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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.