HOW BARBIE GOT HER GROOVE BACK

A Barbie in a Mermaid Tale Packaging Case Study

older barbie illustration

BEFORE

Barbie was going through a midlife crisis.

She was too young, not relevant, sales were down, and she needed a makeover. I was placed on a team to help make her relevant again for an entertainment line called Barbie in a Mermaid Tale.

My role as an Art Director in Barbie Packaging was to lead the entertainment branding and packaging figuring out the look and feel before the movie is written.

I worked with a global team of product designers, copywriters, engineers, scriptwriters, producers, publishing department, licensing department, executive leadership, and our overseas partners.

The ask was to go bold, own PMS 219 pink, channel the fashion runway, and make her surfer cool.

barbie mermaid tale DVD

AFTER

barbie mermaid tale packaging mood board

All projects start with a mood board to share across groups and to get the marketing and sales groups excited.

barbie mermaid tale packaging logo

Then the first actual asset is the logo, it goes on everything and get translated in to over 20 languages.

barbie mermaid tale packaging

A key deliverable is making sure the communication of our feature doll is clear. The hardest part was communicating in 10 languages so we quickly were going from a beautiful crafted sentence to something so simple like “surfer to mermaid” or “tail becomes hoodie” and even went down to only visuals like an arrow and motion blur.

Since it was a transitional design in our history, you still see swirls which were of the older line look but I incorporated it to look like abstract waves and then added in a surfboard on the front. The background was either underwater or a sunset surf scene that was the photoshop magic of about 10 pictures to get it just right.

I wanted to make less waste and so the engineer and I came up with a half in, half out plastic cover on the package. Everyone was so worried about her hair! (GASP!) I knew it would look amazing and on the plus side, it saved on the bottom line to have less plastic so the product team could back in details on the actual doll.

barbie mermaid tale packaging

We even realized that if we put some of the dolls horizontal (again, gasps could be heard in the building), we could have them look like they were swimming on shelf. It just needed some marketing adjustments as early as possible for planograms so they would fit. It is a lot of work to define and refine planogram space.

barbie mermaid tale packaging
barbie mermaid tale packaging
barbie mermaid tale packaging
barbie mermaid tale packaging
barbie mermaid tale packaging
barbie mermaid tale packaging

I felt really proud even to this day in taking down the percent of package plastic that we used and figuring out how to keep our key doll looking good in transit and on shelf.

You have to have your presentations buttoned up and take them on the journey, every time because marketing and executive leadership forgets and makes more changes. I learned to start a presentation with “The last time you saw this…” and “The strategy was…” and then end it with “Our key takeaways and next steps are…”

barbie mermaid tale book
barbie mermaid tale
barbie mermaid tale DVD
brett cambria

Having built good relationships with my overseas team, I was able to take the learnings from this project and more to work on-site in Hong Kong for 3 months for Mattel to help streamline the process and then bring feedback to the US office and share my experience.

I felt honored to be a part of such a significant brand shift in Barbie history. The second historical shift came during the redesign of the Fashionistas. Check out that case study for more detail.

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