by M. G. Lord
Instead of reworking the doll, Shackelford implemented a market "segmentation strategy," which she thinks helped Barbie achieve record sales.
She did this by "segmenting the market," introducing dolls with different themes and then "creating whole worlds around them." Beginning about 1980, Mattel issued separate dolls for each of the major play patterns. There was a "hairplay" doll that came with styling paraphernalia; a "lifestyle" doll that came with sporting equipment; and a "glamour" doll that came with a gaudy dress. The strategy benefited Mattel in two major ways: because the costumes were sold on dolls, Mattel could charge more for them, and the variety encouraged girls to own more than one doll.
Shackelford got into the toy and novelty business as an entrepreneur, where her unusual combination of talents—Ruth Handler's business sense and Elliot Handler's art background—served her well. After graduating from Southern Illinois University with a degree in art, she moved to New York and taught grade school. "I was in this smock going from room to room with my paintbrushes—not my idea of a career," she said. So she took one of her art lessons, turned it into a toy, and sold the idea to a toy company, which led to more ideas for more companies. Later she went into manufacturing, inventing and producing an inflatable boot-tree designed to hold the knee-high footwear worn with miniskirts. But when hemlines fell, sales slowed, and to recoup her $100,000 investment, she wound up loading the trees into a truck and selling them herself across the country.
Shackelford learned the toy business from industry veterans, but not in a formal seminar. "When I started designing toys, I was twenty-four years old, and the only way I could get an appointment was to get one at four o'clock for cocktails," she said. "It was me and my partner—who was very voluptuous, like Barbie." When they showed a design, they'd ask for criticism, and the male executives would share what they had learned on the job. "I got stories from back in the 1940s. People were telling me what toys worked, why they didn't work," she explained. "And I was like a sponge. You pick all this stuff up. And suddenly you begin to perceive what 'market niching' is—you don't know the right words for it, but you begin to see." Working at Mattel was, for her, the culmination of this apprenticeship; she felt she "knew how to drive" but had finally gotten into "a really good car—one that didn't shake and you were sure wasn't going to run out of gas halfway there."
Working her way west after the boot-tree fiasco, Shackelford took a job with the Chicago-based toy design firm of Marvin Glass & Associates, which, until its demise in 1988, was preeminent in its field. Like Barbie marketing director Rita Rao, who left Mattel in 1979, Shackelford does not describe herself as a "feminist." But she does acknowledge a commitment to hiring and promoting women. She feels Mattel, for purely practical reasons, offers great opportunities to women: "They have more girls' volume than any other toy company . . . and no matter what anybody says about the marketers, you can't have that much girl product run by nothing but men. You need a balance." Yet given her own history, when it came to advancement in a male-run field, she could hardly pretend that a woman's appearance meant nothing.
Perhaps even more than Shackelford, Jill Elikann Barad, who joined Mattel in 1981 and was made its CEO in 1992, understands the value of appearance—and how to create a look that sells. While still an undergraduate at New York's Queens College, she traveled around the East Coast as a beauty consultant for Love Cosmetics. A drama major who graduated in 1973, she briefly flirted with an acting career, landing a nonspeaking part as Miss Italian America in Barbarella producer Dino De Laurentiis's film Crazy Joe; but she renounced greasepaint for Coty Cosmetics—ascending, in a record three years, from a lowly trainer of department store demonstrators to brand manager of its entire line. Nor did marriage to Paramount executive Thomas Barad detour her rise. When she relocated to Los Angeles in 1978, the Wells, Rich, Greene ad agency put her in charge of its Max Factor account. Even her application to Mattel—made after taking time off to have a baby—stressed her beauty know-how: she approached the company with a plan to sell cosmetics to children.
Barad was not, however, permitted to realize her vision immediately. Slime was still an important product at Mattel, and Barad's first assignment was to sell it in its then-current incarnation, A Bad Case of Worms, which featured, besides the popular green glop, brown vinyl crawlers. The modified Slime also functioned as an activity toy. If you threw it against a wall, it would stick and wriggle down. Barad rose to the occasion but ultimately confronted her boss, Tom Kalinske, and asked for greater responsibility on an aspect of girls' toys. He assigned her to work with Shackelford on Barbie. While she was pregnant with her second child she was promoted to marketing director, and what can be described as the doll's golden era began.
A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured "Hey There, Barbie Girl" sung to the tune of "Georgy Girl," Mattel launched a startling series of ads that toyed with female empowerment. Its slogan was "We Girls Can Do Anything," and its launch commercial, driven by an irresistibly upbeat soundtrack, was a sort of feminist Chariots of Fire. Responding to the increased number of women with jobs, the ad opens at the end of a workday with a little girl rushing to meet her business-suited mother and carrying her mother's briefcase into the house. A female voice says, "You know it, and so does your little girl." Then a chorus sings, "We girls can do anything."
The ad plays with the possibility of unconventional gender roles. A rough-looking Little Leaguer of uncertain gender swaggers onscreen. She yanks off her baseball cap, her long hair tumbles down, and—sigh of relief—she grabs a particularly frilly Barbie doll. (The message: Barbie is an amulet to prevent athletic girls from growing up into hulking, masculine women.) There are images of gymnasts executing complicated stunts and a toddler learning to tie her shoelaces. (The message: Even seemingly minor achievements are still achievements.) But the shot with the most radical message takes place in a laboratory where a frizzy-haired, myopic brunette peers into a microscope. Since the seventies, Barbie commercials had featured little girls of different races and hair colors, but they were always pretty. Of her days in acting school, Tracy Ullman remarked in TV Guide that she was the "ugly kid with the brown hair and the big nose who didn't get [cast in] the Barbie commercials." With "We Girls," however, Barbie extends her tiny hand to bookish ugly ducklings; no longer a snooty sorority rush chairman, she is "big-tent" Barbie.
Although the ad, and, by extension, the whole career Barbie series, is not without problematic and contradictory content, it is such a departure from the doll's fatuous, disco positioning in the seventies that one's jaw tends to drop. And one wonders: How on earth did it happen?
One factor was the Barbie group at Ogilvy & Mather, the ad agency that had, in the seventies, acquired Carson/Roberts. By 1984—a year after Sally Ride's landmark space flight, the same year as Geraldine Ferraro's historic bid for the U.S. vice presidency—Mattel urged O&M creative director Elaine Haller and writer Barbara Lui to, in Lui's words, "express where women were and where they wanted their daughters to be at the time." Upon hearing that, Lui told me last year, she remembered her own childhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "My mother's words came to me," she said. "My name is Barbara—I was called Bobbie at home—and my mother used to say, 'Bobbie, you can do anything,' " which, with a few revisions, became the doll's new slogan: "We girls can do anything, right, Barbie?"
And in 1985, it seemed "we girls" actually could. For the first time since the sixties, Barbie, in her Day-to-Night incarnation, was positioned as a career woman by career women who knew what it took to achieve in the business world. (Not in an idealized world, but in the one that really existed.)
What they came up with was Day-to-Night Barbie, a yuppie princess, equipped to charge, network, and follow the market. Her attache case contains a credit card, a business card, a newspaper, and a calculator. Although her suit is baby-blanket pink rather than boardroom blue, it is tastefully cut and covers her knees. Her ou
tfit, however, does more than look good during the day. Turn it inside out, and it is a fussy, glittery evening dress.
To decode the meaning of Day-to-Night Barbie, one must turn to the work of Joan Riviere, a female Freudian psychoanalyst, who in 1929 published an essay about a pattern she had begun to notice among her professionally accomplished female analysands. Many powerful women, Riviere discovered, were uncomfortable with their masculine strivings; to conceal them, they overcompensated, decking themselves out like caricatures of women. One woman, after giving a successful lecture, flirted idiotically and inappropriately; she also delivered her presentation in cartoonishly feminine clothes. Others exaggerated different aspects of femininity, and one even dreamt that she had been saved from a precipitous fall by wearing a mask. "Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask," Riviere wrote, "both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if [a woman] was found to possess it—much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove he has not the stolen goods."
In her book Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary, psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan uses the term homeovestism for this strategy of cloaking one's cross-gender strivings by disguising oneself as a parody of one's own sex. It is the reverse of transvestism, in which one acts out one's cross-gender impulses by wearing the clothes of the opposite sex. Nor is homeovestism practiced exclusively by women. A male homeovestite, for instance, might mask his feminine urges by dressing up like Norman Schwarzkopf. In literature, Scarlett O'Hara seems a convincing example of a female homeovestite. She is as aggressive and tenacious as any biological male, but she conceals it behind fluttering eyelashes and an affected fragility. Of course, the only people who know they are homeovestites are the homeovestites themselves. It is, I suppose, possible for a woman to tart up like a Gabor sister and not know she is a caricature. But if a high-powered female executive wears enough makeup for a Kabuki performance, negotiates in a purr, tosses her hair coquettishly, unbuttons more than two buttons on her clinging silk blouse, and generally vamps around the conference table, she may well be a homeovestite.
Day-to-Night Barbie strikes me as a teaching implement for homeovestism. Clearly, the doll is meant to be a serious professional; her case contains the tools for executive achievement, where the idea of possessing a "tool," a colloquialism for the penis, implies a sort of phallic empowerment. Her nighttime outfit, however, is about hiding those "tools." Like the thief who turns out his pockets, the doll disguises herself by exposing herself. Her shoulders are bare; her toes are uncovered; her translucent skirt flutters around her legs. She is fluffy, girlish, vulnerable. By day, a virago; by night, Little Bo Peep.
Mattel issued Day-to-Night ensembles for other vocations as well. By rearranging her costume, any female achiever—teacher, dress designer, TV news reporter—can masquerade as Maria Maples or Donna Rice. Ken also has a Day-to-Night incarnation, but his seems to reflect cross-class rather than cross-gender strivings. By day, a TV sports reporter; by night, a Wayne Newton impersonator.
Although Kaplan categorizes homeovestism as a "perverse strategy," it strikes me as both cynical and pragmatic. Masculine business clothing has always been power-coded; something as subtle as the width of a pinstripe can signal an executive's status. But for women, the coding is less easy to decipher. Whether one likes it or not, there is a strong power-pulchritude nexus in business; making it to the top in a fashion or entertainment field involves not just the bottom line, but the hemline, neckline, hairline, etc. Of course too much glamour can be as bad as not enough. It interferes with a woman's ability to be taken seriously. But if one has to err, Barbie teaches, better soignee than sorry.
Barbie's 1986 astronaut incarnation certainly weighs in on the side of glamour. When Barbie first blasted off in 1965, she wore a baggy gray spacesuit. By 1986, you wouldn't catch her in that kind of shmatte. She comes with a hot pink miniskirt, a clear plastic helmet, sleek pink bodysuit, even silver space lingerie. "I thought Barbie would dress if she were on the moon," said Carol Spencer, the outfit's designer.
She-Ra, Princess of Power, is another Mattel toy from this period that explores the link between female strength and female beauty. Promoted with the slogan, "The fate of the world is in the hands of one beautiful girl," She-Ra, a five-and-a-half-inch action figure, was introduced as the sister of Mattel's He-Man in 1985, the same year as Day-to-Night Barbie. He-Man by then required no introduction. On the market since 1982, he and his fellow Masters of the Universe, based on a popular children's television show, were by 1984 second in sales only to Barbie.
She-Ra inhabits a world called Etheria, a curious mix of Middle Earth and Rodeo Drive. From what the catalogue terms its "plush rug and free-standing fireplace" to its "clothes tree for shields, swords and capes," She-Ra's Crystal Castle is a sort of Valhalla 90210, populated by sturdy, breast-plated females reminiscent of the biker Valkyries in Charles Ludlum's Wagnerian satire, Der Ring Gott Farblonjet. There is a villain named Catra ("Jealous Beauty!" the catalogue calls her), a secret agent named Double Trouble (who literally has two faces), a boyfriend named Bow, and several assorted allies including Castaspella, an "enchantress who hypnotizes." Because of their long, combable hair and their sparkling outfits the figures were introduced as "fashion dolls," but this group doesn't just change its clothes. Children can use the dolls to act out a struggle between females for the title of "most powerful woman in the Universe."
Although She-Ra is not outfitted for the boardroom, the doll, perhaps even more than Day-to-Night Barbie, seems to be an instructional tool for corporate achievement. She-Ra's state of nature is a state of perpetual war. All the inhabitants are armed, and some of them are dangerous. Women are designated as jealous, manipulative (spell-casting), and Janus-faced. And of all the weapons each doll possesses, perhaps the most potent is her beauty.
While She-Ra was not a flop—in the first of her two years on the market, she generated about $65 million in domestic sales—she never approached Barbie. Some say this is because the dolls were too robust. "They looked like lady wrestlers," observed collector Beauregard Houston-Montgomery. But I suspect She-Ra's short life was predicated on metaphor. No matter what she wears, Barbie is a female fertility archetype. She-Ra, by contrast, lacked Barbie's pronglike feet; she and her pals could not plunge their toes into the earth, they merely stood solidly upon it. They had no totemic link to the power of the Great Mother. Their abundant hair and radioactive eye makeup are not enough. If Barbie is pure physical yin, they are, alas, rather yang.
Barad was inspired to create She-Ra and her world after a conversation with her sister, who had disparaged toymakers for inflicting silly, frilly playthings on American daughters. "It seemed time to offer little girls a role model who also had strength and power," Barad told Working Woman in 1990. And to play out the other early-eighties fantasy—"having it all," where "all" referred to children and a career—Barad invented the Heart Family, a Barbie-sized couple that, unlike Barbie and Ken, were married and had a brood of plastic children.
The She-Ra state of war, however, far more than the Heart household's domesticity, reflected the atmosphere at Mattel during the dolls' development. By 1984, CEO Arthur Spear's diversification strategy had proved disastrous. Mattel was on the brink of bankruptcy. It had begun the year burdened by a staggering $394 million loss from the previous year. Like the executives at Warner Communications' Atari division, Spear had been seduced by the seeming boundlessness of the home video game market. To him, the country's craving for the likes of Pac-Man and Space Invaders looked insatiable. Inspired by Atari's gargantuan profits—from 1979 to 1980 Atari's sales increased from $238.1 million to $512.7 million—Mattel in 1980 introduced Intellivision, a competitor to Atari's home video system that in 1981 did, in fact, initially do well. The company's electronics division was also at work on a line of home computers.
But in 1983, when the home video game market crashed, Mattel crashed with it. Despe
rate to stay afloat, it began unloading its subsidiaries— Western Publishing, Circus World, Monogram Models—even its own electronics division. Ironically, all the companies whose stability was intended to offset the toy world's volatility were undergoing upheavals. And toys— particularly Barbie—were thriving.
It could be said that Barbie saved Mattel. Lured by her track record of profitability, venture capitalist E. M. Warburg, Pincus & Company, junk-bond king Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., and merchant banking firm Riordan & Joseph supplied the toymaker with $231 million in capital in July 1984. It was, given her penchant for hanging out with celebrities, a classic Barbie moment. Her white knight at Drexel was none other than Michael Milken himself. The deal, however, was a huge gamble for Mattel's management and a reflection of its desperate straits. It had to risk losing control of the company to gain the funds to continue operating. The group was given a 45 percent voting interest in the toymaker; if, however, Mattel couldn't pay dividends on a new preferred stock held by the investors, each of their shares would inflate to 1.5 votes—giving them a controlling interest of 51 percent.
By December 1984, Mattel had rebounded, reporting an 81 percent increase in its fiscal third-quarter profit. This enabled it to pay off the dividends it owed on its preferred stock and, in 1985, to float another $100 million in junk bonds.
With Mattel's future resting on Barbie's slight shoulders, the Barbie team, like the warriors in Etheria, fought bitterly to rebuff her competitors—particularly a "full frontal attack," as Shackelford put it, from a doll called Jem. In the fall of 1985, Shackelford learned from undercover sources that Hasbro was planning to launch a new rock star fashion doll at Toy Fair in February. "All we needed to know was the theme," she said. "Within five minutes, we had a war council. Within an hour, we thought of what we were going to do." By the time Toy Fair rolled around, Mattel brought out an MTV version of Barbie—Barbie and the Rockers—with greater fanfare than Hasbro had prepared for Jem. Mattel even beat Hasbro at shipping its dolls to stores. But the thing that really killed Jem, doll experts say, was her size—twelve and a half inches—which made her too tall to wear Barbie's clothes. "If you're going to go up against General Motors," says doll dealer Joe Blitman, "you'd better be the same size."
