It has been tough times for toy-maker American Girl.
First, Princess Elsa from Frozen took the doll aisle by storm, icing out other players in the category. Then, last year, American Girl spiffed up the marketing and packaging of some of its dolls, only to find the refresh didn't drive store traffic as executives had hoped.
Sales at the brand, owned by Mattel, fell 7 percent last year. Last week, the company reported that business has only gotten worse since then, with American Girl's sales plunging 19 percent in the second quarter.
So in recent weeks, American Girl has launched what executives hope will be the pint-size antidote to their multimillion-dollar problem: a new line of dolls they've dubbed WellieWishers that come with a price tag that is about half what the toy-maker charges for classic dolls such as Samantha and Addy.
It's the first time in over a decade that the toy brand has added a new collection, and it is an acknowledgment that American Girl's notoriously high prices have been a problem in trying to get parents to pony up for the dolls.
But WellieWishers is not just an effort to shake up the brand's pricing strategy. It is also a bid to shore up a struggling business by taking it to a different audience. American Girl has made its name with gear that targets girls age 8 and older, but WellieWishers is for the 5-to-7-year-old crowd.
That means their arrival in stores serves as a fresh and important test of whether the now 30-year-old brand is capable of evolving for a new generation of parents and an intensely competitive toy market.
The WellieWishers characters are a gaggle of five outdoorsy girls who spend their days clomping around a backyard garden. The books that pair with the dolls feature stories meant to teach girls about things like kindness, cooperation and taking turns. The "Wellie" in their name is a reference to their brightly colored rain boots, intended to give off the vibe that the dolls are always ready for an adventurous splash in the mud.
To be able to charge less for them, American Girl had to figure out how to make them more cheaply than it does its other dolls. That's why WellieWishers stand only 14 inches tall, compared with 18 inches for the rest of the American Girl universe. The newcomers also have hard, plastic bodies instead of soft ones, and they have "fixed eyes" -- toy industry jargon for eyes that don't blink.
One place Mattel didn't try to trim costs, though, was on the dolls' hair. Julia Prohaska, American Girl's vice president of marketing, said it still went with highly durable wigs like those used in their other toys because the team believed the figurines needed to be able to "withstand hours of hair play."
Earlier this year, Mattel president Richard Dickson told investors that "there are some price-value issues that need to be addressed" in the American Girl brand. And yet WellieWishers aren't specifically designed as an appeal to lower-income shoppers. Rather, Prohaska said they are meant to be an easier entry point to the brand's pricier assortment of products.
"For this age group, some moms, candidly, are concerned about making a really significant investment in a product they don't know yet," Prohaska said.
American Girl's move to reinvigorate its business comes as its sister brand, Barbie, is also waging a battle to make itself more relevant and reverse a slide in sales. Barbie is by far the bigger jewel in Mattel's crown, with $906 million in global sales last year, compared with $572 million for American Girl.
But there are clear parallels in their respective turnaround strategies. Barbie executives have said that they are working to reposition their dolls as vessels for imaginative play. This is why, for example, they've launched online videos that show girls role-playing as professors, soccer coaches and even U.S. president while playing with their Barbies.
WellieWishers, too, is aiming to position itself as a toy property that encourages kids to summon their creativity. Valerie Tripp, the author who wrote the companion books for the dolls, said she deliberately didn't include any magic wands or enchanted spells in the stories.
"I didn't want to give the message for girls that you need something that doesn't really exist," Tripp said. "I wanted them to be empowered by their own imagination."
Mattel has said that it expected the first half of this year to be "challenging" for American Girl, followed by a shift in momentum in the back half of the year.
SundayMonday Business on 07/24/2016