Annalee Dolls
 |
|
| Private | |
| Industry | Doll making |
| Founded | Meredith, New Hampshire, U.S. (1955) |
| Founder | Annalee Thorndike |
| Headquarters | Meredith, New Hampshire, U.S. |
|
Area served
|
Worldwide |
|
Key people
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Annalee Thorndike Chip Thorndike Townsend Thorndike Charles Thorndike |
| Revenue | US$ 10 million |
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Number of employees
|
30 (2006) |
| Website | www.Annalee.com |
Annalee Dolls, Inc., also known as Annalee Mobilitee Dolls Inc., and AMD Holdings Inc., is a company located in Meredith, New Hampshire, that manufactures collectible dolls. The company was founded by Barbara Annalee Davis (later Thorndike) who died in 2002. At the company's height, it filled over 14 acres (5.7 ha) of land dotted with seven buildings containing 34,000 square feet (3,200 m2) of space, and had US$15 million in sales with 300 employees. The popularity of Annalee Dolls led R. Stuart Wallace to write that "the most famous manufactured item to come from New Hampshire in the 20th century is the Annalee doll." Annalee Dolls have reached up to $6,000 at auction. In 2008, the company closed its museum and sold its Meredith factory while as of 2006, there were only 30 employees.
Barbara Annalee Davis was born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1915, and grew up at 113 Centre Street in the same city. Originally interested in puppetry as a young girl, she began creating dolls at a young age along with a friend. When her friend went off to college in the early 1930s, Annalee, as she was called, continued to create dolls and began to sell them through the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen. She soon moved to Boston and continued to sell her dolls, most notably to S.S. Pierce and Co.
In 1941, Annalee met Harvard graduate Charles "Chip" Thorndike. Soon thereafter, the two married and moved to Meredith, New Hampshire, where they raised a family and opened Thorndike's Eggs and Auto Parts, which survived until 1950. With the fall in price of eggs and poultry, Annalee wanted to see if she could make money selling her dolls again. The Thorndikes sold off a section of the poultry farm and used the profits to create a small line of skier dolls. The line was a success, and slowly the Annalee doll "Factory in the Woods" was born. This continued until, in 1955, Annalee Mobilitee Dolls was incorporated as a company.
During the 1950s, stores in Manchester and Boston started buying Annalee dolls to decorate store windows, and Annalee was hired by New Hampshire to create dolls to be featured in tourism material. These dolls were on display at the Eastern States Exposition in Springfield, Massachusetts, and at the Rockefeller Center in New York City, both to advertise the state. These promotional dolls were extremely popular; so popular in fact that by 1960 Annalee dolls were being sold in stores in forty states, Canada, and Puerto Rico.
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Wikipedia