By Bulletin Staff
Forty years after the kids from the Cabbage Patch became the hottest selling new doll in the US toy market, dolls spawned in the Zombie Patch are taking the 2023 holiday season by storm.
Sales of Zombie Patch Dolls have notched up records at both mass-market retailers and specialty stores since going on sale in September, blowing out expectations for the baby-faced monsters and single-handedly boosting industry sales projections for holiday sales this year.
“These ugly little beasties are flying off the shelves faster than we can restock them,” said Elliot Duncan, CEO of toy store chain Duncan’s Toy Chest. “I haven’t seen anything like it since Big Hugs Elmo.”
Zombie Patch Dolls made their debut earlier this year at the Bentonville International Toy Show to a rousing reception, with toymaker executives who grew up with the 1980s Cabbage Patch Dolls captivated by the “nostalgia with an evil twist” of the undead dolls.
“The dolls bring back so many memories of finding the toy we all wanted under the tree on Christmas morning in 1983, and we really were eager to deliver that same sense of joy to a new generation of kids,” explained Brenda Pigeon, lead designer at Zombie Patch Doll maker ZPK Enterprises.
Pigeon added: “At the same time, we also wanted to update the experience to reflect the dark times we live in since the latest surge in the spread of the zombie virus. We had to acknowledge the outsized presence that the undead play in the lives of children of all ages today.”
Nostalgia really does sell, according to Peter McCallister, zombie toy analyst for Forest for the Trees Insights, an industry researcher. “The people who were kids in the 1980s are now having children of their own, and they’re essentially reliving their own childhoods by gifting these Zombie Patch Dolls,” McCallister said.
The analyst noted that, in its time, the 1980s doll craze helped distract worried Americans from the threat of nuclear annihilation that hung over the world as the Cold War reached its culmination prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“Back then, the threat of extermination was coming from behind the Iron Curtain, with communists wanting to eat our lunch. Now it’s coming from behind the picket fence, with a neighbor that’s been zombified and wants to eat our brains,” McCallister said. “The Zombie Patch Doll helps alleviate the ever-present anxiety that our society lives with today.”
Retailers have reported selling out of the zombie dolls both online and in brick-and-mortar outlets. In fact, during the latest Black Friday shopping frenzy, police were called to several stores around the nation to break up fights among adults battling over the last Zombie Patch Doll on the shelf.
In the most extreme case, a tussle over a doll at a store in Little Rock, Arkansas, resulted in the death of a man who then zombified and bit several other shoppers, turning the doll aisle into its own bloody zombie patch before the local rapid undead response unit was able to contain the outbreak. In all, seven shoppers turned and had to be put down.
Pigeon, at ZPK Enterprises, acknowledged that demand has far outstripped the company’s most optimistic sales forecasts for the dolls, and she said that supply chain snags and production issues in Malaysia and Vietnam, where the dolls are produced, were hampering the company’s ability to meet the soaring demand.
However, she was quick to assure worried parents that the company would be able to work down its backlog over the next several weeks and that every child who wants to find a snarling zombie figure under the tree would not be left disappointed.
Meanwhile, desperate parents are reportedly turning to online outlets like eBay, Facebook and Craigslist, among others, to make sure they get the doll their children want – and paying many multiples of the Zombie Patch Doll’s MSRP of $49.95.
In a TikTok video, a user named “cohara54” said that she had paid $350 (plus shipping) for the “Princess Blood” Zombie Patch Doll, one of the more popular dolls, and another user named “dstearn57” reported paying more than $400 (shipping included) for the “Chomping Charles” doll, another hot item.
ZPK has warned that the high demand has resulted in a number of knockoff Zombie Patch Dolls showing up in the market, and the company cautioned that consumers should be on the lookout for dolls that, for example, are stained with real blood or brains instead of the simulated guts and bodily fluids that ZPK uses.
McCallister agrees that counterfeits could present issues for the dolls’ manufacturer and parents alike. “It would be highly ironic, not to mention tragic, if a parent were to buy a fake doll tainted with actual zombie blood that then causes a family to zombify on Christmas morning. That would definitely spoil the whole holiday,” the analyst said.
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