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This is Build for Tomorrow, a podcast about the smartest solutions to our most misunderstood

problems. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, and in each episode, I take something that seems concerning or confusing

today and figure out where it came from, what important things we're missing, and how

we can create more opportunity tomorrow.

What do you think when I say the name Barbie?

Maybe you think something neutral, like classic toy for girls, or you're nostalgic

because you played with Barbie as a kid, or you think any number of negative things, like

harmful body image, outdated gender stereotypes. Well, in the year 2014, if you were an executive

at Mattel, the massive toy company that owns Barbie, here is what

you would have thought about Barbie.

You would have thought, this is a holy hell five-alarm fire, because although Mattel had

plenty of other classic toys in its toy chest, like Hot Wheels, Fisher Price, American

Girl, and Uno, Barbie is by far its biggest moneymaker. And yet, back in 2014,

Barbie was slipping. Sales had declined 20% in the last two years alone. Consumers said Barbie

was behind the times. Parents weren't comfortable giving one to their girls. So again,

if you're an executive at Mattel, this is not just about one toy falling

out of favor. This is an existential crisis. So what do you do? Well, you call someone who can fix it.

And for Mattel, that meant calling a former Mattel executive named Richard Dixon, who had left

to run a fashion company. And then got a call back almost five years later from Mattel inviting me to come back to play. Is that how they say it, Mattel, or is that just your own? I feel like Mattel should be full of play talk. Yeah, yeah. Well, it wasn't quite that playful. Of course it wasn't. This was no time for play. This was time for work. And speaking of work, that dinging sound was

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