aura of fashionable chic, but cost $30 (even less in some places), and the affordability made them seem less rarefied. ”It doesn’t have the art vibe to it,” he says. ”They look comfortable.”

I ran this by Horvath, and he interjected, ”And you can hug it.” It’s clear that he and Kim see their invention connecting with children. Each character comes with a tag explaining the character’s back story and how they all ”know” one another and what each one is like. Wage works diligently at Super Mart, although, poignantly, no one at the store knows he works there; Jeero, meanwhile, wishes Wage and Babo wouldn’t ask him so many questions, since he ”just wants to sit on the couch with you and eat some snacks.” Hits with kids like the American Girl dolls have a similar narrative glue. To Tracy Edwards, the Barneys vice president who oversees the chain’s home and kids businesses, the Uglydoll characterizations are important: ”The stories, in the end, sell the dolls.”

Horvath is not certain (or maybe just cagey) about where he figures all of this could lead, but a leap to books or animation doesn’t seem out of the question. Meanwhile, the Uglydolls have given Kim and Horvath more reasons to visit each other, and now they plan to marry. This in itself is the kind of ending you’d expect from a children’s story — of the sort that grown-ups can’t resist.

[This installment of the Consumed column appeared in the February 15, 2004, New York Times Magazine; it was posted on this site some time much later, despite the fiddled-with time/date stamp.]