In the news

Ginny and Her NONO are new best friends! Ginny is dressed in stylish jean
overalls showing off her love for NONO Dolls. Wearing her favorite tennis shoes,
Ginny and her NONO are ready for anything. Ginny is proud to be the first kid
on the block with a NONO Doll, as she continues to be a fashion leader in doll
society. Ginny and Her NONO is a joint project from The Vogue Doll Company
using NONO Doll under a license from the newest USA doll company,
Goodreau Doll, LLC.

- The full-sized NONOs are a line of designer dolls that are brand new for 2006.
- The families behind The Vogue Doll Company and Goodreau Doll, LLC are best friends in real-life, too.
- The set will be ready for play in May 2006. 2/28/2006

THE NEWSLETTER OF THE CASUALTY ACTUARIAL SOCIETY - FEBRUARY 2007

When I am complimented on my attire, I often explain that my wife, having grown too old to play with
dolls, now dresses me! One of our Fellows—Annette Goodreau—still plays with dolls and has developed
this hobby into a business.

Doll-making is a logical extension of the Goodreau family’s life-long fascination with toys.
She, her mother, and two sisters are all passionate doll collectors who frequent toy trade shows
and have many friends in the community. Annette has been known as the one with the best toys since
her college days at UC Berkeley and throughout her professional career.

Annette’s sister Paulette is an artist and a designer who started making cloth dolls in 1998. In 2004,
her entry in a competition at the Doll and Teddy Bear Expo—a simple cloth doll with purple hair and a
hand-sewn face—was judged to be so ugly that she was awarded a third place ribbon, even though she
had the only entry in the “Amateur Cloth Doll” category!

The dolls’ unusual appearance made them stand out in any crowd, and soon after the ill-fated doll competition
a friend in the toy industry asked for a doll of her own. Excited by the interest, Paulette and Annette
(the marketing and business brains behind the endeavor) brought the doll to the January 2005 IDEX East,
a trade show in Orlando. The sisters had christened their dolls "NONO" after Paulette told the purple-haired doll,
“No, no, little one, you’re too ugly to leave the house.” The name stuck and now
the crazy face and homemade-looking stitches are standard features of their cloth doll line.

After IDEX, interest in the quirky dolls surged, and Annette and her sister got down to the business of
marketing their product to the toy industry, formulating a concept and design for the product line
(including a mock-up, sculpt, or drawing of the doll), as well as manufacturing, distributing, and pricing them.
Though there is very little uncertainty involved—only hard costs and consumer reaction to consider—pricing is
one of the duties that falls to Annette, the numbers person. Compared to insurance pricing,
she says, it is a relaxing exercise.

The doll line debuted last February at the biggest show of all—Toy Fair 2006 in New York City—a convention
where every exhibit brings to mind a carnival stand, and where the sisters had to keep a close watch over the NONOs,
lest the toy rockets in the next booth came shooting over the divider to knock them down.

Debuting at an event as large as Toy Fair can be a stressful affair fraught with great expectations.
To forestall any tension and start on a light note, Annette set their goal at one single order, a quota that was
met with ease! Their booth received unusual interest, ranging from a curious voodoo shop owner to an animator
who thought the NONOs could make great cartoon characters.

They did miss one opportunity for a prestigious coup. The buyer for Barney’s of New York wanted to order a
couple of styles of NONO dolls. But they had told all interested buyers that they would only sell the first line of eight
NONOs as a set. Their doll industry friends are still ribbing them about being the start-up (or rather upstart) doll
company that said “no” to Barney’s.

With or without Barney’s, the sisters’ endeavor is going strong. Currently they have two lines of dolls— NONO™ and Snappy™.
NONOs are simple cloth dolls with crazy faces (designed in the style of Paulette’s original third-place
competition doll) and a short rhyme on their tags. There are 10 styles in all, such as, “NONO Ted, you ain’t
right in the head!” A newer development, Snappy™, is a brightly colored 8-inch vinyl doll with removable legs, arms, head,
and wig. Since all Snappy™ dolls interact together, the more dolls kids collect, the more combinations they can create.

A third doll, a cheery, soft, and squishy character for infants called the Squishy Moe™ is being developed.
The prototype has been generating great interest from retail buyers and collectors, one being an obstetrician who wants
to give one away to every baby that she delivers. This new product is particularly dear to the sisters’ hearts because it
was motivated by the recent birth of their identical twin nieces, to whom they expect to give a very extensive collection
of dolls. All their lines and retailers can be found at www.goodreaudoll.com.

Thanks to Annette, Paulette, and the NONO dolls, ugly is the new cute.

Annette Goodreau is senior vice president & chief actuary of Houston Casualty Company in Houston, TX.
She is also chairperson of the CAS Program Planning Committee.