The holiday season is the zenith of the craze for American Girl, yet another of the seemingly endless line of marketing masterstrokes designed to separate American parents from their cash.
American Girl markets a line of historical dolls that hail from Colonial, pioneer and the Second World War periods, among others.
Unlike sexy clothes-hounds Barbie and Bratz, the American Girl is obsessed, in various incarnations, with horses, reading and friends — not boys.
If innocence can be purchased for $87 (Dh320) — the price of the starter kit, a basic doll and introductory book —parents are willing to pay.
The brand, a subsidiary of Mattel, rang up sales of $436 million (Dh1,601 million) in 2005 by being marketed as a preserve of innocence and as a place for female bonding and child-scale history.
Doll utopia
On a recent Saturday outside American Girl Place on Fifth Avenue, New York, a 40-minute line stretches to the end of a block. The Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy is piped over loudspeakers.
Security guards wave a trickle into the store and as young girls cross the threshold, they emit a uniform squeal. Here rises a four-storey, hearts-and-friendship world that taps young girls' fantasies. And it's all for sale.
Inside, the place is jammed. Girls in tutus, velvet and patent leather; girls with snowflakes painted on their cheeks and doll heads peeking out of their backpacks; girls whispering requests into adult ears and parents looking deep into their daughters' eyes.
Employees in the purple-walled emporium speak of it breathlessly as an "experience'', not a store.
And indeed, it contains a doll hair salon, a café that serves high tea to girls and dolls, a small Broadway-quality theatre with plays about dolls and a photo studio ready to immortalise the duo of doll and girl.
Expensive fantasy
"You can't do the store in one day," says Sharon French, 44, a social worker from Boston — though one day was enough for her to spend about $700 (Dh2,571).
The dolls have a chipmunk prettiness, with fat cheeks, two small front teeth, huge eyes, a tiny narrow nose and varying facial features and shades of skin and eyes.
Kit, for instance, lives during the Depression but still has a $58 (Dh213) bed and a $159 (Dh584) trunk. Addy is an African American girl who escaped from slavery at the time of the Civil War but keeps $20 (Dh73) accessories and a $70 (Dh257) desk.
There are sequel storybooks, companion dolls, DVDs, accessories from the DVDs and lots and lots of clothes, sold in the store on doll-size hangers.
Also on offer are a robe and fuzzy-wuzzies, a tap costume, powder-blue snow boots, satiny ballet slippers for flat feet, a hair-care set for $32 (Dh118), doll-size horses ($62 or Dh228), kayaks ($28 or Dh103) and sleighs ($150 or Dh551).
In the doll salon, for fees up to $20 (Dh73), seven stylists speed-spritz the hair of dolls strapped into mini-swivelling chairs.
Also available is the Pampering Plus package: For $5 (Dh18), a stylist washes the doll's vinyl face.
In the café — reservations recommended — a doll can be affixed to the table in a clip-on chair with her own table setting.
Tea, accompanied by a harpist, included crustless sandwiches stuck with toothpicks with American flags and cinnamon buns, pink lemonade and citrus fruit rinds filled with Jell-O.
Store not enough
As the day wears on, nerves in the store fray. Girls push near the escalators. Boys splay out on the floor. Grandmothers slump on a couch. Girls cry. Parents say no.
"It's rough," says a security guard, staring at the crowds.
The next day, four Boston girls get into a white limousine and head home, playing with their new dolls and watching an American Girl DVD (Molly's movie) along the way. Their mothers each spent at least $1,750 (Dh6,427).
But this visit to an American Girl emporium has only whetted the appetite of the girls.
"Going to the store made me want to get more of the American Girl stuff," Hannah Orcutt, a bright, straight-talking 10-year-old, fond of a red Patriots cap, says later. "It's hard to think what, 'cause there's so much there. I just wanted the whole store."
