Barbie won the battle, but at 50, can she win the war against the little Bratz, asks Lynley Donnelly
I recently had the eye-opening experience of spending the night in the room of a five-year-old, complete with butterfly-bedecked counterpane on a bed too short for my legs.
On a shelf neatly stacked with what were clearly prized toys, two Bratz dolls sat stiffly, lording it over Barbie and her Ken, who lay neglected in a dusty corner.
The little tableau is emblematic of the real threat that the Bratz brand has been to Barbie, who celebrates her 50th birthday on March 9.
Anyone with a daughter under 10 is aware of the Bratz phenomenon — edgier, more ethnically diverse dolls that have blown Barbie out of the play pool.
Little girls everywhere have gone batty for the impossibly large-footed, bobble-headed fashion dolls. The Bratz have steadily eaten into Barbie’s market shares since their launch in 2001, totting up a reported $500-million a year ever since.
The two Bratz my five-year-old host had on display — Sasha and Cloe — were dressed rather sportily in little minis and sneakers. Think pouty teen pop star meets Wimbledon whites.
The Bratz invasion has so terrified Mattel, Barbie’s makers, that it successfully sued MGA Entertainment, the makers of Bratz, for copyright infringement. A United States judge ruled late last year that the Bratz’s designs belonged to Mattel and left the way open for the revenue generated by the dolls (a reported $2-billion) to be paid over to Mattel.
The designer of the Bratz dolls, Carter Bryant, was an employee of Mattel at the time he developed the Bratz concept. Under contract, this made all his ideas at the time the property of the toy conglomerate.
He moved on to MGA Entertainment, which has made a massive, and apparently unlawful, fortune out of the dolls.
The Bratz dolls have been accused of all sorts of things — over-sexualising little girls, driving eight-year-olds to bulimia, being evil incarnate. Countless angry parents have signed petitions to have the doll line shut down.
But the Bratz story loosely parallels that of MGA Entertainment’s founder Isaac Larian. An Iranian-born immigrant to the US, he arrived in the country at 17. After earning an engineering degree he went on to create the largest privately owned toy company in the US.
He was an outsider, stepping in from left field, to steal the limelight from his smug and, dare we say it, complacent rival.
By a small legal reprieve, MGA Entertainment is allowed to continue selling the dolls until the end of 2009. But I’m sad to see the Bratz go. I found them refreshing. Here’s why.
Bratz are the girls from the wrong side of the tracks who dared to take on the prom queen. Barbie is as white, middle-class and as steeped in privilege as a plastic toy can be.
The Bratz characters include fro-fabulous Sasha and indo-Asian Yasmin, reportedly named after Larian’s own daughter. For the first time little girls who don’t conform to Western stereotypes can pick up and play with sought-after toys that don’t conform to those stereotypes either.
Bratz have reached a whole new geneÂration of young girls, and the sales show it. Despite winning the case, not even Barbie has been able to save Mattel from the ravages of the economic crisis. The BBC reported that Barbie’s worldwide gross sales fell 6% between April and June last year as the company’s net profit fell 48% to $11.8-million. Barbie sales in the US were down 21%.
And while I hate to blame a plastic toy for the eating disorders of generations of women, Barbie surely started the trend of resembling a runway model — and vice versa.
By contrast, Bratz dolls are so ill-proportioned they look more like cartoon characters in 3D than representations of women. At least little girls know they cannot actually resemble a cartoon.
To be frank, Barbie’s 50 years are beginning to show. And while Barbie execs must have listened with glee to critics moaning about Bratz dolls and their corrupting influence, Mattel seems loath to see Bratz disappear altogether.
The company is reportedly open to settlement discussions on the case.
I predict that as soon as Mattel has secured the Bratz revenue rights, we’ll see Bratz Barbie in stores.
