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Dear Mattel CEO Bob Eckert,
Happy holidays! You're welcome!
Background: Just over five and a half years ago, I wrote a story about something I found totally hilarious: It turned out the Bratz dolls, a multibillion dollar line of dolls with pouty lips and dazed barbiturate-addled eyes that emerged from nowhere to utterly excommunicate the Barbie from the dreams and hopes and play patterns of millions of young lives, were actually concocted inside your own design center! The line had been scrapped because you didn't want to cannibalize your precious Barbie brand! Especially on her 40th birthday!! Ha ha, yeah, that strategy sure sucked! And no one within your executive suites even seemed to know about all this. The designer who'd sketched the original renderings upon which the Bratz were based was still working for you—while another rogue designer who'd been on her team had ripped off the sketch and brought the idea to a scrappy little toy company up Highway 101 that would turn it into a multibillion-dollar powerhouse overnight.
Well now you own the Bratz, thanks to my "discovery" and an ensuing gazillion dollar legal battle (in which someone on some side of the thing paid me a whole $43.50 for my deposition services, a check that is still sitting on my nightstand purely out of laziness; don't worry, my employment situation will surely force me to pump it back into the economy at some point.) According to an insane story penned by my successor in crack toy industry coverage, Nick Casey, the challenge now is to … well, scrap or not to scrap the Bratz. Certainly the Bratz have wreaked nothing but ruthless, middle-school-style havoc on your beleaguered company. Certainly there are also millions of concerned moms who would not mind if you condemned every last Bratz to whatever campy eBay storefront purgatory brokers in Abercrombie's "wink wink" thongs for 7-year-olds.
But Barbie is 50 now, and she should be the "bigger" doll and let the Bratz live. It's not only Mattel's fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders; it could reinvigorate both brands, as well as the one industry that—for better or, well, let's face it, probably worse—unites children of all classes, colors, credit ratings, etc.
1. Barbie and the Bratz get to "collabo" now! It worked for Hello Kitty and the Paul Frank chimp, right? Kids love it when two characters from different "worlds" meet. When I was a kid my favorite show was Superfriends, which introduced Wonder Woman to her male superhero counterparts and taught powerful lessons in the universe-saving powers of teamwork, the whole equalling more than the sum of the parts, etc., etc. Since you will now have a few once-competing design, production, and marketing "teams" to work together, you will no doubt have loads of real life inspiration for this dynamic on store shelves! Oooooh, idea: Make a "Caribou Barbie" boxed set, with a snowmachining Ken and a tanning bed-equipped house full of Bratz kidz! (Willow totally deserves her own Bratz.)
2. Bring back Jill Barad. I never met the controversial former Mattel CEO, a onetime beauty queen who was briefly the highest-profile female CEO in America before being ousted from the company in a $50 million golden parachute after colossally overpaying for the software company behind "Carmen Sandiego" during the Internet frenzy. But Barad loved Barbie. Some folks speculated that she projected her own identity and aspirations onto Barbie. She also apparently dyed her hair blonde like Barbie and wore a lot of pink, also like Barbie. Barad was blamed for refusing to nurture competing brands like the Bratz within Mattel. But as Mattel struggled after her departure to recast Barbie as "cool," most longtime toy industry observers opined that Barad would not have allowed such humiliation to befall her beloved doll. In the toy industry, see, it is important for executives to take their products a little bit personally. Which, incidentally, most toy-designers seem to do. And yet quarter after quarter you punish them by pursuing the safest possible options and blaming "focus groups" composed of children who are naturally inclined to prefer toys that are already being advertised on TV. Look, kids don't know what they want until one of their friends has it, period. That's why everyone who sells to kids has to employ a few key adults who act in many ways like overgrown kids. Luckily, you are based in Los Angeles.
3. Stop making so much total crap. Barad's successor, Bob Eckert, was widely hailed on Wall Street shortly after his arrival for cutting costs, streamlining and consolidating businesses, and pumping up gross margins. Whatever: Most of this stuff is easy to do, and a mypoic focus on eking out a certain profit margin can be death on a toy brand, especially when the company has certain assumptions. Mattel didn't think it could sell a lot of dolls for $20 or $30 like the Bratz did, so it focused on manufacturing the chintziest, most disposable stuff ever. The conventional wisdom is that Bratz succeeded because the dolls themselves are so visibly utterly unredeeming, like the rest of vapid oversexed tween culture. And while that is somewhat true, the Bratz probably wouldn't have prevailed had it not been for the little details: cloth handbags with piping unlike the plastic purses Barbie got; elaborate ensembles that managed to incorporate fishnet, lace, and lame; rhinestone detailing on real denim jackets that in Mattel's world would have been downgraded to cheap cotton dyed pathetically to look like stonewashed denim. Look, it does not give me any great pride to tell you I have noticed these things, but if I have, I am pretty sure your customers have. That's your job.
4. Experiment. When I wrote the aforementioned story, you were fighting back at the Bratz with a line of more aggressively hip-hop-themed dolls called "Flavas." The Flavas were rushed into production and then just as swiftly rushed out after they "bombed" on shelves one season. A bunch of executives got fired over the line's failure, and the Flavas were proclaimed to be a disaster. This is how consumer products companies work, of course, but it's stupid and wasteful. The Flavas were ridiculous, but in a cute way. They might have been launched in January quietly and "exclusively" -- say, in partnership with novelty and collectors shops and specialty chains like Spencer gifts and all your big accounts in Japan, that sort of thing -- and demand might have more gradually and organically gotten out to kids in time for the following Christmas or something. It might make less money this way, but it also loses a lot less, and it forces you to interact with consumers on a grassroots level a lot more. Which brings me to:
5. Be more like Nike. It pains me to say this because Nike is the most salient microcosm for the most perverse kind of income redistribution scheme American consumerism had come up with before this whole subprime debacle—let's get minority kids who can't afford them to spend thousands of dollars a year on cool kicks produced for $10 a pair thousands of miles away by minority women whose bosses punish them, also perversely, by forcing them to run laps in their own unbranded canvas non-shock-absorbing shoes, then pump the billions of dollars we make into cool commercials and cool houses where we host cool celebrities at cool parties and employee stock options and the already bloated bank accounts of idolized professional athletes!—but. Nike "gets" a few things, especially when it comes to interacting on both a micro- and macro-level with consumers of various stages of obsessiveness. Mattel and Nike both have near-pathological collector communities—but while Mattel has generally treated its collectors' division as a high-margin cash cow and has been sued by Barbie fan clubs for copyright infrigement, Nike has so nurtured its obsessors that it actually at some point succeeded in making sneaker fetishism a kind of cool thing for dudes. And while I don't necessarily endorse this trend, I have found such sneaker autistics on the whole to be more stimulating company than, say, the average Uggs-wearer. But beyond that, engaging the obsessors pays dividends over the long term, as Bratz (whose "creator" Carter Bryant had long toiled in Barbie's collectors' division) proved. Nike pays such close attention to consumers that most celebrities at this point endorse the brand for free. Which brings me to a telling anecdote in a Vanity Fair profile of Kimora Lee Simmons a few years back in which Kimora's daughters clamor for Bratz dolls even as the mortified designer/diva/whatever had inked a contract with Mattel. Similarly, a few years back Reebok was constantly paying rappers and entertainers to endorse their shoes only to open a magazine to find said entertainer in Nikes. (Fabolous notably told Slam magazine, and I can't believe I remember this, that Reebok wrote him checks, but he was more of a Nike dude himself. I have no idea what Fabolous is doing now, but that is sort of the point I guess.) In any event, you have to make toys that celebrities will endorse for free. If you don't think you know what those toys are, you should maybe ask the designers who invented the Bratz. Many of them still work there.
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Julia and Marjorie, thank you for pointing out these designers' complete (and amusing) inability to draw a black woman. How behind the times these ethnocentrists will be in just a few short weeks, their limited talents overtaken by events! (My own stick figures are SO superior.) Your posts reminded me—[alert: this thread now being hijacked]—of the astonishing skill of Alison Bechdel, the brilliant "cartoonist" who can reveal differences in ethnic background, gender identities, and class attitudes with the slightest of strokes, no after-the-fact coloring-in or cartoonish exaggeration needed.
Bechdel broke into wider public view with Fun Home, a stunning graphic memoir that NYT's Dwight Garner said "knocked a lot of people, myself included, right over." It had a narrative and metaphoric depth that was literary in the best sense—meaning not "poetic" but profound. But some of us can boast that we already worshipped Bechdel's pen. Like every other lesbian of a certain age and attitude, I've been addicted to—infatuated with—Alison's work since she began chronicling and gently mocking our shared subculture with hilarious precision in Dykes To Watch Out For. Back in the day when the only place to find gay news was in weekly lesbian and gay newspapers (remember newspapers?), some of us would turn first to the back pages for our Alison fix. Every week, her characters, apparently based in Northhampton (aka "Lesbianville"), were working themselves up into soap-operatic fevers over love and politics all at once. Who else could intertwine (and send up) discussions of the perils of dating and monogamy, the unitary executive theory, bisexuality, Guantanmo, sex toys, the dot-com bust, academic jargon, internal debates over same-sex marriage, credit card overspending, and the problems of parenting with such kind, laugh-out-loud accuracy? Her work, over time, has added up into a kind of Dickens-like chronicle of my generation's sociopolitical world.
Now she's published the Essential Dykes To Watch Out For collection—which means I needn't keep trying to find back issues of my life (er, old collections of her strip) in used bookstores. For anyone who wants to know what a certain slice of feminist lesbians have been worrying about for the past 25-ish years, buy this book! And if, um, the publisher wants to send me a free publicity copy, I wouldn't send it back.
Bechdel is a goddess—and, to my regret, taken. (Note to my prosecutor: So am I, baby, nothing to worry about!) But seriously, folks: I have no idea why Alison Bechdel hasn't yet received a MacArthur Genius Award. She's the real thing, walking amongst us.
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Julia, I too found some of the renderings of Michelle Obama questionable and also troubling because of their subtle use of stereotypical imagery. Christian Lacroix's Michelle is a sneering, mean-looking lady, much like the "angry black woman" the Obama haters accused Michellle Obama of being. Why is she frowning in every sketch? Doesn't she have every reason to be happy? After all, her husband is the soon-to-be leader of the free world. You'd think the new first lady is smile-challenged. Same goes for Zak Posen's scowling, slouching Michelle, an obviously sullen black woman. They might as well have thrown in the controversial New Yorker cover sketch of Michelle as black militant for good measure. Betsy Johnson's sketch was a bit too graffiti-artisty for my taste. Maybe Johnson was going for whimsical, but it seemed to me that she was trying for an urban (read: black, or inner-city) look. Her Michelle looks out of sorts with the crazy big hair and all those distracting handwritten notes surrounding her; they might as well be graffiti tags spray-painted on a wall. While some of the designs were indeed gorgeous, some of the drawings of Michelle's facial feautures were so suspect that they drew attention away from the dresses.
And by the way, the other black female nonmodels to grace the cover of Vogue were Marion Jones (2001), Jennifer Hudson (2007), and Oprah Winfrey (2007).* Vogue Editor Anna Wintour only let Oprah appear on the cover after she agreed to lose weight first. I can't believe Oprah, media powerhouse Oprah, even agreed to such nonsense.
You're also right, Julia, about the fashion world being inhospitable to black women. That's why my radar always goes up when I see questionable pictures or drawings of black women. If Michelle does land on the cover of Vogue, I hope they won't try, and I bet she won't allow them, to depict her in the same way they did Jennifer Hudson: slightly bent over with her mouth open wide, hair flying, and ample cleavage on view. Think loud, fat, black woman. Annie Leibovitz and Vogue were rightly criticized for the photos.
I've seen this sort of thing too many times for it to be a concidience. Just take a look at any of those obnoxious bridal magazines and notice how the women of color—the few token black and Lationo models even in the mags—are photographed. They are often wearing the more revealing dresses, their mouths are usually open or pursed in suggestive fashion, their makeup is heavier, and their hair is sometimes styled to suggest wild-haired raven. The subtle suggestion is that they are looser, or whore-light, and the imagery is stark when compared with the prim and proper, virginal-looking white models photographed with their hair done up in sophisticated buns.
You asked if it was hard to draw a woman with black skin, and I think the answer is no, at least not for those artists/designers who don't reflexively see, and thus imagine, black women in a stereotypical light.
Correction, Dec. 12, 2008: The original sentence included only Hudson and Winfrey.