The Times Magazine: How Bratz beat Barbie
Move over, Barbie: there are some hot new kids on the block. David Rowan visits Bratz HQ to discover how these ethnically ambiguous, fashion-crazy dolls are winning our tweenagers' hearts and minds
Richard Landry designs high-end celebrity homes for the likes of Eddie Murphy and Rod Stewart. But today he appears to be winning over that infinitely more fickle customer: a streetwise eight-year-old fashionista from South London. With its Jacuzzi, private lift and sun-deck, Landry's "deluxe three-storey high-rise apartment" has utterly charmed Robyn Henry, who stares transfixed in her fluffy pink coat and knee-length boots, a white handbag swinging elegantly in time with her beaded hair. "Wow! Look at this!" she calls across Hamleys to the two adult cousins who have brought her here this dank November Saturday. "It's the coolest thing in the world! That's what I want for Christmas."
At £149, Landry's gaudy plastic dolls' house won't win any awards for value. But this is the official 2004 "Bratz Pad", built for today's hippest fashion dolls, and brand loyalty is all to consumers like Robyn. She already owns four Bratz and six of her Lil' Bratz friends, for whom today she'll take home a few hot new fashion outfits. "I love Sasha and Cloe, but Yasmin's my favourite," she explains coyly. "She's got the best clothes." Robyn also owns a dozen Barbies - "and the car, and the house" - but, well, she hasn't played with them for ages. "I don't like them much," she whispers, screwing up her nose. "They're not teenagers, like Bratz."
The evolving tastes of one little black girl from South Norwood reflect a more global headache for the world's biggest toy firm. Mattel, whose Barbie range used to command 90 per cent of the international fashion-doll market, has lately slumped towards 60 per cent and seen profits dive. In Britain, a retail audit recently put the 45-year-old blonde into second place. The Bratz, a clique of sultry-eyed, collagen-lipped fashion flirts, have come from nowhere in three years to tell Barbie Millicent Roberts to retire back to Willows, Wisconsin. And the tweens - the booming consumer demographic aged between six and 12 - have broadly tended to agree.
MGA Entertainment, the family-owned California firm that launched Bratz in June 2001, says it will earn $3 billion (£1.6 billion) this year from the dolls and accessories, ranging from the Luscious Lip Phone to the Dazzlin' Disco Karaoke. Barbie still makes more money - $3.6 billion (£2 billion) last year, according to a rather defensive Mattel - but the fashion dolls are tearing out each other's hair. This year, Mattel - with 25,000 employees, as opposed to MGA's 460 - has made some awkward financial disclosures as its upstart rival has eroded Barbie's market share: a 73 per cent fall in profits in the first quarter; a 13 per cent drop in sales in the third. The Bratz, meanwhile, continue to sashay funkily into new markets - increasingly, as in the UK, claiming first place.
What explains the extraordinary appeal of Bratz, beyond catwalk chic, huge expressive faces, and skin tones that cross ethnic boundaries? How have Meygan, Sasha, Jade, Cloe, Yasmin and their newer friends tapped this mysterious pre-teen psyche in a way that increasingly eludes Barbie? It cannot be price: Hamleys sells the Bratz "Formal Funk" dolls for £29.99, whereas a remarkably similar MyScene range, from Mattel, is £7 cheaper and includes a DVD. Old-style Barbies cost less than £10 - yet for some reason, the store's Bratzworld section is far busier this Saturday afternoon than Barbie's magical land of Fairytopia.
The answer lies 6,000 miles away, in a nondescript 150,000 sq ft office complex adjoining an airfield in Van Nuys, southern California. Apart from a temporary vinyl banner, there is nothing to suggest that 16380 Roscoe Boulevard is home to the midriff-bearing dolls "with a passion for fashion". Since MGA moved here a few weeks ago, having suddenly outgrown its old offices, there has been little time to install corporate signs - even if Isaac Larian, the Jewish-Iranian immigrant who founded the company, has arranged for a mezuzah, a scroll containing passages from the Torah, to be affixed to every doorpost as required by Jewish law. Behind one of these security-guarded doorways a buzzing hive of doll designers, hair stylists, make-up artists, couturiers, seamstresses, package creators and "inventors" is finalising what will be the 2006 and 2007 Bratz ranges. Colour box templates are grabbed from printers, Vivienne Westwood monographs are pored over at workstations, tiny hand-stitched leather jackets are handed around for colleagues' thoughts. Animated creativity pervades the long open-plan room, punctuated by occasional giggles and girl-like sighs of approval at the latest arrivals from MGA's Hong Kong factory.
At one end of the building, Poottipong Phoosopha is painting almond-shaped eyes and swollen red lips on to a rack of bald plastic heads. In a room next door, Kristen Kirst is oven-baking the disembodied heads before experimenting with new hairstyles. Beside her, above a montage of Brad Pitt magazine photos, are 60 impaled heads with frizzy blonde locks, black ponytails, white platinum bobs, auburn spikes with green extensions - whatever combinations Kirst feels might excite her fashion-aware consumers. "I'm a Mattel refugee," she whispers as she prepares to root a new style for Jade, her "absolute favourite". "They just want your typical boring styles you've already done ten times." Nearby, another designer in a goatee and a reversed baseball cap declares that he, too, left Mattel "because it was inhibiting my creative freedom, always people telling you what to do". But after Kevin Bloomfield joined MGA, he was excited to find Isaac Larian receptive to his idea for an innovative boys' action figure. The company now sees Alien Racers as its next billion-dollar brand. If the Bratz have a mother figure, it is Paula Treantafelles, a product designer who joined MGA five years ago from Mattel. "I was there towards the decline of their Barbie brand, though they'll never admit it," Treantafelles smiles. "Executives moaned that girls were getting older, faster, so they couldn't be blamed for Barbie's diminishing age profile. I didn't agree. I'd heard about this crazy Iranian guy who could challenge their taboos. So I came here."
Within six months, she had brought Larian her idea: a fashion doll specifically targeting the seven to ten-year-olds whom Mattel was failing to reach. "At this age they're very different to four to six-year-olds," she says. "They're about self-expression, self-identity. When Barbie was in her prime, girls were taught to be career women, to be men's equals. Today, yes, career and education matter, but it's also ‘express yourself, have your own identity, girl power'. Strangely, Barbie might have missed that message."
Her answer was not simply a doll, but a "self-expression piece". Bratz, unlike Barbies, have no "back story" - there are no "Doctor Bratz" or "Vet Bratz"; each can become whatever, whoever their little girl owners want them to be. "The only time we could express ourselves as girls was through our fashion. It really didn't matter what you looked like - you could be blonde, blue-eyed or dark-skinned, dark-haired. I wanted each doll to have a different personality that would be expressed through her fashion." Fashion matters here. Across the company, from design to licensing, executives monitor trend-forecasting services, MTV and the international catwalk. Lui Domingo, 32, one of two main doll designers, used to create £6,000 couture dresses on behalf of Mary McFadden in New York and Richard Tyler in LA. That was before he spent five years outfitting Barbie. "If you had a new idea, Mattel made you go through well over ten approval processes," Domingo recalls. "If, heaven forbid, you picked a colour other than pink, you'd have to justify yourself in a large conference room to 20 people."
The dolls could have been called Fashion Frenzies, Girrlz or Girlfriends, but the name Bratz was suggested by Carter Bryant, another former Mattel employee whose initial drawings Treantafelles felt "exuded the attitude and expression we wanted". Mattel is now suing Bryant, claiming he secretly worked for MGA while still employed by them; he is countersuing, claiming that Mattel wants to "hijack" Bratz, which he says remained just an idea until after he left. Separately, Mattel is also suing Ronald Brawer, a former employee who in October took over MGA's sales and marketing divisions. Mattel claims he took with him "highly confidential materials"; MGA describes the writ as "frivolous nonsense" timed to deflect attention from poor quarterly results. (Mattel chose not to respond to anything in this article, beyond stressing that "the Barbie brand has been and continues to be the No 1 brand for girls".)
Treantafelles never played with Barbie as a girl. "I never understood how I could aspire to be a 30-year-old mummy when I was still trying to get to be ten," she says. This new doll, then, would be the "anti-Barbie". "Where Barbie is completely profiled - this is my sister, this is my hobby - Bratz would be whatever you choose it to be. We give you the palette, identify with it as you wish." She also wanted "to turn Barbie's proportions upside-down" - hence the oversize head and huge detachable feet. "You're not idolising something supposed to look like you," Treantafelles says. "Instead of 'I should look like that physically', it's 'I want to identify with that'."
And whereas Mattel introduced black and Hispanic Barbies in 1980, Treantafelles - herself Greek-American - wanted to blur the ethnic lines. "We were so careful not to say, 'This is our Hispanic character; this is our African-American…'" At one of our first focus groups, this beautiful little Indian girl saw our darker-skinned doll, and was so excited, screaming hysterically. She'd finally found a character that identified with her. Little did she know that Barbie culture identified that doll as African-American." "Listening to the kids" is coded into MGA's DNA. The company relentlessly focus-groups with children, invites their feedback via its members' clubs, talks back to their Bratz fan sites. Throughout the company, the lessons are drummed in: eight to ten-year-olds aspire to be 16, and so they will reject toys their younger sisters might play with; edginess and rebelliousness reinforce the independence they crave; they absorb "adult" media messages more completely than may be apparent.
"All these wild emotions are playing in your head when you're ten," Treantafelles says. "You want to be pretty, you want to wear fancy clothes. We're just materialising these wild impulses, no different from Beyonce or Christina Aguilera." The punk-inspired range for spring 2005, "Pretty 'N' Punk" - black leather and chains, tartan miniskirts, ripped T-shirts - has tested particularly well. "I don't think that's an accident," Treantafelles says. "It takes the rebellious dark side of every little girl. Is it appropriate? Yes, she understands it completely. We've kept the halo above the logo."
In a darkened room in the San Fernando Valley, halfway between Van Nuys and Hollywood, Isaac Larian is staring intensely through a one-way mirror while distractedly picking at a plate of raw vegetables. Behind the glass screen, Ashley, Joy, Cassandra and five other eight and nine-year-olds are transfixed as Joy, the moderator, unveils four large jigsaws featuring their favourite funky friends.
"Cool!" they coo in unison. "They're awesome! I love Bratz!" adds Jessica. "I'd hang them on my bedroom wall."
"How are we going to get that across on the packaging?" Larian calls across to four MGA colleagues, each scribbling away frantically. "Let's see if they'd buy all four."
Joy has already pre-empted his question. "I might, but that would waste all my money," Sara says thoughtfully. "Ha!" Larian interjects. "I love it, kids are so honest." It is 5.45pm on a wet Wednesday evening, and the weekly Bratz focus groups have been going for an hour when Larian arrives. For a billionaire chief executive, he seems remarkably informal, an open-necked shirt beneath his brown leather jacket, Blackberry e-mail device in one hand, phone in the other. Yet despite the casual appearance, Larian is in complete control here, refining questions for the moderator, berating organisers for showing photo boards rather than actual products. He insists that The Times makes no reference to specific products being tested tonight. "Mattel is dying to find out what we're doing," he explains.
His research staff talk a lot about "age compression" and "KGOY" - a marketing term for "kids growing older younger". When Barbie was introduced in 1959, they point out, her target market was six to ten-year-olds. Today, she appeals mostly to ages three to six.
Another Mattel toy, Fisher-Price's Little People, used to be pitched to two-year-olds. Nowadays they are for one-year-olds. The distinction between childhood and early adulthood has also blurred. Three years ago, the Argos store chain was condemned by British child welfare groups for marketing thongs and padded bras to nine-year-old girls. Pop stars such as Britney Spears, meanwhile, have brought what activists call "hooker chic" into the pre-teen bedroom. To some campaigners, these cultural messages are irrefutably linked to "premature sexualisation" and perhaps even to a lowered age of puberty. The toy industry sees them simply as an untapped commercial opportunity.
"I was looking for a way into this tweens demographic, which has $22 billion to spend," Larian recalls, back in his office. "That's the highest disposable income of any demographic. They don't want to play mummies any more, and they're becoming more multicultural. You've also got the guilt trip from parents working so hard. If your daughter nags you for a doll, you'll buy her one, two, maybe three."
Larian, 50, had his own focus group to convince him: his daughter Yasmin, now 16, and sons Cameron, 10, and 18-year-old Jason. So when Treantafelles first showed him Bryant's sketches, he sought Yasmin's advice. "She said, 'They're really cute.' I thought, if Yasmin thinks so, so will other kids." He still had to convince a sceptical sales force, more familiar with electronic toys and singing baby dolls. So Larian put on make-up and a dress, and addressed his staff as "Persian Bratz". Eighty million dolls later, Bratz now accounts for most of the company's profits. Larian's story is textbook American dream. He arrived from Iran in 1971, aged 17, with a one-way ticket and $750 in his pocket. "I'll never forget that after 30 days, I had 25 quarters left, no job, and was scared to my stomach. I was a kid." Larian walked for 11 miles down a Los Angeles street, stopping to ask for work at every restaurant and gas station.
Eventually, Spires Coffee Shop said he could wash dishes for $1.65 an hour. He would work until 7am, and then study civil engineering.
He discovered that making money was easier. He imported Korean brassware, then moved into consumer electronics. Larian's big break was reading in a newspaper, when in Japan in 1987, about Nintendo's hugely successful Game & Watch toy. "I asked them to give me American distribution rights," he remembers. "They said no, but I was very persistent. Finally they said yes. That year we sold $22 million of Game & Watch."
He soon learnt that children are fickle. "You had to give kids a new fashion, a new product, every three or four months or you would die. We didn't see that. The next year, we had $10 million of inventory. It was scary. I quickly sold the lot to Dixons at 25 cents to the dollar. I thought, forget about the toy business." But he persisted, forming Micro Games of America to license Donkey Kong, Power Rangers and Star Wars merchandise. There were huge sums at stake. When MGA claimed that George Lucas's company, Lucasfilm Ltd, had violated its Star Wars licence by letting another firm sell electronic toys, Larian won $5.6 million in a legal settlement.
By the mid-Nineties, turnover had reached $60 million. In 1997, Larian launched a doll, Singing Bouncing Baby. A Walmart buyer questioned what a games firm knew about dolls; so he changed its name to MGA Entertainment (the MGA stands for Micro Games of America). The doll became a bestseller, and the Walmart buyer challenged Larian to find the new Barbie. So when Treantafelles and Bryant made their pitch, he knew they were on to something. Larian is an unlikely billionaire. His greatest extravagance is a leased chauffeur-driven car, and he only agreed to that "because I was on the Blackberry and cellphone so much that I got into two accidents". In Iran, he says, he was a socialist. "That's one of the reasons I picked civil engineering, so I could go back and build roads. Money can be a blessing and a curse. I'll probably end up giving 90 per cent away to charity."
Meantime, there is still plenty more of it to be made. A new entertainment vice president, hired from Disney, is overseeing a second Bratz DVD, a TV series, and a feature film. A celebrity hit squad is busy ensuring the dolls are regularly photographed in the hands of teen icons such as Avril Lavigne and Hilary Duff. And, of course, there are the 300 licencees busy producing all manner of spin-off merchandise.
"The tween is much more sophisticated than people credit," Marcy George, US licensing director, says during a merchandising brainstorm session. "I met a designer today who was actually talking about embedding rhinestones into swimwear flippers," says Holly Stinnett, a senior brand manager. "They'll be pearlised with glitter, really cool and Bratzy."
Isaac Larian walks in. "Hey, let's not give the enemy too much information," he says. "Frankly, you'll have a whole room that's Bratz - her toothbrush, bedding, apparel, basically her whole life. The opposition, meanwhile, is too busy with corporate politics and suing people. Mattel's boss comes from the cheese industry. [Robert Eckert used to run Kraft Foods.] They don't see that selling cheese and toys are very different.
"It's kind of sad," he continues, "that instead of innovating, the world's top toy company is imitating. After 45 years of working, maybe it's time for Barbie to retire." A more serious question is whether Bratz dolls are sexualising little girls. Last January, a child advocacy group, Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children, led a protest against Bratz and other raunchy dolls outside the International Toy Fair in New York. In a letter sent to the Toy Industry Association, the group spelt out its concerns: "Bratz dolls are highly sexualised dolls with extremely high heels, eyes heavy with make-up, large puffy lips and very skimpy, tightly fitting clothes," it said. "These dolls are at the forefront of a toy trend that promotes stereotyped and sexualised behaviour that children cannot understand. They make the way bodies look a focus of play and equate self-worth with appearance."
Another group, Dads and Daughters, is running an e-mail campaign against MGA's "Secret Date" range of Bratz. "Is there a benefit to anyone but the manufacturer when that toy comes with a seductively dressed female doll, a mystery date, champagne glasses and date night accessories?" it asks. Kay Hymowitz, who has written widely on the commercialisation of childhood in books such as Liberation's Children, believes that the marketing industry is deliberately sexualising girls for profit. "Marketers make it sound like KGOY is just a fact of nature," Hymowitz argues. "The truth is, they have played a central role in making it happen. They want to sell products; they know kids who are independent and ‘empowered' are more likely to tell their parents to buy those products. They know that the way you seize kids' attention is to make them feel older and more glamorous - and sexier."
This "premature sexualisation" can have wider consequences. Ruth Coppard, an NHS child psychologist based in Sheffield, says she sees the impact in 12-year-old fathers and 15-year-olds on the pill: "It's a great commercial opportunity - but is it ethical?" Coppard asks. "The little girl doesn't necessarily understand the sexual connotations of the clothes she sees on television and wants to wear. She might think she's just being fashionable, but the older people around her do pick up those sexual messages. And that erodes our respect for childhood." The consequences, Coppard says, partly explain Britain's high rate of teenage pregnancy. Predictably enough, such views hold little traction back on MGA's design floor. "We are not making a deliberate effort to sexualise these dolls," insists Lui Domingo. "We are making them fashionable, and coincidentally the fashions these days are rather sexy." "As soon as you put a sexy outfit on a doll, all of a sudden it's inappropriate," adds Paula Treantafelles. "The truth is, the celebrities these girls aspire to, the Beyonces and the Aguileras, they're far more inappropriate than Bratz."
Besides, Isaac Larian is smart enough to see the PR benefits of a little controversy. "You know, it's always adults who make these claims about sexualisation," he says. "Ask the kids, and they don't say they like Bratz because they're sexy. It's because they're fashionable."
His warm, gentle expression suddenly becomes one of utter determination. "We're going to make toys that the kids like, not the parents," he says. "They're the customers. The world has changed."
(The Times, London, December 4 2004)
Richard Landry designs high-end celebrity homes for the likes of Eddie Murphy and Rod Stewart. But today he appears to be winning over that infinitely more fickle customer: a streetwise eight-year-old fashionista from South London. With its Jacuzzi, private lift and sun-deck, Landry's "deluxe three-storey high-rise apartment" has utterly charmed Robyn Henry, who stares transfixed in her fluffy pink coat and knee-length boots, a white handbag swinging elegantly in time with her beaded hair. "Wow! Look at this!" she calls across Hamleys to the two adult cousins who have brought her here this dank November Saturday. "It's the coolest thing in the world! That's what I want for Christmas."
At £149, Landry's gaudy plastic dolls' house won't win any awards for value. But this is the official 2004 "Bratz Pad", built for today's hippest fashion dolls, and brand loyalty is all to consumers like Robyn. She already owns four Bratz and six of her Lil' Bratz friends, for whom today she'll take home a few hot new fashion outfits. "I love Sasha and Cloe, but Yasmin's my favourite," she explains coyly. "She's got the best clothes." Robyn also owns a dozen Barbies - "and the car, and the house" - but, well, she hasn't played with them for ages. "I don't like them much," she whispers, screwing up her nose. "They're not teenagers, like Bratz."
The evolving tastes of one little black girl from South Norwood reflect a more global headache for the world's biggest toy firm. Mattel, whose Barbie range used to command 90 per cent of the international fashion-doll market, has lately slumped towards 60 per cent and seen profits dive. In Britain, a retail audit recently put the 45-year-old blonde into second place. The Bratz, a clique of sultry-eyed, collagen-lipped fashion flirts, have come from nowhere in three years to tell Barbie Millicent Roberts to retire back to Willows, Wisconsin. And the tweens - the booming consumer demographic aged between six and 12 - have broadly tended to agree.
MGA Entertainment, the family-owned California firm that launched Bratz in June 2001, says it will earn $3 billion (£1.6 billion) this year from the dolls and accessories, ranging from the Luscious Lip Phone to the Dazzlin' Disco Karaoke. Barbie still makes more money - $3.6 billion (£2 billion) last year, according to a rather defensive Mattel - but the fashion dolls are tearing out each other's hair. This year, Mattel - with 25,000 employees, as opposed to MGA's 460 - has made some awkward financial disclosures as its upstart rival has eroded Barbie's market share: a 73 per cent fall in profits in the first quarter; a 13 per cent drop in sales in the third. The Bratz, meanwhile, continue to sashay funkily into new markets - increasingly, as in the UK, claiming first place.
What explains the extraordinary appeal of Bratz, beyond catwalk chic, huge expressive faces, and skin tones that cross ethnic boundaries? How have Meygan, Sasha, Jade, Cloe, Yasmin and their newer friends tapped this mysterious pre-teen psyche in a way that increasingly eludes Barbie? It cannot be price: Hamleys sells the Bratz "Formal Funk" dolls for £29.99, whereas a remarkably similar MyScene range, from Mattel, is £7 cheaper and includes a DVD. Old-style Barbies cost less than £10 - yet for some reason, the store's Bratzworld section is far busier this Saturday afternoon than Barbie's magical land of Fairytopia.
The answer lies 6,000 miles away, in a nondescript 150,000 sq ft office complex adjoining an airfield in Van Nuys, southern California. Apart from a temporary vinyl banner, there is nothing to suggest that 16380 Roscoe Boulevard is home to the midriff-bearing dolls "with a passion for fashion". Since MGA moved here a few weeks ago, having suddenly outgrown its old offices, there has been little time to install corporate signs - even if Isaac Larian, the Jewish-Iranian immigrant who founded the company, has arranged for a mezuzah, a scroll containing passages from the Torah, to be affixed to every doorpost as required by Jewish law. Behind one of these security-guarded doorways a buzzing hive of doll designers, hair stylists, make-up artists, couturiers, seamstresses, package creators and "inventors" is finalising what will be the 2006 and 2007 Bratz ranges. Colour box templates are grabbed from printers, Vivienne Westwood monographs are pored over at workstations, tiny hand-stitched leather jackets are handed around for colleagues' thoughts. Animated creativity pervades the long open-plan room, punctuated by occasional giggles and girl-like sighs of approval at the latest arrivals from MGA's Hong Kong factory.
At one end of the building, Poottipong Phoosopha is painting almond-shaped eyes and swollen red lips on to a rack of bald plastic heads. In a room next door, Kristen Kirst is oven-baking the disembodied heads before experimenting with new hairstyles. Beside her, above a montage of Brad Pitt magazine photos, are 60 impaled heads with frizzy blonde locks, black ponytails, white platinum bobs, auburn spikes with green extensions - whatever combinations Kirst feels might excite her fashion-aware consumers. "I'm a Mattel refugee," she whispers as she prepares to root a new style for Jade, her "absolute favourite". "They just want your typical boring styles you've already done ten times." Nearby, another designer in a goatee and a reversed baseball cap declares that he, too, left Mattel "because it was inhibiting my creative freedom, always people telling you what to do". But after Kevin Bloomfield joined MGA, he was excited to find Isaac Larian receptive to his idea for an innovative boys' action figure. The company now sees Alien Racers as its next billion-dollar brand. If the Bratz have a mother figure, it is Paula Treantafelles, a product designer who joined MGA five years ago from Mattel. "I was there towards the decline of their Barbie brand, though they'll never admit it," Treantafelles smiles. "Executives moaned that girls were getting older, faster, so they couldn't be blamed for Barbie's diminishing age profile. I didn't agree. I'd heard about this crazy Iranian guy who could challenge their taboos. So I came here."
Within six months, she had brought Larian her idea: a fashion doll specifically targeting the seven to ten-year-olds whom Mattel was failing to reach. "At this age they're very different to four to six-year-olds," she says. "They're about self-expression, self-identity. When Barbie was in her prime, girls were taught to be career women, to be men's equals. Today, yes, career and education matter, but it's also ‘express yourself, have your own identity, girl power'. Strangely, Barbie might have missed that message."
Her answer was not simply a doll, but a "self-expression piece". Bratz, unlike Barbies, have no "back story" - there are no "Doctor Bratz" or "Vet Bratz"; each can become whatever, whoever their little girl owners want them to be. "The only time we could express ourselves as girls was through our fashion. It really didn't matter what you looked like - you could be blonde, blue-eyed or dark-skinned, dark-haired. I wanted each doll to have a different personality that would be expressed through her fashion." Fashion matters here. Across the company, from design to licensing, executives monitor trend-forecasting services, MTV and the international catwalk. Lui Domingo, 32, one of two main doll designers, used to create £6,000 couture dresses on behalf of Mary McFadden in New York and Richard Tyler in LA. That was before he spent five years outfitting Barbie. "If you had a new idea, Mattel made you go through well over ten approval processes," Domingo recalls. "If, heaven forbid, you picked a colour other than pink, you'd have to justify yourself in a large conference room to 20 people."
The dolls could have been called Fashion Frenzies, Girrlz or Girlfriends, but the name Bratz was suggested by Carter Bryant, another former Mattel employee whose initial drawings Treantafelles felt "exuded the attitude and expression we wanted". Mattel is now suing Bryant, claiming he secretly worked for MGA while still employed by them; he is countersuing, claiming that Mattel wants to "hijack" Bratz, which he says remained just an idea until after he left. Separately, Mattel is also suing Ronald Brawer, a former employee who in October took over MGA's sales and marketing divisions. Mattel claims he took with him "highly confidential materials"; MGA describes the writ as "frivolous nonsense" timed to deflect attention from poor quarterly results. (Mattel chose not to respond to anything in this article, beyond stressing that "the Barbie brand has been and continues to be the No 1 brand for girls".)
Treantafelles never played with Barbie as a girl. "I never understood how I could aspire to be a 30-year-old mummy when I was still trying to get to be ten," she says. This new doll, then, would be the "anti-Barbie". "Where Barbie is completely profiled - this is my sister, this is my hobby - Bratz would be whatever you choose it to be. We give you the palette, identify with it as you wish." She also wanted "to turn Barbie's proportions upside-down" - hence the oversize head and huge detachable feet. "You're not idolising something supposed to look like you," Treantafelles says. "Instead of 'I should look like that physically', it's 'I want to identify with that'."
And whereas Mattel introduced black and Hispanic Barbies in 1980, Treantafelles - herself Greek-American - wanted to blur the ethnic lines. "We were so careful not to say, 'This is our Hispanic character; this is our African-American…'" At one of our first focus groups, this beautiful little Indian girl saw our darker-skinned doll, and was so excited, screaming hysterically. She'd finally found a character that identified with her. Little did she know that Barbie culture identified that doll as African-American." "Listening to the kids" is coded into MGA's DNA. The company relentlessly focus-groups with children, invites their feedback via its members' clubs, talks back to their Bratz fan sites. Throughout the company, the lessons are drummed in: eight to ten-year-olds aspire to be 16, and so they will reject toys their younger sisters might play with; edginess and rebelliousness reinforce the independence they crave; they absorb "adult" media messages more completely than may be apparent.
"All these wild emotions are playing in your head when you're ten," Treantafelles says. "You want to be pretty, you want to wear fancy clothes. We're just materialising these wild impulses, no different from Beyonce or Christina Aguilera." The punk-inspired range for spring 2005, "Pretty 'N' Punk" - black leather and chains, tartan miniskirts, ripped T-shirts - has tested particularly well. "I don't think that's an accident," Treantafelles says. "It takes the rebellious dark side of every little girl. Is it appropriate? Yes, she understands it completely. We've kept the halo above the logo."
In a darkened room in the San Fernando Valley, halfway between Van Nuys and Hollywood, Isaac Larian is staring intensely through a one-way mirror while distractedly picking at a plate of raw vegetables. Behind the glass screen, Ashley, Joy, Cassandra and five other eight and nine-year-olds are transfixed as Joy, the moderator, unveils four large jigsaws featuring their favourite funky friends.
"Cool!" they coo in unison. "They're awesome! I love Bratz!" adds Jessica. "I'd hang them on my bedroom wall."
"How are we going to get that across on the packaging?" Larian calls across to four MGA colleagues, each scribbling away frantically. "Let's see if they'd buy all four."
Joy has already pre-empted his question. "I might, but that would waste all my money," Sara says thoughtfully. "Ha!" Larian interjects. "I love it, kids are so honest." It is 5.45pm on a wet Wednesday evening, and the weekly Bratz focus groups have been going for an hour when Larian arrives. For a billionaire chief executive, he seems remarkably informal, an open-necked shirt beneath his brown leather jacket, Blackberry e-mail device in one hand, phone in the other. Yet despite the casual appearance, Larian is in complete control here, refining questions for the moderator, berating organisers for showing photo boards rather than actual products. He insists that The Times makes no reference to specific products being tested tonight. "Mattel is dying to find out what we're doing," he explains.
His research staff talk a lot about "age compression" and "KGOY" - a marketing term for "kids growing older younger". When Barbie was introduced in 1959, they point out, her target market was six to ten-year-olds. Today, she appeals mostly to ages three to six.
Another Mattel toy, Fisher-Price's Little People, used to be pitched to two-year-olds. Nowadays they are for one-year-olds. The distinction between childhood and early adulthood has also blurred. Three years ago, the Argos store chain was condemned by British child welfare groups for marketing thongs and padded bras to nine-year-old girls. Pop stars such as Britney Spears, meanwhile, have brought what activists call "hooker chic" into the pre-teen bedroom. To some campaigners, these cultural messages are irrefutably linked to "premature sexualisation" and perhaps even to a lowered age of puberty. The toy industry sees them simply as an untapped commercial opportunity.
"I was looking for a way into this tweens demographic, which has $22 billion to spend," Larian recalls, back in his office. "That's the highest disposable income of any demographic. They don't want to play mummies any more, and they're becoming more multicultural. You've also got the guilt trip from parents working so hard. If your daughter nags you for a doll, you'll buy her one, two, maybe three."
Larian, 50, had his own focus group to convince him: his daughter Yasmin, now 16, and sons Cameron, 10, and 18-year-old Jason. So when Treantafelles first showed him Bryant's sketches, he sought Yasmin's advice. "She said, 'They're really cute.' I thought, if Yasmin thinks so, so will other kids." He still had to convince a sceptical sales force, more familiar with electronic toys and singing baby dolls. So Larian put on make-up and a dress, and addressed his staff as "Persian Bratz". Eighty million dolls later, Bratz now accounts for most of the company's profits. Larian's story is textbook American dream. He arrived from Iran in 1971, aged 17, with a one-way ticket and $750 in his pocket. "I'll never forget that after 30 days, I had 25 quarters left, no job, and was scared to my stomach. I was a kid." Larian walked for 11 miles down a Los Angeles street, stopping to ask for work at every restaurant and gas station.
Eventually, Spires Coffee Shop said he could wash dishes for $1.65 an hour. He would work until 7am, and then study civil engineering.
He discovered that making money was easier. He imported Korean brassware, then moved into consumer electronics. Larian's big break was reading in a newspaper, when in Japan in 1987, about Nintendo's hugely successful Game & Watch toy. "I asked them to give me American distribution rights," he remembers. "They said no, but I was very persistent. Finally they said yes. That year we sold $22 million of Game & Watch."
He soon learnt that children are fickle. "You had to give kids a new fashion, a new product, every three or four months or you would die. We didn't see that. The next year, we had $10 million of inventory. It was scary. I quickly sold the lot to Dixons at 25 cents to the dollar. I thought, forget about the toy business." But he persisted, forming Micro Games of America to license Donkey Kong, Power Rangers and Star Wars merchandise. There were huge sums at stake. When MGA claimed that George Lucas's company, Lucasfilm Ltd, had violated its Star Wars licence by letting another firm sell electronic toys, Larian won $5.6 million in a legal settlement.
By the mid-Nineties, turnover had reached $60 million. In 1997, Larian launched a doll, Singing Bouncing Baby. A Walmart buyer questioned what a games firm knew about dolls; so he changed its name to MGA Entertainment (the MGA stands for Micro Games of America). The doll became a bestseller, and the Walmart buyer challenged Larian to find the new Barbie. So when Treantafelles and Bryant made their pitch, he knew they were on to something. Larian is an unlikely billionaire. His greatest extravagance is a leased chauffeur-driven car, and he only agreed to that "because I was on the Blackberry and cellphone so much that I got into two accidents". In Iran, he says, he was a socialist. "That's one of the reasons I picked civil engineering, so I could go back and build roads. Money can be a blessing and a curse. I'll probably end up giving 90 per cent away to charity."
Meantime, there is still plenty more of it to be made. A new entertainment vice president, hired from Disney, is overseeing a second Bratz DVD, a TV series, and a feature film. A celebrity hit squad is busy ensuring the dolls are regularly photographed in the hands of teen icons such as Avril Lavigne and Hilary Duff. And, of course, there are the 300 licencees busy producing all manner of spin-off merchandise.
"The tween is much more sophisticated than people credit," Marcy George, US licensing director, says during a merchandising brainstorm session. "I met a designer today who was actually talking about embedding rhinestones into swimwear flippers," says Holly Stinnett, a senior brand manager. "They'll be pearlised with glitter, really cool and Bratzy."
Isaac Larian walks in. "Hey, let's not give the enemy too much information," he says. "Frankly, you'll have a whole room that's Bratz - her toothbrush, bedding, apparel, basically her whole life. The opposition, meanwhile, is too busy with corporate politics and suing people. Mattel's boss comes from the cheese industry. [Robert Eckert used to run Kraft Foods.] They don't see that selling cheese and toys are very different.
"It's kind of sad," he continues, "that instead of innovating, the world's top toy company is imitating. After 45 years of working, maybe it's time for Barbie to retire." A more serious question is whether Bratz dolls are sexualising little girls. Last January, a child advocacy group, Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children, led a protest against Bratz and other raunchy dolls outside the International Toy Fair in New York. In a letter sent to the Toy Industry Association, the group spelt out its concerns: "Bratz dolls are highly sexualised dolls with extremely high heels, eyes heavy with make-up, large puffy lips and very skimpy, tightly fitting clothes," it said. "These dolls are at the forefront of a toy trend that promotes stereotyped and sexualised behaviour that children cannot understand. They make the way bodies look a focus of play and equate self-worth with appearance."
Another group, Dads and Daughters, is running an e-mail campaign against MGA's "Secret Date" range of Bratz. "Is there a benefit to anyone but the manufacturer when that toy comes with a seductively dressed female doll, a mystery date, champagne glasses and date night accessories?" it asks. Kay Hymowitz, who has written widely on the commercialisation of childhood in books such as Liberation's Children, believes that the marketing industry is deliberately sexualising girls for profit. "Marketers make it sound like KGOY is just a fact of nature," Hymowitz argues. "The truth is, they have played a central role in making it happen. They want to sell products; they know kids who are independent and ‘empowered' are more likely to tell their parents to buy those products. They know that the way you seize kids' attention is to make them feel older and more glamorous - and sexier."
This "premature sexualisation" can have wider consequences. Ruth Coppard, an NHS child psychologist based in Sheffield, says she sees the impact in 12-year-old fathers and 15-year-olds on the pill: "It's a great commercial opportunity - but is it ethical?" Coppard asks. "The little girl doesn't necessarily understand the sexual connotations of the clothes she sees on television and wants to wear. She might think she's just being fashionable, but the older people around her do pick up those sexual messages. And that erodes our respect for childhood." The consequences, Coppard says, partly explain Britain's high rate of teenage pregnancy. Predictably enough, such views hold little traction back on MGA's design floor. "We are not making a deliberate effort to sexualise these dolls," insists Lui Domingo. "We are making them fashionable, and coincidentally the fashions these days are rather sexy." "As soon as you put a sexy outfit on a doll, all of a sudden it's inappropriate," adds Paula Treantafelles. "The truth is, the celebrities these girls aspire to, the Beyonces and the Aguileras, they're far more inappropriate than Bratz."
Besides, Isaac Larian is smart enough to see the PR benefits of a little controversy. "You know, it's always adults who make these claims about sexualisation," he says. "Ask the kids, and they don't say they like Bratz because they're sexy. It's because they're fashionable."
His warm, gentle expression suddenly becomes one of utter determination. "We're going to make toys that the kids like, not the parents," he says. "They're the customers. The world has changed."
(The Times, London, December 4 2004)
posted by David Rowan at Saturday, December 04, 2004
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