Barbie is inviolate. Girls since the beginning of time (let's be clear: time didn't start, toywise, until the Barbie) have begged for Barbies, and no more time more loudly and earnestly than at Christmas. Even my four-year-old, mud-puddle-jumping, super-hero-adoring son wants a Barbie.That was. Until Bratz came along. For the past few years Mattel, Inc. (NYSE:MAT) has been fighting tooth and nail to keep up with the overly-madeup, hiphop bad girls with the big heads. Where Barbie is too curvaceous, Bratz are too too -- too street, too saucy. If Barbie represents the unrealistic dimensions of a Vogue model, Bratz represent the unwanted idealization of a girl who hangs out at a strip mall when she should be in government class, spends her allowance on collagen lip injections, and dates a rapper twice her age.
Barbie sales have been falling in the past several years thanks to the formidably mispelled bad girls of the fashion doll world. They attempted to combat closely-held MGA Entertainment, Inc., who manufactures the Bratz dolls, in the marketplace by positioning its My Scene dolls to compete directly (although MGA sued Mattel last year, claiming that Mattel had changed the My Scene dolls to imitate Bratz too closely). When that didn't work so well, they brought out the big guns: an IP lawsuit.
Mattel alleges that MGA lured Mattel employees away, and encouraged the theft of trade secrets -- including the Bratz doll designs. Not just that. After having stolen the idea, Mattel alleges that MGA "repeated - even expanded - its pattern of theft on numerous occasions" according to the lawsuit.MGA's CEO, Isaac Larian, responded shrilly, calling Mattel "desperate" and saying "They wish they owned Bratz. They don't and they know it. The last time I checked, it was not illegal for people to leave one company to go to a better company for a better job."
While I have no more knowledge of the actual facts behind the lawsuit than you do, it seems illogical to me that Mattel would accuse MGA of stealing the ideas for Bratz if, indeed, MGA developed the concept independently. What's more, Larian's statement doesn't ring sincere to me; it's pregnant with braggadocio and, ummm, truth-stretching. "Last time I checked" and "They don't and they know it" are both phrases more frequently used by junior high bullies than CEOs.
If you're going to fight with the dirty girls, though, I guess you've got to play dirty. And that's what Mattel is doing, bringing a lawsuit that does seem a bit desperate, or at least, a smidge paranoid.
If I were up against the wall like Mattel, competing against a playground bully in a battle for the most best-selling bad girl on the toy store shelves? I'd fight dirty, too. Wouldn't you?
[Black-and-white Barbie photo . Jillian .]
Update: It bears mentioning, as Rick Aristotle Munarriz points out on the Motley Fool, that Mattel's customers won't be affected in the least by the mud-slinging in court or the relative demeanor of the CEOs of the companies who make the dolls. They're not reading the Wall Street Journal, or, with the exception of my own children, BloggingStocks. Make all the accusations you like, Mattel! Barbie will keep on' smiling just as sweetly as before.
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