Girl, 13, Is Consultant to Toy Firm, Inspiration for Doll

MOORESTOWN, N.J. —  You could say that Katie Lewis has been in the toy business from the beginning.

She was 6 weeks old when she attended her first design meeting at Mattel Inc., after her toy executive mom was called in from maternity leave. By age 7, a sign at Tyco toys, another company where her mom worked, declared Katie the honorary “head of research.”

“I think I’ve been around it since forever,” the soft-spoken 13-year-old says as she sits in what has become her very own office at The Family Co., the toy company her parents founded last year in Moorestown, a small, Norman Rockwell-ish town just east of Philadelphia.

Every kid’s dream come true, right?

Well, reality is, Katie does more homework than anything in the office, noted by the handwritten list of assignments on the erasable board above her desk.

But she’s also become an informal yet trusted consultant at the company, spending much of her after-school time at the office and making suggestions that even inspired her mom, Patti, to design a doll in her likeness.

“She’s really our sounding board. She lets us know what’s cool--and what’s not,” says Patti Lewis, chief executive of the company, which launched its first major doll line for the holidays.

Katie’s advice sometimes comes in the form of a smile, or a simple but effective “Ewwwww!” She also puts in her two cents about what the dolls wear, having deemed the shoulders on one doll’s dress “too puffy” and the legs on a pair of jeans “not wide enough.”

Other times, Katie helps her mom pick out fabric and buttons during buying trips in Philadelphia or checks out toy stores with her parents to see how their product is being displayed.

“There’s lots of things I get overruled on--but not always,” says Katie, a seventh-grader at a private school that’s just across the street from the company’s small but growing headquarters.

The Katie-inspired doll is part of the “It’s Me!” line, now on shelves at such stores as FAO Schwarz, Zany Brainy, Noodle Kidoodle and Toys R Us. Each doll is meant to commemorate an important moment in a girl’s life: her first day of school, getting a good grade and becoming a big sister, for example. The dolls come with books about courage, wisdom, responsibility and other topics.

It was a conversation with Katie last spring that helped her mother and her staff of 11 develop the concept.

Asked what special moments she remembered, Katie, who plays the flute, told her mother, “Whenever there’s a concert, I look into the audience and you’re there and I relax.”

That thought led to the “When You Came To My Recital” doll.

Getting to recitals is, in fact, a lot easier for Patti Lewis these days. She had been commuting two hours each way to New York, where she helped revive the ailing Alexander Doll Co., before she started The Family Co. in the spring of 1997.

“I’d call Katie on my way to work in the morning to wake her up and be home in time to tuck her in,” Lewis says.

Now, Katie sees a lot more of both her parents.

“When Katie’s around, it’s a little bit lighter,” says her dad, David Lewis, who is the company’s vice president of creative services and public affairs. “She has a sharp wit. It makes it fun.”

Katie also has discovered a few things about her parents.

“They’re smarter than I thought,” she says. “I never knew how much went into making a company.”

Not that it’s all a life of glamour--or much at all like the kid-meets-toys life of Tom Hanks’ character in the movie “Big” (which Katie has never seen, by the way).

Katie is a bit shy about saying so, but she doesn’t want to be a toy executive when she grows up.

“I want to be an Olympic swimmer and an actress,” she says. “And run a record company.”

And that’s just fine with her parents.

“We dreamed a dream,” Patti Lewis says. “And Katie’s dreaming her dream.”