How Bratz is trying to revive its brand with a TikTok series aimed at adults

In the so-called year of the doll, Bratz is looking to make a comeback. The MGA Entertainment-owned doll and media franchise, however, is not necessarily looking to woo a new audience of Gen Z and Gen Alpha to its edgier dolls, but rather appeal to many of the girls who grew up playing with Bratz dolls and are now in their 20s and 30s. Bratz launched a new social media series last month called “Always Bratz” that’s playing to young women’s nostalgia for the brand by reuniting and aging up its four original Bratz dolls: Yasmin, Cloe, Sasha and Jade. The series, which follows the four characters through the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, is specifically designed to resonate with Bratz fans who enjoyed the brand’s media lineup of TV series, movies and music albums as kids, Bratz’s brand manager Adrianne Cekan told Ad Age. It’s a strategy that closely mirrors that of Mattel’s “Barbie” movie, which similarly leveraged nostalgic references to the franchise and adopted a mature tone and raunchy jokes to appeal directly to older Barbie fans rather than young girls who still play with its dolls. In Bratz’s case, the brand is specifically targeting its core demographic of 20-to-35-year-old women by aging Yasmin, Cloe, Sasha and Jade from teens to young adults, ensuring “they were at a point in their lives that felt relatable to the fandom,” Cekan said. @bratz *ALWAYZ BRATZ* episode 2 part 2 📽️ Make sure to watch both parts 1 and 2 here on Instagram, or the full two minute episode in one post over on our Tiktok ( @bratz )👄📼 #bratz ♬ original sound - bratz MGA has somewhat neglected Bratz in recent years in favor of its other doll brands, such as its successful LOL Surprise franchise, said Chris Byrne, a toy analyst and consultant. LOL Surprise, a doll brand launched in 2016, was the best-selling toy brand in the U.S. in 2020 and brought in $25 billion in sales that year alone, according to MGA. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs “Alwayz Bratz” reflects the company’s efforts to revitalize the brand by capitalizing on the growing “kidult” phenomenon of adult consumers keen to collect toys and other items typically considered childish, Byrne said. This is a sentiment that Mindy Puente-Escalera, MGA’s senior VP of global licensing, echoed in a recent interview with License Global. “Over the last 21 years, the girls with a passion for fashion have taken their place in the cultural zeitgeist and, in the last few years, have made an especially large resurgence in fashion and pop culture spaces,” she said. “Bratz differs from some of our other IP as it appeals to, and is marketed to, a young adult or ‘kidult’ audience who grew up on the brand.” Also: A TikTok creator's dark humor doll videos attract big brands Bratz’s recent release of its first-ever celebrity doll, in partnership with Kylie Jenner, further demonstrates the brand’s redoubled focus on appealing to potential doll collectors in their 20s and early 30s, Byrne said. These types of collector-oriented dolls aimed at adults rather than kids have been “one of the hallmarks of the Barbie brand” since the 1980s, when the brand was roughly the same age as Bratz is now, he said. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Bratz (@bratz) Bratz’s collaboration with Jenner attracted some backlash in response to the dolls’ skin tones being darker than Jenner’s, tying into ongoing accusations of “blackfishing”—when a non-Black person attempts to look Black through makeup, excessive tanning or other appearance changes—leveled against the Kardashian family. The brand chose to partner with Jenner to appeal as part of its "continued efforts to reconnect with the Gen Z and millennial audiences" while introducing “a contemporary style icon who grew up on the dolls into the Bratz Pack," Bratz said in an email. Battling Barbie Bratz going toe-to-toe with Barbie is nothing new. The two doll brands have been locked in a fierce rivalry that traces back to Bratz’s 2001 founding by ex-Mattel employee Carter Bryant. When Bratz began to threaten Barbie’s chokehold on the doll category—even briefly usurping Barbie’s position as the top-selling doll in the U.K. in 2004—Mattel kicked off a long-running legal battle against MGA Entertainment over which company owned the rights to Bratz, alleging Bryant developed the rival dolls while still employed by Mattel. Though MGA ultimately emerged victorious from the series of lawsuits in 2011, tensions between the two doll brands have continued to simmer. While Barbie maintains a hold on market share in the doll category, some consumers have a greater affinity for Bratz than Barbie—particularly on social media, where user-generated content tied to Bratz dolls amassed 1.7 trillion views, more than 12 times that of Barbie content, between 2018 and 2021, according to W Magazine. Mattel’s second-quarter worldwide billings of Barbie dolls slipped 6% from a year earlier. (The movie opened in July, during the third quarter.) Unlike Barbie, which has “always wanted the implied if not explicit approval of moms” and never strayed too far from the standards of traditional fashion dolls, “Bratz was always about edgy fashion and these ‘right off the runway’ looks” and “did an end run around mom and marketed it to kids, so mom bought it because the kids wanted it,” Byrne said. And Bratz dolls and their facial features have always possessed a sort of ethnic ambiguity meant to allow more children to see themselves in the dolls, he added, whereas the Barbie brand for many years centered around its original white doll with blond hair. Bratz’s “core four” dolls who have starred in its media franchise and return for “Always Bratz” highlight the diversity the brand’s dolls have represented since its inception—Yasmin is Latina, Cloe is white, Jade is Asian and Sasha is Black. “One of the big things that got me into this brand was the content and the storytelling,” Cekan, a self-proclaimed “Bratz superfan,” said. “That [content] is part of what brings the magic to the brand that brings these characters to life, and is what has really helped build that Bratz fanbase and that connection with the fans.” “We’ve been seeing requests for that narrative, storytelling-type content constantly on social media,” she added. “I think we’ve known that it was long overdue.” The “Alwayz Bratz” series consists of 13 roughly two-minute-long episodes uploaded to the brand’s TikTok and Instagram accounts on a weekly basis. Animated by Pixel Zoo, MGA Entertainment’s digital animation studio, each episode follows Yasmin, Cloe, Sasha and Jade through relatable moments, such as scrolling through a dating app and encountering a photo of a man holding up a fish, a play on a very common profile picture theme on dating sites, or sitting through an agonizingly boring Zoom meeting. @bratz Today is the day, Bratz Pack! 💕 📹 The moment you’ve all been waiting for! Check out Alwayz Bratz, our new animated series consisting of 13 two-minute episodes, premiering TODAY! 💕 Launching exclusively on TikTok and posted weekly, you won’t wanna miss this scorchin’ new show as we continue to follow the story of our fave girls with a Passion for Fashion 👄📺 #bratz ♬ original sound - bratz Bratz opted for a social media series for its return to narrative content because many of the brand’s fans—including those who had inspired the brand to create “Alwayz Bratz” with their pleas for a new series—were already there, Cekan said. Though the series was initially meant to be exclusive to TikTok, where Bratz has 2.5 million followers, the brand began cross-posting it on Instagram at the request of some of its 1.6 million followers on the platform. “That was a great decision, because we tripled our viewership almost instantly by doing that,” she said. With “Alwayz Bratz,” Cekan and her team are aiming to revive the decade-long drought in the brand’s media franchise by building off of their social media success. “There has been so much amazing content posted to our socials, and we love to see people enjoying the content that's coming out there,” she said. “But it felt like there was one thing missing, which was that narrative piece. So, we wanted to meet our fans where they are and start dipping our toe into this storytelling world again and have them check in with our girls for the first time in a long time.” Y2K nostalgia and modern pop culture Over the past two years, Bratz has largely connected with its core young adult audience via social media. The brand amassed much of its TikTok audience with recreations of pop culture moments animated in the distinctive Bratz art style, several of which have gone viral. Bratz’s stylized reproduction of a scene from HBO’s teen drama series “Euphoria,” for example, garnered 38 million views, nearly 10 million likes and over 50,000 comments, many of them begging the brand for a new Bratz series. “We need an adult Bratz cartoon plz,” reads one user’s comment, which currently sits at more than 36,000 likes. “We need a new TV series or movie with this animation omg,” another user commented, racking up over 37,000 likes. @bratz Already thinking about Euphoria season 3 and Halloween 2023, tbh!! 👄👀 #bratz #euphoria #halloween #cassie #countrymusicstar #sydneysweeney ♬ original sound - bratz It was the ending scene of that “Euphoria” parody—where it’s revealed that Yasmin, Cloe, Sasha and Jade are watching the show—that attracted the most attention, Cekan said. “The back half of that ‘Euphoria’ video … got almost as much of a reaction as the recreation of the scene from ‘Euphoria,’” she said. “It really hit something in people's hearts nostalgia-wise to see their four best girlfriend characters doing that again.” “Those four have always been at the forefront of all of the media content—the ones singing on the albums, the ones in the TV shows and movies—so we wanted to really focus on them for the ‘Always Bratz’ series, as well,” she added. Introducing “Alwayz Bratz” was a delicate balance of preserving details from past Bratz movies and TV series while simultaneously modernizing the storylines and dialogue for a young adult audience, Cekan said. Nearly every detail of the social media series, from the outfits the characters are wearing to the background music of each episode, was carefully lifted from past pieces of Bratz media. Ensuring Yasmin, Cloe, Sasha and Jade resembled their 2013 counterparts as closely as possible involved a level of nuance, including multiple iterations of character models to “pinpoint little tiny details on faces, face shape, textures on the clothes,” she said. And though the voice actors for Cloe and Sasha reprised their roles in the new series, choosing actors who matched Yasmin and Jade’s original voices was equally as meticulous as designing their character models. “It’s a very tricky thing to cast a new voice actor for an established character. Fans have people that they know and love and voices they recognize and become attached to,” Cekan said. “We walked a fine line of ‘okay, this is kind of what they've sounded like in the past, but also you have your own talent and creativity and can put your own spin on it as well.” Beyond the characters themselves, Cekan and the Bratz team have also stuffed the series full of references to moments from the media franchise. In the first “Alwayz Bratz” episode, after Yasmin brings up Netflix’s “Emily in Paris,” Sasha says, “Didn’t Cloe and Jade almost die in Paris?” Her comment is a reference to a scene from “Bratz: Go to Paris the Movie,” which many viewers quickly picked up on. @bratz Oui oui! 🇫🇷 Don’t forget to tune in to an all-new episode of *ALWAYZ BRATZ* tomorrow at 2:30 PM PST both here and on Instagram ( bratz ) 👄💕 #bratz #dolls #alwayzbratz #paris #emilyinparis ♬ original sound - bratz The three episodes of “Alwayz Bratz” released have collectively amassed more than 2 million views and 375,000 likes on TikTok alone. The brand also plans to post clips from these episodes on TikTok and Instagram. “Alwayz Bratz” has been a largely experimental effort to satisfy the frequent requests for a new Bratz series that the team encountered on social media—but it may also be playing a dual role of functioning as a pilot for a full-length animated Bratz TV series. An overarching plotline across the “Alwayz Bratz” episodes revolves around the four girls working to pitch a new TV series to a streaming service, which Cekan said “kind of mirrors things that the team internally has been doing.” She declined to elaborate further. If Bratz is developing a TV series, the reception of “Alwayz Bratz” is a clear indicator that fans are interested in seeing Yasmin, Cloe, Sasha and Jade’s adventures continue beyond social media. “Can we please have a full series? full bratz show?!?” reads one comment. "BRATZ movie please🙏” reads another. “‘Always Bratz’ comes at a really perfect intersection of many things,” Cekan said. “Y2K fashion is very much back; Bratz has been celebrating some big anniversaries recently, and we’ve really been building that [social media] audience over the past couple of years. We’ve gotten to a point now where a series like this feels natural, and seeing all the buzz around dolls, in general, at the forefront of pop culture just makes it a no-brainer to lean in further into this.” Follow us on social media X Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn YouTube

How Bratz is trying to revive its brand with a TikTok series aimed at adults

Featured Stories