Thomas Dam couldn’t afford a Christmas present, so he carved one. The Danish craftsman whittled a squat, wide-grinning wooden figure for his daughter sometime in the late 1950s, a design so strange and appealing that neighbors in Gjøl started asking him to make more. By the mid-1960s, Americans were buying more than a million of his troll dolls a year and spending over $100,000 a month at the craze’s peak, according to Smithsonian Magazine’s history of the toy. But Dam never locked down U.S. rights fast enough, and a wave of cheaper knockoffs ate into the fortune the original should have earned him.

A Doll Made Out of Necessity

Dam, a baker by trade whose local flour mill had shut down, began carving wooden figures to entertain his children while he worked through his own financial troubles, according to Smithsonian’s account. His wife encouraged him to try selling them, and the early carvings found buyers in nearby Aalborg. His reputation grew from there: a Swedish department store commissioned him for a 1956 Santa Claus window display, and the small spring-loaded elf figures he built for it sold out completely by Christmas, per the same reporting.

From Wood Shop to Factory

Demand pushed Dam to abandon hand-carved wood for rubber cast in gypsum molds, then to found the company Dam Things to organize production at scale. By 1959 he had a dedicated factory running in Gjøl, and in 1961 he switched to rotational molding in PVC plastic — the same manufacturing method still used for troll dolls today, according to Smithsonian’s history of the toy. The dolls were marketed as “Good Luck Trolls” and later rebranded “Wishniks” by their U.S. distributor, selling for between roughly 65 cents and $5.95 depending on size, with additional revenue from doll-sized clothing and accessories.

A White House Cameo and a Sheepskin Shortage

By 1962, Dam’s trolls were manufactured everywhere from New Zealand to Florida, and the craze reached the White House itself: President John F. Kennedy greeted aviator Betty Miller and her troll doll, nicknamed “Dammit,” during a 1963 visit, and First Lady Lady Bird Johnson reportedly owned one of her own, according to Smithsonian’s account. Demand for the dolls’ wild, fuzzy hair grew so intense that Dam Things purchased Iceland’s entire sheepskin harvest in a single year to keep up with production, per the same reporting.

The Rights He Never Secured

Dam’s downfall wasn’t a lack of demand — it was a gap in U.S. copyright law. He had licensed a New York company, Uneeda, to sell official versions of his troll in the United States, but Uneeda’s early sales effectively introduced the design into the American public domain before Dam formally secured his own copyright there in 1965, according to Smithsonian’s history. Competitors including Lucky Schnooks, Fauni Trolls and a wave of unbranded manufacturers flooded stores with cheaper look-alikes that Dam had no legal way to stop. A 1965 U.S. court ruling made things worse: judges found that Dam Things’ copyright notice, molded into the sole of each doll’s left foot, didn’t clearly name the company and therefore didn’t qualify for protection, effectively placing the entire design in the public domain, according to The Hustle’s account of the ruling. Salesman Russell Berrie, who had represented Dam Things’ original U.S. licensee, went on to build his own “Russ Trolls” line using copies of the original molds manufactured in China, and by 1992 had sold roughly $150 million worth of trolls under his own name, per the same reporting. A rival firm, Ace Novelty, sold millions of its own “Treasure Trolls” and projected $125 million in U.S. sales that same year. The dispute wasn’t resolved for decades: only after the U.S. passed the Uruguay Round Amendments Act in 1994, aligning American copyright law with international treaties, was Dam Things able to restore its copyright in 1996, according to Smithsonian’s reporting. The company then sued infringers directly, including Russ Berrie, which agreed to stop selling troll dolls in 2004.

What the Delay Cost

Thomas Dam died of cancer in 1989, before troll dolls staged their next big American revival in the early 1990s. A 1994 fire at the Gjøl factory destroyed the original molds his company had built its business on, and Dam Things spent several more years fighting near-bankruptcy even after regaining its legal footing, according to The Hustle’s reporting. The company eventually rebuilt around licensing rather than manufacturing alone, striking a deal with DreamWorks Animation in 2012 that led to the animated “Trolls” film franchise, while total lifetime sales tied to Dam’s original design have been estimated at around $4.5 billion, per the same source. The trolls he carved for his own kids ended up as one of the defining toy fads of the 1960s, reappearing in new waves of popularity every decade or two since. But the family that made the originals spent roughly three decades locked out of the profits its own knockoffs generated on American shelves, a reminder that a hit product and a protected one aren’t automatically the same thing — sometimes the gap between them is measured in decades, not dollars.