How do you save a brand that everyone knows, but not everybody likes?
Back in 2014, the toy company Mattel needed an answer to that question—fast. It owns popular brands like Hot Wheels and Fisher-Price, but one of its consistently top-selling products has long been Barbie. The tall, blonde doll enjoyed ubiquity for over half a century, but her popularity was slipping. To many people, Barbie had come to represent outdated standards of beauty and gender norms, and sales had dropped 20% in the prior two years alone. So the company called Richard Dickson, a former Mattel executive who’d left to run a fashion brand, and asked him to come back and save the famed doll. “We were
