>>7201318Barbie IS fucking ugly nowadays, and it isn't "evil SJW agenda" shit. It's just Barbie literally has no central theme or message, no specific target audience, and all the good designers at Mattel either quit or settled for designing mediocre shit.
Barbie can't be an everywoman but also be super unique or trendy, and have her brand be targeted to kindergarteners as fairies and mermaids and also be seen as hip and trendy with tweens with the same doll wearing modern clothes. Mattel's flooded the market with every age group but it's resulted in girls simply associating the lowest common denominator shit with the brand.
Plus I've heard MANY times in recent years parents saying to their kids "You can't have Barbie, it's for babies" when the kid is like 8-12 years old. The brand has literally painted itself into a bland, safe corner and it's dying because Mattel isn't taking risks anymore.
Mattel needs to split Barbie off from the Dreamtopia shit, make the career dolls just playsets or fashion packs instead of dolls, and focus on narrowing the brand to Barbie in how she appears on Barbie Style on Instagram rather than trying to make Barbie a princess presidential vet who also looks 16 and 45 at the same time who shops at Target.
It doesn't help that Barbie has no defined friends in the current lines so there's no immediate need for kids to "collect them all". Marketing as every doll as Barbie just makes kids pick maybe two at most cuz why the fuck should they care about getting a black doll with white lips or an Asian doll with the same face as the white doll.
With Monster High, the "friends thing" really helped kids get invested cuz you couldn't have Frankie without her bff, but then her bff needed their boyfriends, and their boyfriends had sisters, and so on and so forth. Barbie being *everyone* just means she's no one then.
