How does Mattel resolve an issue of its personal design? The drawback: a doll, long-established seven many years in the past, with a ridiculously tiny waist, perfectly-arched toes, dwelling in a Pantone 219C pink home, the embodiment of the Perfect Woman™. The California-based toy conglomerate, for the reason that flip of the century, stored drawing playing cards that augured hassle for its 400+ toy portfolio: misguided acquisitions, dwindling gross sales, debt crises, stiff competitors, a public relations nightmare. More damningly, Barbie dolls, Mattel’s origin story, had been proving to be its Achilles Heel. Criticism mounted over its relevance in a world desperate to redefine magnificence requirements and undo gender norms.
Mattel’s answer? Reinventing the $3 toy right into a multi-billion-dollar “pop culture company”, as Richard Dickson, COO and president of Mattel, stated in a current interview. Mattel was able to have a “dialogue” with shoppers, morphing right into a “canvas” for conversations and experiences, he says. The canvas at present is painted scorching pink: Barbie x Gap clothes, Barbie x Impala rollerskates, Barbie baggage, a Barbie Xbox, a Malibu Dreamhouse. The canvas generally is a model, franchise, an concept. The rumoured $100 million advertising and marketing technique can be a playbook subsequent utilized to Hot Wheels, UNO and different playthings in Mattel’s toybox. Welcome to the Mattel Cinematic Universe. Here, life is Mattel’s creation.
Mattel began with a trio in a storage, circa 1945, Los Angeles. Ruth Handler, her husband Elliot and Matt Manson (Mattell is a portmanteau of the latter two; Ruth’s title couldn’t match into the title, Eliot revealed later). Mattel bought image frames, then doll furnishings and toys. Matt withdrew his participation on account of poor well being, transferring the remaining stakes to Ruth. Ruth proposed a heretical product (by toy business requirements): a doll with breasts. Her personal daughter Barbara performed dress-up with child dolls or one-dimensional paper dolls; it dawned on Ruth that younger women had been conditioned to dream of turning into moms or caregivers — nothing extra, nothing much less. This inspiration concretised on seeing Bild Lilli, a doll modelled after a cartoon character in a Swiss native newspaper. The first Barbie doll ambled by the breach sporting a black-and-white striped swimsuit, hooped earrings, sun shades, priced at $3 then.
Barbie-themed merchandise is displayed in New York on July 20, 2023.
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AP
Ms. Handler wrote in her 1994 biography: “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be. Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.” A world, with numerous variations, was delivered to life: quickly got here the Ken doll, the Barbie Dreamhouse, Barbie’s finest buddy Midge, sister Skipper, Ken’s finest buddy, Barbies of various pores and skin colors, partaking in sundry professions.
Photo dozens of Barbie dolls are displayed on the Mattel showroom at Toy Fair in New York.
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AP
Mattel had acquired 10 different firms by the Seventies, however the Handlers quickly resigned when a 1974 investigation discovered them responsible of falsifying monetary statements and mail fraud. Ms. Handler’s subsequent challenge concerned creating prosthetic breasts for most cancers survivors (she herself had two mastectomies). This historical past is documented within the film, when Ruth’s character in a dream-like setting muses about her sickness and monetary hiccups. “Ideas live forever, humans not so much,” she says.
Undeterred, Mattle continued on its method to success. It’s the world’s largest toy maker immediately when it comes to income; Barbie and Hot Wheels proceed to be its most valued manufacturers. Ms. Handler wrote: “People in the retail business use an expression for a popular product – they say it ‘walks’ off the counter. Barbie didn’t walk. She ran.” Barbie accounted for greater than half of Mattel’s gross sales inside preliminary years of launch..
The outdated guard gone, Mattel, then helmed by Arthur S. Spear, initiated a method of hit and take a look at: buying sport consoles (virtually pushed the corporate to file for chapter), publishing home (bought 4 years later), launching motion figures (later dropped, inflicting a $115 million loss), charting paths into multimedia with a $3.6 billion funding in Learning Company (an knowledgeable likened to “falling off a cliff’). The company was in financial trouble, recovering briefly in the early 2000s, by refocusing on what they are good at: basic toys. “The strength of Barbie and other important brands — combined with two years of cost-cutting — have lifted the stock of the company, the nation’s largest toymaker,” a 2003 article in The New York Times famous.
The respite was short-lived — the aughts offered challenges new and outdated: youngsters moved on from analogue toys to digital, competitors emerged from new franchises, Barbie’s feminity was nonetheless regressive. Russia banned Barbie dolls in 2002 for exciting “early sexual interest”; Saudi Arabia banned it for carrying a “symbol of decadence to the perverted West”. India noticed Barbie enter the market submit the 1991 financial reforms, “cultural norms embodied in each written laws and within the ―unwritten legal guidelines of the Indian public precluded Mattel from efficiently promoting Barbie‘s gendered and ethnocentric values to Indian female children”, a 2009 paper argued. Scandal struck in 2007 due to quality control, when Mattel recalled 1.5 million Chinese-made toys tainted with lead paint. Profitability between 2000 and 2014 was unsteady: Barbie sales dropped by 16% (its lowest sales volume in 25 years), Fisher-Price (which manufactures baby toys) were down by 13%.
Analysts agreed Barbie, and Mattle, were in their decline phase, struggling to stay relevant. Mr. Dickson who re-joined the company in 2014, when speaking of Mattel’s new imaginative and prescient, implied it was time to revisit its roots: “What made us great to begin with? And how do we start to personify our purpose through meaningful touch points and execution?”
Mattel’s Barbie drawback additionally grew to become its answer. The doll obtained updates to answer a shifting tradition round 2016: Barbie dolls could possibly be astronauts, Presidents, docs, even Frida Kahlo. There had been three further physique shapes, seven pores and skin tones, 24 hairstyles, 22 eye colors. There was a hijabi Barbie, a Barbie in a wheelchair. (New variations had been criticised for being tokenistic gestures, doing little to be really subversive). The doll’s gross sales grew by 16% finally, per reviews.
Mattel was reinventing, and that meant revisiting the notion of enlivening the toys on celluloid (the method of constructing Barbie began in 2014). The new CEO Ynon Kreiz in 2018 shuffled issues round: lowering manufacturing load, forming a movie division, revamping social media presence, assembly with brokers, networks and studios. They had an enviable mental property with a built-in fan base; an IP ripe for mining at a time when viewers had been fatigued by superhero franchises and the ‘Marvelification’ of cinema. “It’s not about making movies so that we can go and sell more toys,” Mr. Kreiz stated in an interview. The film doesassist although: the advertising and marketing had constructed consciousness concerning the movie in addition to Mattel amongst girls beneath 35 years of age, the upper ever seen by the corporate, in response to The Quorum. Mattel has since introduced 14 extra motion pictures, streaming reveals and video video games based mostly on its toys. A theme park is being in-built Arizona.
What lies on the coronary heart of Mattel’s interior sanctum? A need to construct a bottomless dream home, a meta realm that incarnates a model into tradition. Mr. Dickson in a media interplay mused: “Barbie’s not just a toy. She’s a source of inspiration.”
This picture launched by Warner Bros. Pictures reveals Margot Robbie in a scene from Barbie.
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AP
For now, Phase 1 for Mattel’s Cinematic Universe begins with betting on feminism, seemingly embracing the critique and subversion designed into Barbie’s plot (“We’re doing the thing and subverting the thing,” director Greta Gerwig stated). The doll was an inescapable image of what’s anticipated of girls, succumbing to capitalist ambitions and a sexualised male gaze. The chant “I am not a Barbie doll” pealed by girls’s equality marches within the Seventies. With Barbie, Mattel swooped in with reinvention, complicating the concept of what’s anticipated of girls, displaying a polarising doll on a soul mission. “We’re in on the joke,” says Margot Robbie, the star of Barbie and ‘Barbenheimmer memes’. In the film, Ruth tells Barbie that her unique creator needed to be a lady, she says, even when males in fits dominate the Mattle boardroom, pontificating about girls’s rights, making an attempt to assemble a lady’s world from scratch.
It all comes again to Ruth Handler, and her divisive doll. Mattel’s story is inevitably tied to the 2: every desired relevance, reinventing oneself whereas trying to find a goal. Mattel nonetheless has a job to do, nevertheless: to earn cash. In the frilly, self-aware joke drenched in fuschia pink, one wonders if subversion is the primary bit. Can Mattel carry out the final word balancing act, chasing each cash and which means?
