Live From NEMOA: The Girl Business
When asked what business American Girl is in, Ellen Brothers doesn’t answer direct marketing or retail or catalogs. She says her company is in “the girl business.”
Brothers, president of American Girl and executive vice president of it’s parent company, Mattel Inc., told attendees at the New England Mail Order Association’s spring conference in Cambridge, MA on Thursday that not limiting itself to a particular marketing channel or approach has been key to the company’s growth.
For a kitchen table start-up founded in 1986, the company grew fast. In its first decade alone, the company went from five employees to 1,000, and from 10,000 square foot of warehouse space to over one million.
Marketers with young daughters are likely very familiar with the Middleton, WI-based cataloger, which sells books and dolls (and scads of doll clothing and accessories) based on a line of historical and contemporary characters created by the company.
The books always come before the dolls, said Brothers, noting that each of the eight characters in the “American Girls Collection” historical line have a series of paperback books. ‘You can’t buy one of our dolls without a book,” she noted, adding that the company has sold over 100 million books.
On the contemporary side, the company also produces American Girl magazine, which has 650,000 subscribers and receives 10,000 pieces of mail per issue. The brand is being further grown by a biweekly syndicated newspaper column that will reprint magazine content.
The American Girl Today line of more modern dolls features 21 different dolls of different skin tones and hair types, and has a complimentary “dress like your doll” clothing line for little girls.
For the first 10 years, the catalog was the company’s sole marketing vehicle. The company purchases no space or television, instead going towards alternative forms of promotion, such as bind-in cards in all its books and a robust Web site that now generates 30% of the company’s first time orders. The catalog has 1.5 million last-12-month buyers, but does not rent its file, only doing occasional exchanges.
The company has opened two American Girl Place retail stores in Chicago and Manhattan. The shops are designed as destinations with theaters, cafes and doll hair salons in addition to shopping. The average customer visit is over two hours, said Brothers. A possible third store, likely on the West Coast, is under consideration.
The brand will be further extended this year with the company’s first television movie, which will be produced by Julia Roberts’ production company and shown on The WB. An online sweepstakes offering a behind the scenes set visit has already generated over 65,000 entries.
Brothers conceded that it is a bit ironic that the company was acquired by Mattel, since American Girl was originally created to be the antithesis of Barbie. But, the marketing match has been successful so far, she said.
American Girl has served as a direct division of Mattel, which has been branching out into other direct response ventures targeting niches such as Barbie and Matchbox collectors. But, she noted, the doll maker does have to be careful to not upset titans like Wal-Mart, which are gaining a monopoly on the retail toy space.
The company isn’t likely to move beyond its target demographic of girls between ages 6 and 12, she said, noting that once you get into the tween and teen ages categories, one has to address such “scary things like boys and puberty.” Going after the “American Boy” market was considered prior to the Mattel acquisition, but hasn’t been pursued, and the preschool market is handled by Mattel’s Fisher-Price brand.
