Positive Impact from Barbie: The Hidden Heroes Behind It All

Let’s say that positive change is a beautiful house.

We rightly fall in love with the shape, the trim, the windows that let us see epic adornments inside.

We often don’t see or acknowledge what is by far the most important and pivotal accomplishment that enabled the assemblage of all the positive we had fallen in love with:

The foundation of the house.

The foundation that goes deeply into the actual earth, the real world, so that everything else is able to proudly stand.

This writing is to shine a light on the yet unsung foundation of accomplishment truly responsible for all goodness springing from the current phenomenom of the Barbie movie.

While the film and its story are indeed generating positive impact in the world, as was its intent, it’s important to understand that the film is literally and figuratively the projection of the real change-mechanism for Barbie, the foundation of it all, that had almost eight years ago courageously made its way into the world.

Before illuminating that, it’s vital to recognize the hugely-deserved applause going on for the big, honest, and brave vision of this film. It managed to alchemize many potential political pitfalls into a profound story and compass for cultural evolution. It did this through Barbie’s societal and spiritual awakening while on one of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journeys into today’s real world. Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, and Mattel all deserve the biggest accolades for the willingness, vision and courage it took to commit to a story and script like this. The enormous media recognition about this level of talent daring to be connected to a story, not just about a toy, but a toy with a once maligned past, and the courage of Mattel leadership to dare to be honest and self-effacing in the story and script, is all hugely merited and right on.

Yet that beautiful house of change and positive impact we see as we savor our popcorn could only have been built had there been an epic foundation already laid, which like Barbie in the film, was making contact with the very real world, as in the terra-firma corridors and shelves of the Walmarts, Targets, and the beautifully littered floors of girls’ bedrooms. Had eight years ago, Barbie remained an absurdly shaped, white blonde woman, and thereby a pariah to a new cultural movement around diversity, body image, inclusion, authentic and empowered womanhood, would any of the aforementioned courage, willingness and vision have been even able to exist?

No.

It would not.

It could not. The film itself reveals why. It showcases Barbies of all shapes, sizes, colors, races, with disabilities, prosthetics, etc. Did it fabricate them all up just for the film, to enable the story to seem worthy and relax the cultural goodness gauges in the talent, studio, brand, critics, and most importantly, today’s audiences? Of course not. These Barbies had for years been already conceived, designed, created and distributed into the real world with absolutely no knowledge or awareness of a future film. And that it had already become the truth of this toy, that girls and their parents had already acknowledged this evolution from the least to the most diversified doll in the world, is what made everything else possible: From the talent taking it on, the story being feasable, the C-suite good with the all-open script and self-effacing humor, the $145M budget, the $500M at the box office so far, the millions and millions of girls in theaters seeing a more expansive, post-patriarchal aperture of possibility for their future selves.

Why and how?

If you stay seated in the theater through the credit roll, to what is actually the last few seconds of the projected film — after listings of cast, production, music attributions, locations, caterers, etc., just before the lights go on and most of the crowd is walking back up the aisles, you’ll see a “Special Thanks” section with names too small to really read. In those few lines of names you may find this one: “Kim Culmone”.

Kim Culmone is the SVP Global Head of Barbie and Doll Design at Mattel. Years ago she answered an inner calling to use her life and vocation to help the marginalized and disenfranchised be elevated to equality in the world. And that her calling could be served by having these people be seen, heard, and represented as toys for children and through the act of play itself given its impact on children’s neurology and empathy. Surrounding her was a cross-division team of Design, Insights, and PR/Marketing who shared the vision as they together valiantly brought it through the halls of power at Mattel and then into the halls of even greater power of the human family. In the NYT review of the film, Greta Gerwig herself describes her first discovering this team’s transformation of Barbie as she embedded at Mattel for research: “…this is extraordinary! This is a very high spiritual work that they’ve done!”

It’s critically important to note, that even before the film was started, back in 2020, the direction to diversify Barbie had proven not just good for society, but good for business, as it generated a 28% quarterly increase in revenue. The highest in 20 years. It was attributed directly to the diversification and modernization of Barbie. Girls of all kinds, and their parents, were seeing themselves for the first time and responding with vigor.

In 2012, Harvard professors, Porter and Kramer, published a world-changing vision called “Creating Shared Value”. It spoke to the reinvention of capitalism and the future of business and positive impact coming together in purposeful enterprise where goods and services would serve profit and positive impact simultaneously. Barbie and the Barbie movie are marvelous and emblematic examples of what 21st century shared value can look like and how it can be exquisitely executed through cross-sector collaboration. All while Barbie is also driving a powerful social impact initiative called “The Dream Gap” to empower girls to know they can break out of any stereotypes and be anything they want to be.

The Barbie film clearly seeks to be a powerful extension of shared value ideals and to be a cultural accelerant for our evolution out of sexism, racism, and stereotyping. And yet we all know, before its projection reaches the screen, there needs to be an audience in the theater. And for there to be an audience, there needs to be a great story being projected. A great story needs serious talent to write, direct, perform and produce it. Serious talent today require projects that can add positively to their personal brand luster by being in alignment with the trajectory of the cultural gestalt. Had Barbie not already been in alignment with that trajectory and actively accelerating it, there would be no giant talent, no brilliant story, no $500M (and counting), no insanely great brand partnerships, no brave moves by studio or brand executives, and no droves of audiences creating the highest grossing weekend ever for a female director.

Behind the projection on the screen, and behind the audience in the theater, the film is being projected through machinery up in the booth.

But that is not where it all starts.

It starts deeper in the machinery with a very, very bright light.

That light enables everything. It blasts through the machinery, through the film and story, through the media celebrating the triumph of the brave talent, through the cavernous expanse of the theater, through our popcorn and smartphone text sneaks, through the dreams and aspirations of a little girl in the second row, and then onto the screen. We think we then see pink, purple, Barbies, Kens, beach scapes, Will Ferrel, and DreamHouses.

But the truth is we’re not seeing that.

Our brain makes those things up. What we’re really seeing is that original bright light now projected and reflected in different shapes and hues dancing together in a way that tells a story inside us.

That original, very, very bright light, are the hearts and minds of that yet unsung group of people deep within the machinery of a giant company who years ago saw that what they were creating could not just entertain the world but help evolve it. No thought of Oscars, just the potential of a girl with cerebral palsy in a wheelchair seeing herself as an iconic toy high on a shelf for the first time and then knowing she could be anything.

The bright light in the machinery were the ones who truly, and bravely, were the very first to bring Barbie into the real world.