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Barbie Is Trademarked What Other Word to Use

Does the Barbie brand represent female empowerment? Many would argue that until very recently the doll reflected the reality of only a small minority of girls and women and the brand was accused by the public for many years of being out of touch.

Barbie brand owners Mattel Inc. started to lose customers (and millions of dollars) to other toy manufacturers, who were seen by many to be more inclusive, like Disney and Lego. Mattel desperately needed to iterate their iconic Barbie brand and in 2016 they pivoted. Enter top-secret Project Dawn. Mattel's designers were asked to imagine that they were designing the doll for the very first time, with no preconceptions, and to imagine a doll that reflects our time.

Project Dawn resulted in Mattel launching 3 new Barbie dolls to complement the original, iconic skinny version in 2016. Barbie now comes in all shapes and sizes from petite, to tall and curvy, in a bid to become more inclusive and real and of course to also try to capture the attention of a new audience and customer for their brand.

A new dawn for Barbie

The doll was invented in March 1959 by American businesswoman Ruth Handler. Handler took a German doll called Bild Lilli as her inspiration for her own invention, which was named Barbie after her daughter Barbara. The toy made its debut at the New York Toy Fair that year.

Since 1959 the doll has gone through many design changes in a bid to move with the times. As the women's rights movement grew, so did Barbie's aspirations. In 1961 a series of dolls was introduced to represent Barbie's inclusion in "gound-breaking" careers: consumers first saw Barbie as a registered nurse (1961), then astronaut (1965), pediatrician (1965), firefighter (1995), pilot (1999), movie director and scientist (2015), game developer and president (2016).

In 2019 Mattel launched its new Barbie Fashionistas line, which offers children more diverse representations of beauty and aims to help combat stigma around physical disabilities. The Barbie brand released two dolls - one with a prosthetic leg and another with a wheelchair.

Dina Asher-Smith, Britain's fastest female sprinter, has had a Barbie doll made in her likeness as the popular toy brand continues to make their range more representative. And this year on March 8th Mattel released newly designed Barbie dolls in honor of International Women's Day, (which marks the movement for women's rights all over the world) to raise awareness of female role models in the sporting arena. Dolls representing the French soccer captain Amandine Henry, Turkish Paralympic swimmer Sümeyye Boyacı and Olga Kharlan, Ukrainian world champion saber fencer were brought to the market.

Today the Barbie range now includes 176 dolls, 9 body types, 35 skin tones and 94 hairstyles. The sky seems to be the limit these days for Barbie career-wise too. It finally seems that Barbie's slogan "You can be anything" really does ring true.

Barbie brand strength at a glance

Mattel Inc. is not happy to let any competitor be anything though! The company is fiercely protective of its Barbie brand and we can see strong evidence of this when examining their Barbie trademark and oppositions activity with the help of our trademark search and watch platform tools.

  • The first Barbie trademark owned by Mattel Inc. was registered on December 1st, 1959 in the USPTO and is still valid at the time of writing.
  • To date, there have been over 1,800 Barbie trademarks registered by Mattel Inc. of which more than 1,100 are still valid today. The most recent application was made on December 20th, 2019 in the Swiss IPI.
  • The majority of the Barbie trademarks (17.3%) were registered in Class 28 (Toys and Sporting Goods) with the top 3 registries, in the United States USPTO (28.3%), France INPI (24.3%), and Italy UIBM 3.2%.
  • The top product descriptions within Class 28 are Toys, games, playthings, and novelties (65.3%), Dolls (58.1%), and Go games 53.1%).

Barbie is Mattel's most protected brand and the company is proactive about monitoring and protecting all of its brands. Mattel takes an aggressive stance when it comes to infringements, having filed over 260 oppositions to date. Of the 10 most recent oppositions which relate to the Barbie trademark filed, 8 were lodged with the USPTO and 2 with the EUIPO.

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Barbie Is Trademarked What Other Word to Use

Source: https://www.trademarknow.com/blog-essentials/barbie-brand-moving-with-the-times