It's an ugly world

Babo, Ice Bat and Wedgehead are just three of the 10 Uglydolls. Some have stitches, others have no eyes, and the rest have stitches in place of eyes. The plush Uglydolls are exactly that: ugly.

Pretty Ugly, Kenilworth, N.J., launched the Uglydolls, first designed in 2001 through love letters between artists David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim, separated after graduating New York's Parsons School of Design. With Kim back at home in Seoul, Korea and Horvath still working in New York, Horvath drew Wage, the orange, apron-wearing ugly with two teeth, as a gift. She returned the drawn gift as a handstitched version.

Soon Babo, Target, Sinko, Jeero, and the rest of the Uglydolls family were born. “It really just started as a gift, and then I showed it to Eric Nakamura, who owns the Giant Robot store in Los Angeles,” says Horvath. “He thought I was going in there to pitch a new product and said, 'I love it. I'll take 20 of them.' I rushed home and got on the phone [to Sun-Min] and said 'thank you.'” Uglydolls aren't too ugly to sell. In the United States alone, the uglies sell out in stores like the Super 7 Store in San Francisco and Toy Tokyo in New York as well as high-end museum shops worldwide like the Whitney Museum in New York, the London Design Museum and the Musée Des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.

Horvath says that while the Uglydolls are slowly expanding throughout the boutique toy store market, larger stores are more than welcome to order the dolls. “If a certain amount of people want them, we want to make sure that they get them,” says Horvath. “At the same time, we are kind of thrilled that we can be found at these small places, because you can rediscover these small shops and see things that are a little different than what you see at bigger stores.”

Paul Budnitz, owner of Kid Robot, New York, one of the first stores to ever sell the dolls, says the Uglydolls are one of their best selling toys. “I think [they sell] because they are so ugly, which is fantastic,” says Budnick. “They look really vulnerable and people really respond to that. We have adults that come in and buy them and totally love them. Because it's so soft you can give them to toddlers, so it's for every age group.”

This year, Uglydolls, which sell for between $20 and $30, launched eight-inch, vinyl versions of the plush dolls in addition to the smaller plush key chains, four inches tall, currently available.

A limited edition holiday doll will make its arrival at FAO Schwarz around Christmastime this year as well as character t-shirts.

Uglydolls creator Horvath says that he'll leave it up to the people to expand the Uglydolls line.

“We're all about telling a story,” Horvath tells Playthings. “Instead of doing it through children's books or other media, we're telling the story through toys. The good thing about that is, we give them a little story, and we kind of leave the rest to their imagination.”