Profile · Madison, Wisconsin
Pleasant Williams Thiele Rowland
American Girl founder; Madison origin story (later HQ in Middleton); not to be confused as a Middleton-only name
$410 million
Pleasant Williams Thiele Rowland founded American Girl in a broken-down downtown Madison warehouse in 1986 and sold it to Mattel for $700 million in 1998. She called the mix of play and history chocolate cake with vitamins. Madison is the origin story; later headquarters sat ten minutes west in Middleton. She was forty-five, a former second-grade teacher with textbook royalties in the bank, hunting Christmas dolls for two nieces and finding only Barbie and Cabbage Patch. A year earlier she had sat on a bench in Colonial Williamsburg and wondered whether history could be mailed to kids who would never get there. She bet nearly all of the $1.2 million she had earned writing reading programs, printed half a million catalogs against advice to print 100,000, and waited for the phones while packers wore mittens because the heat failed. Between September and December they sold $1.7 million; year two brought $7.6 million. Lands’ End had told her customers would not pay more than forty dollars for a doll; she priced them at eighty and sold them only by catalog. She said she had been the company’s steward, never its owner. The money rebuilt downtown Madison with her husband, printer-turned-philanthropist Jerry Frautschi—including the $205 million that built Overture Center, a gift he refused to put his name on. He died in January 2026. She remains in Madison.