That One Time Aldi Sold an American Girl Doll

Aldi plays the imitation game as well as any retailer out there. Whether it’s packaging a cereal that looks just like the name brand box or selling kitchenware dupes, Aldi has no shame when it comes to concocting inexpensive knockoffs of big names. If it’s a big brand, especially an expensive one, Aldi just might try to create a knockoff of it. In fact, chances are that it already has.

This is the story of how Aldi once took a shot at a most unlikely brand target — an iconic 18-inch doll.

The American Girl Story

Pleasant Williams Thiele was born in Chicago, Illinois, on March 8, 1941. Pleasant grew up in the northern Chicago suburb of Bannockburn, roughly an hour’s drive from the current site of Aldi’s American corporate headquarters. She went on to college in New York before working as a schoolteacher, during which she briefly married and changed her name to Pleasant Rowland. She left the classroom after six years, doing a brief stint as a TV reporter and anchor before getting a job with a textbook company.

She would go on to write her own textbook curriculum, earning enough money that she was able to launch into another business venture. By Pleasant’s account, she wanted to bring history alive in the same way she’d personally experienced visiting Colonial Williamsburg, so she partnered with a friend from her textbook days to create a line of 18-inch historical dolls. In 1986, she used her textbook royalties to launch the Pleasant Company, which initially sold a trio of dolls — one named Kirsten from the 1850s, one named Samantha from the 1900s, and one named Molly from the 1940s.

American Girl was born.

The first American Girl retail space opened in Chicago, Illinois in 1998. Pleasant envisioned a mecca for the brand, and that’s exactly what it was — and still is. That same year, she sold her business to toy giant Mattel for $700 million, and Mattel would move the brand from strictly historical dolls to a number of other lines, including customizable versions.

At the time of this post, it’s safe to say that 18-inch dolls are not quite the rage they used to be. Because of shifting interests and the ever-increasing growth of technology, American Girl sales have declined enough that Mattel has shuttered a dozen different American Girl stores since 2018. There is still a market for the dolls, but not the market it used to be.

Aldi Goes American Girl

Back in 2019 — even as American Girl sales were dwindling — Aldi forayed into the American Girl knockoff business. The market was there, as American Girl dolls ran $115. (At the time of this post the full-sized dolls cost between $115 and $125 depending on the style.) Aldi’s doll, by contrast, sold for just $19.99. That came in less than other AG dupes of the era, including Walmart’s My Life and Target’s Our Generation, which ran from the low $20s to as much as $35.

True to form, Aldi used one of its standard private labels, dubbing them Bee Happy 18″ Dolls. Each doll came with both a regular outfit as well as a pair of plaid pajamas. As an added bonus, Aldi sold kid-sized versions of said plaid pajamas for $8.99 each … another obvious riff on American Girl, which is known to sell matching doll-kid apparel.

Oh, and the Aldi dolls had names, too.

As you might expect, Aldi’s American Girl imitations weren’t the historical dolls of early American Girl, but instead they took their cues from the Mattel-era dolls that were, by and large, more modern. Aldi sold three styles.

Eagle-eyed American Girl fans might feel like the black and white outfit on the party host doll looked familiar. That’s because it was a remarkably similar copy (except for the shoes) of Grace’s Sightseeing outfit, which was sold in 2015.

The other two dolls weren’t as close a match to any American Girl we know of, although the ballerina outfit does evoke some similarities to its brand-name counterpart, including a ballet outfit that ran from 2011 to 2015. 

Why We Took a Pass

We had at least two writers with significant American Girl experience at the time: Rachael has owned AG dolls for decades, while Megan is our resident American Girl historian. Back in 2019, I floated to both of them the idea of buying and writing about the dolls. While Rachael did write a piece previewing them, neither of them were all that interested in getting one and putting it through the paces. Both had concerns about how well the dolls would hold up and expressed particular uncertainty about the hair, which in their view is notoriously inferior in AG knockoff dolls compared to the originals.

In any event, the Aldi American Girl experiment didn’t land. As I mentioned earlier, timing wasn’t great, with those dolls in decline by 2019. Aldi’s dolls were eventually clearanced out for half price in our store — a sign they didn’t sell well — and they’ve never returned.

All we have left, as they say, are the memories.