The Man Who Became a Billionaire Through His Fight to the Death With Barbie

http://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2013/10/30/the-toy-mogul-who-became-a-billionaire-through-his-fight-to-the-death-with-barbie/

by 001sky • 13 years ago

64 47 13 years ago

forbes.com

rayiner2• 13 years ago

The court wound up ruling in MGA’s favor and last January awarded it $137 million for legal fees. But the judge left the door open for Larian to refile his suit against Mattel. Larian vows he won’t let the matter drop until Mattel comes crawling to him: “If those guys want me out of their hair, they’ll apologize.”

Sounds like the best client ever.

oijaf888• 13 years ago

You mean for the law firm? I would guess he has in house counsel for that lawsuit.

harryh3• 13 years ago

Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe handled most of the work.

crusso2• 13 years ago

Yeah until he imagines some wrongdoing from his attorneys and ties them up with litigation against their handling of his case for decades.

thaumasiotes6• 13 years ago

Mattel, the world’s largest toymaker, fired the first salvo, suing MGA in 2004 . It alleged that designer Bryant had conceived of Bratz while on its payroll and accused MGA of bribing and secretly hiring Mattel employees for projects on the side. MGA hit back, claiming that Mattel spied on its salesmen by masquerading as toy buyers, rearranged Barbie and Bratz displays at Wal-Mart and other stores and paid off retailers to favor Barbie over Bratz.

Is it too much to wonder "why is any of that described conduct even legally questionable?"?

I mean, say you're Mattel and you have a nasty, exclusive, NDA-ridden contract with some key employees. MGA surreptitiously hires those employees for side projects. Obviously, you can have a cause of action against the employees. But against MGA?

byoung2• 13 years ago

Mattel believed that it owned the rights to designs created by its employees, and Carter Bryant was an employee. Another company profits from the design Mattel believes it owns, so they sue the company.

Mattel produced evidence that Bryant used Mattel resources and time, and even got other employees to help with the design.

thaumasiotes6• 13 years ago

Urgh... I could grudgingly accept that that argument could be a legal reason for MGA to turn over the design to Mattel. I see no reason for Mattel to be able to recover damages from MGA, who didn't do anything wrong, rather than from Bryant.

The counterclaims are even worse.

acchow3• 13 years ago

"I have a passion for making things that kids want, and I have a passion for winning" - Isaac Larian

Are you kidding me? You exploited these kids' minds and brainwashed them into wanting your product which has dealt irreparable harm to their self image.

I can't read the rest of the article; I'm too upset by his self delusion.

verroq• 13 years ago

Was there anything you wanted that wasn't influenced by society?

eru• 13 years ago

Food, water, shelter, sex?

acchow3• 13 years ago

I desire many things due to external influences which aren't harmful to me. A doll with a 18 inch waste and impossibly large breasts doesn't fall under this category.

thaumasiotes6• 13 years ago

It is, in general, much easier to sell a person something they already want than to convince them that they really want the thing you happen to have on hand; the article notes explicitly that the guy was convinced he should make Bratz after his daughter liked a prototype.

Chimpanzee girls play with dolls (chimp technology isn't quite at our levels, so their dolls are just sticks they found).

As a side note, one thing that somehow saddens me is modern Chinese terminology for dolls. 娃娃[wa wa] is a word for "baby" (how they got the idea to refer to babies as "wa wa", we may never know ;) ), and is also the standard word for "doll". A traditional doll is referred to most explicitly as 布娃娃[bu wa wa], "cloth doll"; it's the kind of doll a little girl might make for herself out of some spare material.

The term for a nice doll, the kind you'd buy in a store? 洋娃娃[yang wa wa].

"Foreign doll".

brg• 13 years ago

Interestingly, yang wawa is also the term used to described children of Chinese and mixed ethnicities.

yen223• 13 years ago

I don't think I've ever heard people using 娃娃 to refer to anything other than dolls. Is it just me?

mudil• 13 years ago

Why don't you read the article, and learn something from a person, an immigrant, who became a billionaire? FYI, no one can become a billionaire without delivering value.

ledge• 13 years ago

Sure, under an extremely loose definition of "value".

What about a billionaire cigarette tycoon, drug lord, or arms dealer?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_M._Kelley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapo_Guzman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Khashoggi

Their product had "value" in the sense that somebody was willing to pay for it, but clearly it's possible to become a billionaire while having a net negative effect on society.

schaub4352• 13 years ago

Please get over yourself.

chris_wot5• 13 years ago

Hi, you appear to be new here. These sort of uncivil comments are largely frowned on. Please take the time to review the site guidelines, it makes it much more pleasant if you follow them!

rschmitty• 13 years ago

The same could be said about a number of billionaires.

"Having a passion for making ____ and a passion for winning" - Rich guy

Where ___ is something harmful to society/morals/environment

crusso2• 13 years ago

If anything, the products that seemed so cool to me on TV in my childhood taught me that most of it is crap and can be ignored. The kids in the commercials had so much fun with the toy and then when you get it home and out of the box... it may well disappoint.

Sounds like a great lesson to teach. The younger, the better.

At least the guy is just selling toys. Beats the heck out of a politician trying to force his grand schemes on everyone in society.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

Do you really think a fat muffin top doll with no makeup or sexy miniskirt would have sold? Consumers at large don't want to buy reminders of their own rotten, overweight, barely getting by reality.

rayiner2• 13 years ago

Children aren't "consumers." They're not adults capable of properly evaluating things and making informed buying choices. Products marketed at children carry a special moral consideration that products marketed at adults do not.

reginaldjcooper• 13 years ago

Why does all integrity fly out the window when it comes time to write the title?

He didn't become a billionaire through his fight with Mattel, he became one in spite of it.

Or did I read the article wrong?

chris_wot5• 13 years ago

It's not just referring to the court battle, he competed with Mattel in the market also.

chris_wot5• 13 years ago

This is the guy who invented Bratz? Bratz are fucking evil, my little girl doesn't need a sexy doll. I refuse to buy her one.

schaub4352• 13 years ago

How dare they provide something girls want. How DARE them!

vidarh• 13 years ago

Without taking a stance on Bratz: Do you have a child? Do you realize how much stuff children wants or want to do that is bad for them?

chris_wot5• 13 years ago

Little girls want big, oversized lips, incredibly and ridiculously skinny waists and fishnet stockings? Who knew?

DanBC• 13 years ago

Bratz are fucking evil

Many toys are fucking evil. It's a bizarre, horrible, industry.

omonra• 13 years ago

I really wish articles like these would spend more time on how the poor immigrant went from 0 to first 10 million, then from 10m to 1bio (of course I realize the author only has what his subject would tell him - so it's only a wish).

Here we have 'In the early 1980s they moved on to consumer electronics, repackaging Nintendo's GameBoy forerunner, the Game & Watch, pulling in $21 million in sales the first year. That fad passed after a couple of years but left Larian with an appetite for the toy business. When a struggling inventor in 1996 brought him a design for a talking doll already passed over by Mattel and others, Larian pounced. Singing Bouncy Baby was the surprise runaway hit of 1997.'

So by '96 he was in position to talk to with inventors and bring their ideas to be 'runaway hits' (which I understand is largely about marketing). To me (personally) the path from nothing to someone who can bring runaway toy to market is more interesting than how they build the business beyond that point.

thaumasiotes6• 13 years ago

Well, there's a suggestion in the article, and it's not surprising it's not particularly detailed... it sounds like he first went into business as a way of laundering money.

Larian and his brother went into business as importer-exporters in 1979, selling schlocky brass figurines from South Korea. (They were also maneuvering their parents’ money out of Iran.)

For that purpose, it's not really necessary to do especially well, since profits aren't what you're looking for (if you can turn $20,000,000 locked in Iran into $14,000,000 in the US, that could be a win!). But they seem to have discovered that they could generate profits anyway, and things took off from there.

judk2• 13 years ago

Any indication that the scale was $20M, and not $0.5M?

I have no idea.

hobs2• 13 years ago

This guy sounds like the worst boss ever to work for, a man who just wants robots to fulfill his goals. That is besides his terrible product that I remember my kid sister begging, screaming, and crying for in a shop until my (broke) dad finally broke down and bought her one. Disgusting!

vinceguidry• 13 years ago

Working for a guy like that can be the best career move you'll ever make. He's a bastard, sure, but he's a bastard that built a billion-dollar business. There are many paths to mastery, but learning directly from one is among the quicker ones.

judk2• 13 years ago

So something kids want is a terrible product?

hobs2• 13 years ago

The argument that if someone wants it, it must be good is clearly not a viable one.

Hyperbolic Examples: So something drug addicts want is a terrible product? So something murderers want is a terrible product?

I would say that it is a terrible product because it promotes a self image that is over sexualized to young children.

The Man Who Became a Billionaire Through His Fight to the Death With Barbie

Related Stories