Barbie Creation Station
Lead | IA | UX & UI
Due to the saturation and high adoption of technology-based toys, traditional toy brands were quickly losing market share. To regain a place in the market, Mattel needed to generate awareness with a new customer base that is highly-technology driven, regain market share, and top-of-mind awareness.
Barbie is a fashion doll manufactured by the American toy company Mattel, Inc. and launched in March 1959. Barbie is the figurehead of a brand of Mattel dolls and accessories, including other family members and collectible dolls.
FAO Schwarz is an American toy brand and store. The company is known for its high-end toys, life-sized stuffed animals, interactive experiences, and brand integrations.
The Challenge:
Create an immersive physical and digital experience. Offering both parent and child a fun, engaging, once in a lifetime shopping opportunity to create their own Barbie from scratch, have it assembled on-site, and watch it in a physical and digital catwalk show.
In partnership with FAO Schwarz, the Barbie Creation Station would evolve from imagination to reality, setting the precedent for our customers experience. The experience included interactive touch-screen kiosks, a seamlessly integrated a POS system, digital waiting list, and finally their Barbie making a debut on a physical and digital catwalk.
The entire experience was set up in a four-part process:
The Approach:
1 . Engage & Inspire
The Barbie Creation Station occupied the most square feet of any instillation in FAO’s history. This fact alone attracts attention from almost all who pass by, inside and outside. If that wasn’t enough, the area is covered in monitors, speakers, and a real physical runway show for your custom Barbie. The audio was produced to attract customers attention, enticing them to engage with
the experience through spoken and instrumental audio. The video screens above the kiosks display rotating animations to gain customers attention, simultaneously educating and inspiring them to use the touch screen kiosks directly below.
2 . Selection Experience
Once engaged, the customer would be seated at the kiosk and asked to enter their name, select their Barbie, and then presented with the full kiosk experience. Including selecting various accessories, clothing, and custom swag for their personalized Barbie.
I was responsible for the very extensive user flows of this experience to insure there were no dead ends and that all options flowed intuitively for the users. I also created wireframes, user interface designs, animation storyboards, and illustrations for this experience.
3 . Order Preparation
Once the selection process is complete the users sale information along with their name seamlessly interfaces with the POS system calculating the overall sale of the Barbie, her clothing, and accessories. The kiosk displays a small completion animation, provides the user with an option to see their styled
Barbie in a runway show and instructs the customer to head to the register. If the runway show is selected, the kiosk also sends the sale/item information to a team of employees “behind the scenes” that are literally assembling the custom Barbie to the customer’s specifications.
4 . POS & Runway Show
If the user opted for the runway show, upon payment, their name would be added to the digital waiting list behind the sales counter. This list displayed the order in which customers Barbie’s would be making their runway debut. When your name reaches the top of the list, an animation of Barbie and her friends would begin playing to the left and right of the physical runway.
The lights would dim, music and the sounds of camera flashes were played, and finally a fog machine would add to the allure. This was all handled by our back end development managing the POS, order of runway shows and the finale, with your very own animation runway show and physical Barbie making her runway debut.
5 . THE RESULTS
The Styled by Me Barbie campaign was such an overwhelming success that Mattel engaged our team to develop a re-imagined version of this experience for their House of Barbie store in Shanghai. Both the New York and Shanghai experiences garnered quite a fan fair. Styled By Me Barbie was a fan favorite that began with mothers and daughters, bloggers, and industry publications, ultimately covered in consumer magazines and even discussed on a segment of the Oprah Winfrey show.