Big business advertising miniature sets to children (1953)

One of the "rules" of sales is advertise to the children to make the adults go and buy it. I would have said that children are more easily influenced by ads but let's be honest how many times you entered a supermarket to buy something and ended up buying more than you planned. Children look at their father, mother or another significant grown-up from the family and want to follow in their shoes. So big companies like Bristol-Meyers, Lever Brothers, Congoleum-Nairn, Pillsbury Mills, Singer and others decided to make miniatures of adult jobs related stuff and sell them as toys. So let's take a look at some of those playsets of 1953.


Dentist set includes a full tube of tooth paste supplied free to toymaker by manufacutrer, plus drill, forceps, eyeglasses, excavator, "gold" filling and six teeth. Set costs $3.

Supermarket with 10 brand name products costs $3.98. Cart at $4.98 has 15 miniature brands, holds DuBarry doll that comes with cosmetics.



Baby-tending set comes with six one-third scale Evenflo bottles, nipples, sealing disks, bottle cleanser, an empty oatmeal box. It sells for $2.96.


Young housecleaner is a $4.98 kit offering one-third scale replicas of Congoleum-Nairn linoleum rug, DuPont sponge, broom and various soaps.


Miniature crane is made 1.16-inch scale. Unit Crane and Shovel Corp. supplies blueprints and decals of its trademark for toy. It costs $13.95.


Airline unifroms are exact in every detail for imitative pilot ($12.90) or hostess ($22.95). Plastic walking 19-inch hostess doll costs $12.95.


Billboards produced by Lionel to go with model train sets are authentic of outdoor ads. Some of them came with lights that blinked. 30 million have been distributed between 1948 and 1953.

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