The Business of Barbie | 5

0:09Barbie is in a class of her own. An iconic toy with more than a thousand iterations and more than a billion dolls sold worldwide. A brand with 65 years of history. And now, she's been brought to life in a movie with eight Oscar nominations. We covered some of the history of Barbie in our Hasbro vs. Mattel series, which first aired in 2019. A lot has happened in that universe in the intervening years. And Barbie was only a small slice of that series because while she is one of Mattel's marquee toys, the company has a large portfolio of brands. So in this special episode, we've got the keys to the dream house, so to speak.

0:49We're unlocking her legacy, staying power, and what's ahead. Plus, we'll dig into Barbie's transformation over the past two decades and Mattel's pivot from manufacturing toys to manufacturing box office hits by tapping into a goldmine of intellectual property. Stick around for this special episode of Business Wars.

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3:19From Wondery, I'm David Brown, and this is the Business of Barbie.

3:47Barbie was born in 1959, the invention of Ruth Handler, who co-founded Mattel with her husband, Elliot. Handler wanted to expand the way girls played, so they had other choices than what was the norm at the time, baby dolls that encouraged kids to role-play as mothers. But at her very first debut at Toy Fair in Manhattan, Barbie was a total flop. Toy buyers were put off by her breasts, an hourglass figure, unwilling to take a risk on a doll they called disgusting in its realness. So Mattel used the power of television to go around buyers and parents and speak directly to little girls. Barbie, you're beautiful.

4:30You make me feel. My Barbie doll is really real. By Christmas 1959, Barbie was everywhere. Mattel had sold 300 ,000 Barbies by the end of the year. Girls loved her accessories, too, especially her white wedding dress. It was only natural that Mattel would expand the Barbie line to include a groom. But he'd be more than just a husband for Barbie. He'd become a character with his own galaxy of outfits and occupations. In 1961, Ken debuted in stores, helping to expand what was possible to sell. By 1962, a slew of accompanying merchandise, a magazine, a series of best-selling novels, and the Dreamhouse.

5:18were all on sale. From there, Mattel went on to introduce other side characters and lots and lots of iterations of its star doll. In the 60s, the twist-and-turn Barbie was the most popular with a waist that could twist for grooving. Malibu Barbie ruled the 70s, and disco Barbie topped sales charts in the 80s. The best-selling Barbie in the 90s, and of all time with more than 10 million sold, was Totally Hair Barbie in 1992. You've got the longest hair ever. Totally hot, totally cool, totally hair Barbie. You've got something special. Totally Hair Barbie doll has blonde or brunette hair down to her toes and comes with depth styling gel.

5:59Dolls each sold separately. But by the time the 2000s came around, sales were totally slumping. From 2001 to 2002, the LA Times reported that Barbie sales had dropped 12%. In 2001, Barbie revenue closed out at$1.5 billion, a drop from the$1.8 billion Barbie took home in 1997. It was around this time that Mattel tried bringing Barbie to the small screen with straight-to-VHS movies like Barbie as Rapunzel and Barbie and the Nutcracker. I'll give you a choice, Nutcracker. Dismemberment or barbecue. you.

6:43Today, these films are regarded as nostalgic favorites by the millennials who grew up watching them.

6:51Overall, these films performed quite well, with Barbie and the Nutcracker grossing$150 million in sales and selling nearly 3.4 million copies. But it wasn't enough to revive the Barbie brand. As the Y2K era progressed, Mattel had a hard time keeping up with what the older kids wanted, tiny dolls with big fashion. Produced by the LA-based toy manufacturer MGA Entertainment, the Bratz dolls first hit the scene in 2001 and won over consumers with an edgier, more teen-oriented take on the traditional fashion doll. Their small bodies and large, exaggerated heads were eye-catching next to the rows and rows of old-school Barbies.

7:36These dolls came with lip gloss, cell phones, and all the other trappings of success associated with the celebrity-obsessed age of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. In their mid-aughts heyday, the Bratz dolls raked in$2 billion in revenue and captured 40 % of the fashion doll market.

7:57Bratz were far outpacing Barbie, and Mattel was not happy about it. But Mattel's frustrations ran deeper than being outsold by a rival. The Bratz doll designer was former employee Carter Bryant. Mattel claimed that he developed the Bratz concept while still working for them. Mattel sued MGA for allegedly stealing trade secrets. Initially, the court ruled in favor of Mattel and forced MGA to stop producing the Bratz dolls. Here's MSNBC reporting in December 2008. The ruling also stipulates the company can no longer sell the dolls after the holidays. In fact, the judge ordered MGA to recall all Bratz dolls from retailers and to destroy the molds used to make the dolls.

8:40Well, MGA appealed, and a judge ruled that the two dolls were different enough and granted MGA a retrial. In 2011, the court ordered Mattel to pay MGA around$88 million worth of damages. MGA founder and CEO Isaac Larian responded to the ruling in an interview with Nightline. I didn't really fight all the way for the money. I think it was the principle of it. And what is the principle? The principle is that big multinational companies in these countries cannot come and basically bully and steamroll small entrepreneurs and get away with it. This ruling was a major blow for Mattel, who had already reported losing$300 million in sales to the Bratz dolls over a decade.

9:29Then, in 2016, the company suffered yet another major loss. Hasbro took over Mattel's lucrative contract to make Disney princess dolls, leading to a more than$300 million loss for Mattel. Mattel did eventually win back the contract in 2022. But in the mid-2010s, Mattel's stock prices were tumbling and sales fell nearly 25%. To survive the slump, they needed to make some major changes. And their new CEO, Inan Kreis, saw the answer in the bright lights of Hollywood. When we return, Time reporter and Mattel expert Eliana Docterman will join us to explore the company's comeback. It's one of these ideas where you think about it and you think, why didn't anybody bring this up a decade ago?

10:21Next, more on the idea that helped turn it all around for Mattel. Stay with us.

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12:07Welcome back to Business Wars. The 2000 and early 2010s were difficult years at Mattel. With the Bratz dolls eating into their profits and the Disney Princess contract lost to Hasbro, Barbie felt the weight of an entire company on her tiny plastic shoulders. I think Mattel was in big trouble. It had an identity crisis when Barbie sales started to waiver. I don't think that they really could figure out how to modernize Barbie. That's time correspondent Eliana Docterman. She's covered Barbie and Mattel for more than a decade and written multiple features on the brand. Eliana has made three visits to Mattel's El Segundo headquarters, where she says they take the Barbie brand very seriously.

12:54It's basically a temple dedicated to Barbie. You walk in and one of the walls in the lobby when you enter is just a wall of all of Barbie's teeny tiny shoes on these little platforms. It must be dozens if not hundreds of these shoes. And as you walk throughout the building and into people's offices, one of the two original Barbies that was manufactured is like on a platform behind glass in the middle of the office. People have these old ads hanging up on their walls. I mean, yeah, of course they have other things like Hot Wheels around the office, but Barbie is what made Mattel, so she's everywhere.

13:38Eliana visited in 2016 for her cover story on Curvy Barbie, one of the brand's attempts to modernize the traditional doll. This Barbie had the same face as the original, but with what Mattel describes as more realistic proportions for her body. Eliana reported that not all of traditional Barbie's clothes would fit curvy Barbie, and the new look would take some getting used to. But this step toward inclusivity was a symbolic move for a brand that was coming up on its 60-year anniversary at the time. By introducing Barbies that had fuller hips, thighs, and arms, as well as Barbies that were taller and shorter, Mattel was moving away from the past.

14:17Mattel's president and COO at the time, Richard Dixon, told Eliana that the goal was to convert views about the doll from negative to neutral. But Eliana observed that the kids didn't really understand the changes right away. When I went to Mattel to watch these test groups with these little kids that were playing with these new Barbies, it was completely fascinating to see how they reacted to these different body types, etc. For example, I mean, kids have no filter. Some of them pulled out the curvy Barbies and they immediately called her Fat Barbie, which just says a lot about how our culture penetrates the minds of children very early about body type.

14:55But the most popular one among those kids was this blue haired curvy Barbie because they all thought that it was Katy Perry. And they were just obsessed with I want to play with Katy Perry. I want to play with Katy Perry. Fat Barbie and looks like Katy Perry wasn't exactly the feedback Mattel was hoping for from their target demographic. The more inclusive dolls sold well, but the classic Barbie remained the bestseller. When we think about Barbie, we think of a very specific blonde, skinny figure that at least has been marketed in the past as the ideal for the American woman. And I think that the power of a single figure, in the same way that you say Mickey Mouse, there's a single image that pops into your head.

15:42You say Ronald McDonald, there's a single image that pops into your head. Barbie has this one very specific image that pops into your head. And almost every girl around the world has played with a version of her at one time or another in their lives. In 2019, Mattel took another risk with the launch of the Creatable World dolls. a line of gender-neutral Barbies that could take on whatever identity a child desired. And it was a very cool idea, one that I think was frankly ahead of its time. Eliana also sat in on playgroups for this toy, and although it was only four years later, kids seemed to warm up to these unconventional Barbies a lot more quickly.

16:24They naturally took to them. They were putting on the wigs that made them look more feminine or taking them off that made the dolls look more masculine. They had these sort of, you know, prepubescent bodies so that they could go one way or another or be neither gender. On the other hand, Eliana noticed that the parents in the test groups were more skeptical and even confused by the dolls. The adults were bringing a lot of baggage to the conversation, and for the kids it was much more intuitive. And I do think that that is a major generational difference between Gen X, Millennials, and then Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

17:03I think it's much more intuitive for the younger generations to think of gender as fluid, but those younger generations weren't quite parents yet when these dolls were introduced. And I think the parents had a really hard time figuring out how to talk about these toys and how to introduce them to their kids. You know, in that same story where you reported back in 2019 on these Creatable World dolls, you quote Richard Dixon as saying, I think being a company today, you have to have a combination of social justice along with commerce, and that balance can be tricky. Not everyone will appreciate you or agree with you.

17:37How committed do you think Mattel was or is to making this idea part of their brand? And ultimately, has it worked out or to what extent has it or has it not? Yeah, I think it is funny. It's just in 2019. Things have changed dramatically since then in the world. I were talking about a time when, you know, Nike was making Colin Kaepernick the center of its campaign. There was this notion that you couldn't be a company and not take a side politically. I do think that kind of during the COVID era, things have fundamentally changed for companies where they have backed off this idea that you need to be political in order to be accepted by the public.

18:21I think that, you know, for Mattel, the Credible World dolls, nobody talks about them anymore internally at Mattel when I've been there anyway. They just seem to have sort of disappeared off the face of the earth. You can still buy them, but Mattel certainly isn't promoting them and they don't talk about them as a milestone for the company or anything like that. The Barbies released during this time may not have become bestsellers, but they brought the brand into the present, demonstrating that Barbie could evolve beyond the diva who sported the iconic black and white swimsuit at the 1959 Toy Fair.

18:58And a lot of this was thanks to COO Richard Dixon. Dixon started at Mattel in 2014. His mission was to bring the company out of its slump. One way of doing that was by changing up the leadership. He sought out people with more creative backgrounds, think designers and creative directors over corporate cogs. They were put in charge of the flagship brands with the hope that they might break new ground and come up with out-of-the-box strategies. For Barbie, this included surveying people hostile to the brand to better understand the criticisms and challenging the design team to create a Barbie that was more reflective of the current moment, which ultimately led to the Kirby doll.

19:39As the 2010s decade was coming to a close, a seismic shift was underway at Mattel. Inan Kreiss took over as CEO in 2018. Eliana describes his game-changing strategy. Mattel wasn't a toy company, they were an IP company. And it's one of these ideas where you think about it and you think, why didn't anybody bring this up a decade ago? We're sitting on all of these popular toys. is Barbie first among them. And we're not doing anything with them besides making toys. And if you look around Hollywood, the key to success is having something that is already known, a character that's already known, a story that's already known, and finding a new way to riff on it.

20:25And there had never been a live-action Barbie movie. So he was the one who really put things into gear and said, this is happening. Cries put in motion a shift that resuscitated a once flatlining Mattel. Now that the Barbie's out of the box, Mattel has a whole heap of other intellectual property it's looking to bring to the big screen. But will it stick? More on Mattel's Hollywood dreams and the new creative executive who's bringing them to life when Business Wars returns.

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23:08Welcome back to Business Wars. I've got a question for you. When you hear these opening chords, what pops into your mind? I'm going to guess that if you've seen the Barbie movie or any of the memes, viral dances, or marketing ads, you're probably picturing that scene where the cast is hitting the dance floor at what has got to be the sparkliest party the world has ever seen. Hi, Barbie! The Barbie movie was inescapable last summer. In fact, it was such an event that the Golden Globes had to make a new award to celebrate it, one for cinematic and box office achievement. Accepting the Golden Globe is Margot Robbie.

23:50But the hype can be deceiving. It actually took decades for Barbie to come to life. The attempts to turn Barbie into a live-action movie date back to at least the mid-to-late 2000s. Matthew Jacobs is an entertainment and culture journalist who's reported at Vulture, among other outlets. He explains that the biggest pre-production hurdle for this film was finding the right tone. Both Universal and Sony tried to come up with their own adaptations, but they couldn't get it right. This despite an interest from some big-name talent. Amy Schumer and Hathaway, the Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody, Ginny Bix, who was a writer on Sex and the City, all of them were attached in some way, shape, or form to various versions of a Barbie movie.

24:41Among them and the executives at these studios and the various producers involved, no one could quite crack what that movie should look like. It shows how open-ended Barbie is. You can project anything onto this plastic doll. So what do you project onto her? Nobody could really figure it out. There's that idea again that Barbie is a blank canvas, a girl who can be anything. As Mattel grappled throughout the 2000s with what that canvas should look like, they were also stuck on what a film should look like. So when Richard Dixon and the Barbie creatives began playing around with the idea of Curvy Barbie and the Creatable World dolls, well, it was like a portal had opened.

25:24Time's Eliana Docterman sums it up. Barbie was in kind of a stasis up until they introduced the Curvy Barbie, And she was again in kind of a stasis until Greta Gerwig decided to do something fun and inventive and crazy with the Barbie movie, where there are many different Barbies represented by many different actors in the Barbie movie. So in revisiting Barbie's identity, Mattel was finally able to narrow down a vibe for a live action film, which would turn out to be way more lucrative than any doll the company could make. They just needed to find a production team who could capture the new spirit of Barbie.

26:05And to do that, they called upon a longtime film industry executive, Robbie Brenner, in 2018. She came in to launch an official film division within Mattel, something that had never formally existed before. And her first task was to resurrect the live-action Barbie movie. So it was Robbie Brenner who partnered with Margot Robbie's production company that she runs with her husband and another producer. And it was Margot who then eventually recruited Greta Gerwig to direct the project that she would star in. Greta then recruited her partner, the screenwriter Noah Baumbach. They collaborated on the script together and came up with the Barbie movie that we now know and love.