Bernard Loomis

Bernard Loomis (July 4, 1923 – June 2, 2006) was an American toy developer and marketer who introduced some of the world's most notable brands including "Chatty Cathy", "Barbie", "Hot Wheels", "Baby Alive", and "Strawberry Shortcake", but perhaps his biggest marketing success was bringing a then-unknown film property called Star Wars to the toy shelves.

Every toy company he worked for (Mattel, General Mills, and Hasbro) became "the world's largest toy company" during his tenures in each company.

He also coined the word "toyetic" in a conversation with Steven Spielberg about translating his Close Encounters of the Third Kind into figures.

Loomis was born on July 4, 1923 in the Bronx under poor conditions. He didn't have toys of his own, but enjoyed baseball playing cards. In 1942 during World War II, Loomis served in the Army Air Forces in the Philippines. After the war, he attended New York University. During the 1950s, Loomis became a salesman who represented numerous toy manufacturers to retailers such as Toys R Us and Sears becoming a partner in a small sales firm, Samilson-Loomis [1].

In 1960, Loomis became a part of the Mattel Toys sales department. From there, he moved up to marketing popular brands such as Barbie and developed a sales and marketing strategy for the Chatty Cathy talking doll.

In 1968, Loomis began developing ways to promote the new Hot Wheels boy car line for the company. One of the marketing concepts he thought of was creating an animated series based on the property, which premiered on September 6, 1969 on ABC in the US. [2] This was the first series to be explicitly spawned from a toyline, whereas it was usually toylines that spawned from existing series. The Federal Communications Commission declared the series wasn't entertainment, but rather a thirty-minute commercial for Hot Wheels. ABC cancelled the series in 1971, but by then Loomis was already at his next toy company, General Mills.

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