Midyear Reset Framework, How to Collab With Barbie, Big TikTok News

0:28Hey, welcome to Female Founder World. talking about Barbie's marketing budget and how to collaborate with Mattel. And finally, covering some really big TikTok updates that I feel like have been missed in all this Barbie threads craze that's been dominating our feeds lately. And these updates are probably going to change the way that you do business. So I feel like we really, really need to talk about it. But first, we are hosting a community hang for our female Founder World Business Besties in New York on August 30. It's at the Ceremonia store, which is this super beautiful space. I've been eyeing it for a while as they've been building it.

1:03And it's a haircare brand led by founder, Barbara Rivera. She has been on the show and hosting this fireside chat interview conversation with Barbara. We know each other quite well. So I just like that lens to a really, really good interview. There'll be drinks, obviously freebies, lots of good stuff. And it's a free event for the community. but as always our business bestie paid subscribers do get first dibs on tickets and you have to register to get a spot because it is limited space. So head to femalefounderworld.com to RSVP. Media resets have been trending on TikTok and there's one video that really got me.

1:44It's by a user called Taylor Rose and it's not like this is the video that has like the most views on TikTok under this topic, but it's definitely the one that resonated with me the most. This is just a really quick clip from that video. I spent one to two hours a day for the past five days, completely resetting my life and getting my shit together for the second half of 2023. If you want to do the same, this is everything I've done. Taylor swears by this five-day reset program for getting things like back on track this time of year. And I feel like we all start the year with this real gusto and focus and positive intentions and we can kind of get a bit muddled along the way and also things change throughout the year like things are moving so quickly in this digital universe and in the current world of building brands and building companies that what was your priority six months ago may feel different now and so it does feel like a really good time of the year to just refocus and kind of decide whether you need to pivot or change your focus as well.

2:48So Taylor has this five-day kind of process and I've been following it. It's also just like really achievable. On day one, she does what she calls a physical reset. So that means cleaning the house, washing your sheets, throwing out all your old shit, like reorganizing, cleaning out the fridge, all that good stuff. And you just dedicate a day to doing that. Day two, you do an audit of how you're spending your time and reassess your goals. And for me, like I've had a baby since the beginning of the year. And obviously that has shifted my priorities. Everyone said that it would. And I've been kind of like open to seeing how it shifted things.

3:25And, you know, I feel just as excited about the business as I was before, which is a huge relief because I was kind of worried that I would lose that ambition or lose that joy that work brings to me. And I haven't, which is great. Well, I haven't yet. We're only six months in and that's awesome, but I'm definitely more ruthless about how I spend my time. So before I was very much optimizing and setting goals for growth and productivity. And I mean, those things are still kind of important, but I'm very clearly optimizing for something else now, which is joy and for money. And that kind of made me feel a little bit uncomfortable at first to think about.

4:10But when I really think about it, like that's what I want out of this stage of life. And I'm going to be really unapologetic about it. Like when I'm deciding whether or not I want to do something or spend my time doing something, I look at it through the lens of will this thing bring me and or my family joy? And will it bring me and or my family more money? No. Okay. I go on to the next thing. And I've reconsidered like quite a lot of my goals this year based on that. Then day three is a digital declutter. And the way that I did this is I've unfollowed toxic or boring accounts. I found that my Instagram feed was getting like a lot of before and after weight loss photos.

4:53And I don't know if that's because I had a baby and maybe that's kind of like the stuff you get served after you have a baby. I don't know, but I have been trying to mark those as not wanting to see them or unfollowing certain accounts. I've been turning off notifications on pretty much all of my apps and I've moved my social media apps to a folder so that I have to be more intentional about going to my phone, going into the folder and then opening them. And I suggest doing this because it really does make you more intentionally engage with the content that you want to see and think about why you're going into the apps.

5:26It's just like, you know, a little bit more friction I think is really good. I also now genuinely spend most of my time reading newsletters and in our group chat on Geneva for Female Founder World because these are spaces that feel good and bring joy and also bring like professional opportunity. And I highly recommend doing the same thing, like finding a couple of communities that you want to be a part of and letting those drive your online experience rather than some social media platforms. Day four is about doing an organizational shop. So just buying the things that you need to kind of like get your stuff together.

6:00And then day five is planning and getting yourself all set up to take action. So for me, that's been a lot of figuring out what my day-to-day schedule needs to look like and mapping that out and what support I need to be able to follow that. I have been trying really hard to untether myself from this feeling of if I'm not working 8am to 7pm every day, I'm not being productive and productivity is the highest goal. And I'm really trying to move away from that and know that I can move my business forward by taking space away from it and being super focused when I am working, when I am online and allowing myself other things like a slow, gentle morning with my baby and going for a swim in the afternoon or the evening, and then maybe jumping back online for some calls and really doing the things that are making the most impact instead of that busy work and how I need to reconfigure my day to think about that.

6:56I've linked that video in the show notes in case you want to follow the same framework this time of year. I really liked it and I feel like now is just the perfect time to reconsider what you're working towards this year and how you're working towards it. Next up, I need to talk about Barbie, which just had the biggest opening weekend of any film this year. And this conversation will have no spoilers because I haven't even watched the movie, but I have been deep diving on the marketing content and the way that the Barbie film has just become like the cultural moment of the year and of course Greta Gerwig directed it and she's like if you don't know her a cool feminist director she did the Little Women remake which was amazing the reviews are saying like the film is clever and entertaining but the success of this movie has got to have a lot to do with the fact that it had a$150 million marketing budget.

7:55And that budget was literally$5 million higher than the budget to produce the entire movie. So they spent$145 million to make the movie and then$150 million to market it. And it shows because Mattel has been hyping this for ages now. And we've been seeing it everywhere. It is very much in the zeitgeist. But also like just as an aside, I would just love to bring the energy of whoever that marketing exec is that pitched that they needed more money to market the film than to actually make the film. Like that is the kind of confidence I need this week. Anyway, so there have been in-person experiences popping up.

8:34There are Malibu Barbie cafes, all of the brand collaborations that I'm not even going to bother listing them here because you have seen them. I know that you are a very online person like me and you've been seeing the memes, the collaborations, the events, the press hype. Barbie is everywhere at the moment. And I was looking through these brand collabs and there are some like big, not surprising ones like OPI and Xbox, but there are also a lot of smaller independent brands like us that are getting a look in as well. Not literally us, but you know, brands like yours and mine. And that's kind of interesting.

9:09So Swoon, which is the beverage company by Jennifer Ross. They did like this pink Barbie lemonade and Little Words Project, which is a customized bracelet company. They're very much about like positivity and pretty feministy. And it's by a founder called Adriana Carrig. And they dropped a bracelet collection and they're not like a tiny business. You know, they have retail stores, they're stocked in Target. And why I'm interested in this is because while Barbie is kind of on the tail end of its hype cycle. And by that, I guess I mean the movie is out, the red carpet stuff is done, most of the claps have dropped, we've hit peak memes.

9:50Mattel, the company that makes Barbie, is literally going to copy and paste the same formula for all of its brands over the next, like, I don't know, decade? I'm not sure. but now we know what a big moment Barbie was there is definitely opportunity for us to get ahead of the next big Mattel films maybe even reach out and pitch your own partnership with one of your next with one of the next live action films that Mattel is working on particularly if you have a millennial customer who's going to be into this millennial toy nostalgia thing that the films are tapping into. And just for a little context and background, Mattel, the folks that make Barbie, they've got a new-ish CEO.

10:33And he came into the company basically guns blazing. And he declared that Mattel is not a toy company anymore. It is an IT company, as in intellectual property. And this makes sense. They have all of these nostalgic millennial toys. They've got Barbie, Polly Pocket. Remember Polly Pocket? Hot Wheels, Barney the Dinosaur, American Girls, which like wasn't my thing but you know a lot of folks were into it so now instead of selling toys they're selling the ip rights to make live action films and physical spaces and brand collaborations which are basically like merch and it's so smart obviously in the case of at least barbie's case it's really working and then the next film that we're actually expecting to see from mattel is Polly Pocket.

11:22It's going to be directed by Lena Dunham. It will star Lily Collins, who you know from Emily in Paris. She's going to be Polly. And I don't know, I kind of like, I think about Lily Collins playing little pocket size Polly, and I think it might be a bit cringe, but I'm still going to watch it. I'm still excited about it. I loved Polly Pocket when I was little. And I just know that in the lead up to Polly Pocket, the live action film, we're going to see the press tour the memes the IRL installations the brand collabs and it's all going to be the same framework that they used for Barbie because it worked and so now that we know that Mattel does collaborate with indie brands like go and pitch yourself Jen from Swoon told me like I reached out to her and asked her how these work and I didn't get the numbers and I didn't get the full breakdown of what a partnership looks like I'm guessing there are some NDAs around this as well but she told me that yes Mattel is interested in collaborating with some of the independent smaller brands and if you were going to pitch yourself go with a fully baked pitch include heaps of visuals and mock-ups like what would this product look like and really explain what you can bring to the table that may be one of those bigger companies like an Xbox or an Aldo shoes both of those had collabs with Barbie what they can't bring to the table and what you can And if you're not keen to pitch a collab for one of the many, many Mattel film franchises that are in the works, just keep an ear out because this stuff is going to keep filtering into the zeitgeist.

12:51And that means that it is going to impact your marketing calendar, the way that your social media content works. Like we just need to be across this stuff, right? Another thing that we're talking about in the Female Founder World group chat is TikTok for three reasons. First of all, lots of founders and marketers in the group are saying that TikTok shop is blowing up. So that is the feature on TikTok where same as on Instagram shop, you can kind of like link directly for people to buy your products from the content. TikTok has the same thing. I don't have any special insights from the folks at TikTok on this.

13:24Female founder world has partnered with TikTok before, but I don't know anything from them on this. All I know is that I'm hearing from founders and from their marketing teams that content that is linked to TikTok shop right now is blowing up. They're getting heaps of sales. And so if you haven't created TikTok shop and started linking it to your content, I would make that a priority literally today because it clearly is being pushed and it's leading to sales and like sales are good. So go to set up your TikTok shop today. I have heard it's a bit of a pain, but totally, totally, totally worth it.

13:57Second, TikTok's got this new transparency ad library, which basically means that you can go and search for the ads that your competitors are running right now. And it's only in the UK and Europe, but still, I am very curious about what folks are running on TikTok. I would love to be able to search by brand. You can see all of their creative, some stuff around targeting, how long it ran for and how many people they reached. I hope it's coming to the US. I'm not sure, but it is definitely worth a little snoop. And we covered that a little bit more in this week's newsletter as well. And then finally, more TikTok stuff.

14:32There are really, really strong rumors that TikTok's planning to introduce a big e-commerce business that will take on Amazon and Shein. And I can't pronounce it. Is it like Temu? Temu is that big Chinese retailer, but basically they're going to be managing storage, logistics, sales, and marketing of Chinese products to US customers. to think like private label-y kind of stuff. And there's been talk about this floating around for a really long time, but now the Wall Street Journal has covered it. And when somebody like that starts covering a rumor, I think, okay, they've got some pretty good sources.

15:08I feel like we can start planning for it and thinking that this is actually going to happen and it's legit. Beginning in August, apparently, TikTok's going to offer a very Amazon-ish marketplace called TikTok Shop Shopping Center. And it's going to allow you to go to one place and buy stuff like clothes or electronics that are all made in China. I don't know what this means for those of us who are independent businesses selling our products on TikTok. I mean, Amazon has a pretty big mix of brand stores and essentially like drop ship made in China stuff. And brands that do well on Amazon still totally clean up.

15:48So I really predict that this new TikTok move will just expand the amount consumers are spending on TikTok rather than take away from what people are spending on brands and moving that towards TikTok's own stuff. I don't know, but that's just my gut feeling and my reaction. I would love to know what you guys think. Jump into the group chat. It's linked in the show notes. Let me know your thoughts. Let's just keep talking about this in the group chat because it is definitely going to be a really interesting shakeup. Thanks for chatting. I'm going to be back next week with the regular interview format.

16:20We've got some great founders lined up for you. I know you're going to love it. Bye. Quick shout out to all of our business bestie subscribers. If you are loving this show and you are building a consumer, CPG or e-commerce business, or you're about to build one, this membership will give you access to the people, experiences and the tools that you really need to build your dream business. Head to femalefounderworld.com forward slash subscriber for more. Thank you.