Who Are You Calling Ugly?

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They weren't the first designer plush dolls, and they probably won't be the last, but a cast of 15 unattractive, ever evolving characters called Uglydolls—each accompanied by a quirky, amusing narrative—have plopped down at the forefront of the designer-toy movement. The dolls' creators, David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim, are themselves outsiders in a nearly monopolized corporate toy industry. Their first doll, a snaggle-toothed, apron-donning orange blob named Wage who, the story goes, works at a grocery store and lives for chocolate-chip-cookie dough, was born in 2001 not as a pop-culture collectible but as a love letter turned art project.

Since then, over a million Uglydolls have been sold in 2,500 stores around the world (including high-end retailers like Barneys and Takashimaya), and last year Kim and Horvath's company, Pretty Ugly, did $2.5 million in sales. The dolls have amassed a cult following, with a fifth-anniversary convention, UglyCon, to be held in Los Angeles in December. "I'll bet there are toy-company boardrooms filled with Uglydoll samples and that they're scratching their heads as to why it works and why they didn't do it first," says Eric Nakamura, owner of L.A.-based Asian pop-culture store Giant Robot, where the first doll was sold. "I'm sure people have lost their jobs over it."

Kim, 30, and Horvath, 35, knew since childhood that they wanted to make toys. Growing up in Seoul, Kim's friends played with Barbie houses while she fashioned dollhouses out of cardboard and clay. On the other side of the world, in the U.S., Horvath's mother designed toys for Mattel. "She would bring home her beautiful unique prototypes, but when I saw them in the toy store, they looked the same as everything else," he recalls. "I always wanted to make toys, but I knew I never wanted to work for a toy company."

The two met in an illustration class at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City in 1997. "Right away we realized we had the same vision: making toys that are a storytelling device," says Horvath. "I chased her for a year, and she kept saying no. When I started to give up, she came around." But in 2001, Kim's student visa expired, and she had to move back to Korea. "I was completely devastated," says Horvath, who during their two years apart took a job as a manager at Toys International in L.A. "I interfaced with buyers and distributors and realized I wasn't just interested in toy design but also in the way the whole toy world worked and why it worked that way, why you couldn't just make toys but had to work for a big company or have connections," he says. "I always wanted to follow another way. I wanted to come up with a great idea, not a big idea."

But Horvath's mother started to worry and persuaded him to show his drawings of what were to become Uglydolls to a major toy company (he's mum about which one). "They flat out told me none of my characters could translate into anything," he says. Frustrated, that night he wrote Kim a letter with a little drawing of Wage at the bottom. "Basically I was like, I'm going to work hard and find a way for us to get back together." When Kim received the letter, she decided to do something with it. "I knew it would make David happy to see his character alive in the real world," she says. "So for Christmas I sewed Wage into a doll."