This is iconic fun. I mean, come on the famous.
Elevator, all right.
Yeah, so this is a really fun part of the Design Center and celebration of a part of Barbie's dreamhouse.
I'm Emily Chang, and this is the circuit. The most popular doll of all time is finally getting her big screen debut. Barbie is an icon, a legend, a cultural lightning rod, and an eleven and a half inch piece of plastic who's represented and projected are biggest aspirations and flaws for more than sixty years. Her movie debut marks a big bet by Mattel, which hopes to turn legacy brands like Barbie, Hot Wheels and Rockham Sockam into blockbuster franchises.
Think Marvel if they're lucky. With so much riding on her tiny but mighty shoulders, I've stepped into Barbie Land to find out more about how her makers are inventing her next act. We start with a visit to the Mattel Design Center with President and COO Richard Dixon to get a behind the scenes look at how Barbie is made and has evolved over the decades.
The feedback that we were getting from consumers was she just didn't seem relevant.
I also meet two of the minds behind Barbie's new looks, Kim Colmoney and Robert Best to discover all the work and experimentation that goes into designing a more inclusive and diverse collection.
Will you want to pull them off? And Tommy does story? Anyone that speaks to me? I mean, gosh, they're all so beautiful.
Pretty incredible, Okay, pretty incredible, braid.
Here's the circuit from inside Mattel's design studio.
Welcome to the Big Garage. This is the design center, okay, and right when you come in, you see, as I said, a tribute to our founders, Ruth and Elliott.
Okay. And what did she want to create?
Like?
What was the goal and.
The origin story of the company was an entrepreneurial couple trying to create essentially the future of play Barbie was.
Of course, Ruth Handler's claim to fame.
She was inspired by watching her daughter play out through paper dolls, imagining that she could be anything that she.
Wanted to be.
But what she realized also was her son Ken could also play out with action figures and figures, and Barbie, of course, was invented with the idea that a girl should have those aspiration and inspirational ideas as well. And so the invention of the doll was really about Ruth's connection with her own daughter, inspiring her to imagine that she could be anything that she wanted to be.
Okay, and Barbie wasn't her daughter's name, right.
Barbie, Barbie was Kenneth.
Wow. Yeah, Barbara and Kenneth where Ruth and Elliott's son and daughter.
Okay, just blew my mind. Yeah, that's cool. All right.
So as you walk through the Design Center, it's a huge building with engineers and creatives and artists and designers from fashion and automotive and just an incredible place of pure creativity. And really that's why I reference it as just a bigger.
Girl, big garage.
And you've been working here for a pretty long time.
I have been working here for a pretty long time. This was actually my second chapter. I left and somehow they got me back in. And of course I've been here now a combination of eighteen years.
So you've personally seen a lot of Barbie's sisty.
I've seen a lot of Barbie's history, and I've been fortunate enough to be a part of that history as well, and our job here is to certainly leave it better than we found it and create the next generation of leadership to take it on to the next level.
Wasn't she based on a gag gift?
Well, there's a lot of narratives with Barbie, and Barbie is a cultural conversation. But as far as we are concerned in the context of how Ruth spoke about Barbie, and that's the quote, 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, and the fashions themselves at that time was really about girls experiencing what their choice would be and what their aspirational life would take them, and ultimately how the brand was invented.
And I didn't realize so as I understand it was she the first adult doll.
She wasn't necessarily an adult doll. Never said she's an adult doll.
Well, she looks like she looks.
Like a grown up, but she was actually a teenage.
She was positioned as a teenager, okay, and her intent was really for.
Younger girls, younger at that time.
It's called it tween to be inspired, to imagine that she could be anything that she wanted to be, and ultimately the doll itself when it was taken to New York Toy Fair to be presented to retailers, was really regarded as this adult toy, if you will. That got
a lot of pushback from retailers at the time. That being said, with the pursuit that Ruth in particular had around the empowerment position that she took with this doll, it did break through and the industry actually played back the definition which became the fashion doll, and that's how the fashion all market segment was invented.
The first Barbie was a fashion model, right.
The first Barbie was a fashion model, that's right.
And then she expanded and then.
She evolved into many, many different careers and ultimately today with thousands of careers represented and today is the most diverse and inclusive doll brand in the world.
So she certainly had a complicated history.
How do you reconcile that sort of preserving the history but also rewriting it.
Yeah, it's the world that talks about Barbie the way they are inspired to talk about Barbie. It's our job to make sure that we present Barbie based on her meaning and purpose and that she matters in people's lives as an inspiring tool for girls and boys around the world.
She used to hold a book that said don't eat, Like, how do you think about that?
The brand has always had controversial moments in the context of some of the toys, either that we invented or some of the narratives that were associated with the brand.
Right, there was another Barbie that had a book, or there was another a teen Barbie I think that said math class is tough.
Yikes.
Yeah, yeah, there were there were lots of parts of our history that ultimately, in the moment that they were created, probably with the right intent, either were misinterpreted or ultimately, you know, became part of a cultural conversation that had more negativity associated with it. Now, what's interesting about our brand is we actually present the brand to inspire other imaginations to whatever they want to be.
And however they think of the brand.
Barbie is an open ended brand, so there is no start, middle, and end to it.
It's really what you make of it.
And so while there's been controversy and cultural conversations around it, our job has been to keep the brand relevant and current in the context of culture. Still an eleven and a half inch doll from nineteen fifty nine until now, but we've diversified her. We've included lots of different ways that girls can see themselves in the brand, and we take a lot of pride in the fact that we have evolved her into a meaningful conversation that matters in
people's lives. So now we're entering the Barbie section of the Design Center, and of course you'll see everything Barbie, but in particular our purpose on the wall there to inspire and nurture the limitless potential in every girl. Throughout this section, here as far as you could see, is where the Barbie team sits. They work in a very collaborative, team based environment. It's very much like a fashion company in miniature version.
Interesting because you're sort of your setting trends or you're taking the pulse of.
Well, we're a real fashion trende. Barbie's wearing clothes. She has different looks in different outfits. Every one of them is designed by an apparel and fashion designer with backgrounds in the apparel space. We then have face painters and pattern makers and sewers and stitchers and all sorts of skill sets and talents and artisans that basically bring the brand to life much like real fashion brands.
Okay, yeah, super cool, very cool.
Especially in more recent years, you started doing consumer surveys and talking to kids about Barbie.
What were they.
Telling you, Well, we've gone through an evolution of the brand, and back in twenty fourteen it was really marked a pivotal moment for us where the brand was not doing well in the marketplace. The feedback that we were getting from consumers was she.
Just didn't seem relevant.
Not only didn't she seem relevant, but she didn't look as relevant as she had in the past. She wasn't as aspirational, and she didn't represent the intrinsic values that we were promoting. But it wasn't breaking through in terms of our audience. So we took a hard look at essentially who we were and what we were saying and turn the conversation from what was I call a brand monologue where we were telling the world what Barbie is, into a dialogue where we were actually listening to our
consumer tell us what they thought of our brand. And that was hard and some of the things that we heard were difficult, that she wasn't a reflection of how the world looked, of how our world looked in terms of diversity inclusiveness. She didn't represent the career aspirational values that we had built the brand on.
Did kids say that? How would kids frame that?
Sort of The feedback that we got from kids was the play experience was not as fun. It didn't represent sort of real and in our world that play system is really role play and if we're not providing the right system of play for girls and kids to be inspired, then we're missing the mark. So ultimately, we took a hard look at ourselves. We diversified the brand. We introduced twenty four different skin tones represent the ethnicities around the
world that girls see. We changed her body and introduced nine different shapes, tall, petite, kurvy, and etc. We kept the original, but we expanded for choice, and we started to recognize women of achievement and honor them with their own Barbie to be able to show girls you can be whoever you inspired to be based.
On the accomplishments of women around the world.
So highlighting those stories for girls also helped us create Thats.
You didn't start releasing the new body types until twenty sixteen. What do you say to folks who think it's too late for a rebrand, like it just took too long.
Well, look, I think when we look at the connection that we have with those who love us and with those who are starting to understand more about the value of Barbie play, that's who we want to make sure connects to our brand. We can't please everybody. We have
a strong purpose, we have a reason for being. We have a brand that matters, and it's our job to ensure that those who really respond to our play pattern are inspired by it and can feel connected in a moment where their development needs are being met.
Do you think Mattel should have changed faster, Should Barbie have changed faster?
In your view?
Look, I think the business would have suggested that Barbie should have changed faster.
For sure.
A brand that has decades and decades of history, probably any one of those brands goes through, you know, cycles of peaks and pits, and we had gone through a pit. However, the work that we did to understand the dynamics of how to get out of that, reflecting back to the origin story of the brand, is really what we could be most proud of that has led.
Us to today's Barbie, which is.
Double where it was five years ago, is unbelievably culturally relevant, is on the cusp of this theatrical film that we couldn't be more proud of.
The circuit continues after this quick break.
All right, so now we're going to enter probably you know, one of the most important parts of the doll design and development process, which is.
Of course Barbie's hair.
Yes, come on hairport part of the play pattern, and also a really proprietary way that we design Barbie's hair. Incredible expertise, the finest of fabrics, and the various different ways that we present Barbie as the most inclusive and diversityal line in.
The world, and a lot of it has to do with her hair and her look.
All right, These are our amazing creators who are This is Kim who runs design for all of Barbie as.
Well as other parts of the Mattel system.
And this is Robert Best, one of our most famous designers in the Barbie organization, but also really an avid expert in everything Barbie has a fan following all by himself in terms of his own dollar design and we could not be more lucky to have these two on the Barbie team.
So tell me about Barbie's hair.
We're gonna start at the beginning of the design process, actually, so everything starts with a sketch, and it starts with the designer's vision, and then we have an incredible group of hair designers and face designers that bring the designer's vision to life in three D. And then we move into fiber choice. There's a board of colors and lens of fibers, all the varied textures.
As I'm sure.
You've been talking about, diversity and inclusion and representation is centered in everything that we do.
What were the challenges that you face trying to make her more diverse and experiment with these materials that you've been were using for decades but then had to change.
Well, and some of it's in research and development. So we develop hair fibers that are more varied than we had had in the past. And you can see here this amazing knit fiber that gives you an absolutely fantastic, authentic texture for the afro on that doll. And then we continue to do that R and D, whether it's in raids or other sorts of fibers that allow the designers and our hair designers to bring to.
Life the vision of a real woman in her hair.
So why don't we go see Aki, who's one of our hair rooters, and you can see how we make that magic.
Let's do it, Hi Aki, This is Aki. Nice, Nice to meet you. This is an original machine that was used on the first barbies that we used. We still use the originals here to build our prototypes.
And she's going to show you how we take the hair from those spools and put it into the doll. Oh my goodness, don't be afraid, because sometimes people are.
It's a little districting.
See how the sausage is maybe, and I don't think people think about how does that hair actually get in that head? You know. So she's going to show you so and so often what we do is we heat the heads a little bit so the plastasaol is a little softer. But then she has a needle that draws the hair fiber, which is a continuous filament into the needle, and she guides along the periphery of in the head and each stitch is locking into.
The head as she goes through. It's so intricate. You just don't realize how interest okay that is.
And what she'll eventually do. Once she roots the entire head, she'll then root apart line, she can root highlights in, she can begin the styling process. But each of our prototypes are done by hair working with the specifications from the designers, and we're also very specific about the number of stitches per inch. Barbie's hair is a very heroic part of the.
Doll, and she's famous for her amazing hair. So is everyone who's making these doing it by hand? Or do you have machines do this in the in house factory?
In house here for prototypes, we actually do them by hand. We have some automation process when we reach the manufacturing stage, but the ones that we make here while we're ideating and creating the next Barbie's are all created by hand. Okay, you'd be amazed how much handwork is actually done.
Throughout the process of the creation of a Barbie.
Even in manufacturing, there's handbraiding, there's other aspects just to get the design exactly right.
I had no idea.
Most people now, and it's a fairly fast process. I mean, within a little bit now, she'll start to speed up.
I'm not telling you to.
Speed up up.
I'm just describing it.
What She'll start to speed up and the next thing you'll see, the entire crown.
Of ahead will be covered. And then there's a stage.
Where she'll rush it out and it'll look like the barneys that you see on job.
How do you think about, like what comes next? What should we do? What's that process?
Like?
Do we do this? Do we do that?
I think it's a collaborative process between the creative teams, the marketing team, sort of everybody just looking at ideas and looking to be as expansive as possible. We know that it's like it's not perfect, it's not like a fully finished thing. It's something that can always improve. I think you see that in terms of we are always looking at sort of what representation means and how important that is, and sort of seeing who do we serve currently,
how can we serve more people better? And what does that mean. It's not always just a simple thing of a visual thing about aesthetics. It's about differently abled communities. It's about representation in its broadest forms. So we're always experimenting, talking to outside people, talking to our customers, listening to our customers, and that's how you kind of get to this idea of pushing yourself to kind of explore how that can look and how it could continue to expand
because we know we're not done right. It's not like you can just kind of rest on our laurels la resting here.
Yeah. I think insight instinct equals innovation, starting with insights, talking to parents, kids, families, fans, taking the instincts of our designers, some of which are newer to the brand and some have a history on the brand. That's what gets us to the innovation. All of our prototypes are handmade,
but then we have to get to mass production. So then the process of all of our manufacturing sources really figuring out how to bring this to Life's great in this space, it's great in the design center, it's even better on shelf. Yeah, if we can't get it made, then the idea, you know, is art versus an actual product that can serve the consumers that love the brand.
So I think it's really also like when we talk about the customer you're serving, everyone from like the oldest consumer or collectors who really like have an appreciation of details, are maybe not looking to play with this style as much as display or sort of like have it be part of their collection, whereas like a younger audience, younger kids, it's about brushing the hair, styling the hair, playing with it.
So these really long hairstyles, like this incredible crimped style that would have been so fun to brush.
Yeah, yeah, I did a lot of brush. Like, I did some cutting too. How do you know that I got it cut away?
Yeah, Like, I think it's the whole thing of giving permission. That's the play the play aspect is like not limiting what that means and kids to find it themselves. Right, So cutting the hair is a big part of it because it's this thing of like you see it happen in real life and you're like, that seems like a good idea. I'm going to do that to Barbie. And the next thing you know, it's tears and a horrible hairstyle. I've learned a lesson.
Yeah, but that's actually the best part of Barbie. Right. We put the doll in the box, but she comes to life when she gets in the hands of a kid, and that's the beauty, that's the.
Magic of the Barbie brand. That's actually an amazing place to end. Thank you course, so much, good, Thank.
You, thanks so much for listening to the Circuit podcast. Check out the full episode to hear more from Attel CEO Eenon Cries, the architect of the company's new content strategy. We also sit down with OSCAR nominated producer Robbie Brenner, the heavyweight behind the upcoming Barbie film. If you want even more Barbie content, check out our recent episode of Bloomberg's The Big Take to hear about Barbie's high stakes, big screen debut.
I'm Emily Chank.
You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Emily Chang TV. You can watch new episodes of the Circuit on Bloomberg Television or on demand by downloading the Bloomberg app to your smart TV and let us know what you think by leaving us a review. I'm your host and executive producer. Our senior producer is Lauren Ellis, Our associate producer is Lizzie Phillip. Our editor is Sebastian Escobar.
Thanks so much for listening.