Harlem Doll Factory Is A True Fantasyland For Girls Of All Ages

NEW YORK - This is no storybook castle.

The nondescript brick building is wedged between a meat warehouse and an auto-repair shop in Harlem, with elevated train tracks looming nearby. The old rickety elevator opens onto a shabby blue-and-pink lobby. But beyond the door lies the fantasyland of every little girl, and many a big girl, too: the Alexander Doll Company.

Three huge floors hum with activity as hundreds of workers paint faces, glue eyelashes, coif hair, sew minuscule sequins on elaborate costumes, cut patterns and cobble tiny boots and shoes.

Best-kept secret

Completed, the sweet-smiling, innocent faces of some 200 different types of dolls peer out from all around the cavernous room.

"We're the best-kept secret in New York City," says Patti Lewis, the president and CEO of a company that has brought magic to generations of doll lovers for 73 years.

Alexander's founder, Beatrice Alexander Behrman - known as Madame Alexander - was the daughter of Russian immigrants who ran New York's first "doll hospital" above their Brooklyn tenement.

Madame, as workers still affectionately refer to her, was a petite woman who gave herself a grand name to fit her grandiose ideas at a time when women's suffrage was just beginning.

Madame Alexander "survived all the economic downturns of the company," Lewis says. "She survived working with unions. She got a manufacturing organization operating in a very challenging city. She sold products to very tough retailers. She bid for fabric, secured designers . . . all this in a day when women didn't do it."

After Madame Alexander died in 1990 at age 95, the company remained a family-held enterprise until 1995, when it was purchased by Kaizen Breakthrough Partnership, a New York private capital fund managed by Gefinor Acquisition Partners.

Today, the largest handcrafted-doll factory in America has 460 workers, including many who have been with the company 15 years or more. They still remember when Madame Alexander roamed the factory floor daily, inspecting every detail of the dolls' creation.

One of those workers is Greta Schrader, a 42-year employee and head of the doll hospital.

"I've never had so much fun in my life. I want to retire but I can't 'cause I'm having such a good time," says Schrader. She fields at least 15 phone calls a day from anxious collectors with dolls in need of repair.

After Madame Alexander's departure from day-to-day operations in 1981, the company gradually lost her vision that the dolls be for children. Most of today's customers are collectors who can afford prices ranging from $60 for an 8-inch baby doll to $650 for a couture 21-inch Cissy doll.

But Lewis, who took over two years ago, shares Madame Alexander's vision. She hopes to revive it by improving productivity without sacrificing quality.

When Madame Alexander left, "some of the innovation went away," says Lewis, who has worked at Mattel, Tyco and Tonka. "What we have done over the last two years is bring that innovation back.

"In the baby-doll line, we're addressing the more contemporary baby . . . how children want to play with dolls. We're addressing the themes, the colors, the sculpts that appeal to today's children."

The company's gross sales have doubled in the past two years, to $30 million in 1996.

Cissy and Harley

Part of this innovation is the return of the high-fashion Cissy, the nation's first full-figured doll, which was last produced in 1952. The six different Cissy dolls have separate ensembles "beautiful enough for a woman, but made for a doll," Lewis says.

To appeal to the contemporary younger collector, "I brought in the Harley-Davidson license," Lewis says. "And we're bringing back movie themes, licenses that appeal to the younger collector. And because I want to get children collecting as well, we've introduced `Like Mommy and Like Daddy' and a whole host of wonderful children's themes."

The company continues to produce Madame Alexander's time-honored characters from classic stories and movies, such as "Little Women" and Scarlett from "Gone With the Wind."

Its new classic Storyland Collection presents Cinderella, Dorothy, Tinker Bell and Snow White with a resplendent prince. It also has introduced Eliza Doolittle, as well as "The King of Siam" and Anna. And a Hollywood Classics collection features dolls from Elizabeth Taylor films.

Except for a brief period when they were made out of cloth or composite materials, Alexander Dolls have been made of plastic. "Madame deliberately didn't do porcelain," Lewis says. "She said a child shouldn't have a doll that will break." But to give the dolls a satiny, porcelainlike appearance, the sculpts are tumbled in a mixture of olive oil and sawdust for 2 1/4 hours.

The company's initiatives also extend to the workers themselves.

Alexander is the biggest private employer in its area, with 400 unionized workers, most of them Dominicans. Eighty-five percent of the work force lives in the neighborhood. Since most speak Spanish, the company set up voluntary English classes at its factory.

In turn, members of the design team - including some who have worked with Seventh Avenue names such as Carolina Herrera, Scassi and Halston - are taking Spanish classes.

"I like to think that our factory is like Alice going through the Looking Glass," Lewis says wistfully.

"You come into this brick building and you come inside and here we create the world's most beautiful dolls, in a pink and blue factory in Harlem.

"And we are everything you wouldn't expect - it's American pride, handcrafted detail and quality. A lot of people think it's gone."