If there’s a doll that embodies the 1980s, it’s the Cabbage Patch Kid. The first iteration of the famous dimpled dolls was conceived in the ‘70s by an American folk artist from Kentucky named Martha Nelson Thomas. Thomas, who graduated from art school in Louisville, began making 16-inch-tall soft sculpture dolls with hand-stitched facial features and yarn for hair. She considered them expressions of herself and called them her Doll Babies. Each baby came with its own packet, which included adoption papers, a letter from Martha, and a list of the baby’s likes and dislikes. Xavier Roberts purchased the dolls from Thomas to offer at his gift store in Georgia and sold them for a huge profit. Thomas was uncomfortable with the high price of the dolls and spoke to Roberts about lowering it.

In response to Thomas’s concerns, Roberts began to make the successful cloth dolls himself, cutting out Thomas. He called his dolls Little People, but they looked exactly like Thomas’s dolls, with adoption papers and all. Roberts soon met with Roger Schlaifer, an Atlanta designer and licensing agent, and changed the name to Cabbage Patch Kids to avoid confusion with FisherPrice’s Little People toy line. Schlaifler then brokered a deal with the toy company Coleco Industries, designed the Cabbage Patch Kids logo, and, along with his wife, Susanne Nance, created the magical origin story of the Cabbage Patch Kids, which was printed on each doll’s box.

It’s fitting that it was another woman who altered the design to create the Cabbage Patch Kid we know today. Judith F. Albert was a designer at Coleco Industries in the 1980s who created a vinyl recast (with a signature sweet smell) of the formerly cloth doll head. Albert also designed a computerized program to ensure that each doll was unique, with varied eye colors, facial features, and clothes.

In 1983, the new Cabbage Patch Kids were introduced to great fanfare at the International Toy Fair in New York City, and soon, they were coveted by every child in the U.S. That holiday season, there were riots in stores across the country because there were not enough dolls to meet consumer demand. In 1985, Cabbage Patch Kids sales totaled $600 million. Schlaifer estimates that the final tally of five years of sales was around $4 billion.

Thomas, the original creator, did file a lawsuit in 1979 that was settled out of court in 1985 for an undisclosed sum. Thomas reported that the settlement was enough to allow her kids to attend college. Maybe for our next lesson we’ll talk about when karma came for the Cabbage Patch Kids empire, when the baseball card company Topps ripped them off to imagine their far less cuddly Garbage Pail Kids.