The most famous fashion doll in the world, Barbie, is currently taking offers for her Dreamhouse Malibu mansion. Now, Mattel has issued an open invitation to literally step inside her world with Barbie The Dreamhouse Experience.

Two life-sized houses—complete with pink elevators, a walk-in “glitterizer” and a “diamond” ring display—will open next month in south Florida at Sawgrass Mills and for European fans, in Berlin, Germany.

Why Germany? It turns out that Barbie has roots in the country. American businesswoman Ruth Handler is credited with the creation of Barbie for her daughter, who in the 1950’s, like all little girls, had only paper dolls or baby dolls to play with. Handler convinced her husband Elliot, a co-founder of Mattel to create an adult-bodied doll based on a German doll called Bild Lilli. Barbie made her debut in 1959, followed by the reveal of the original Barbie Dreamhouse in 1962.Continue reading...

The world of the Disney Princess—which faces competition from moms and fairies even as it continues being a cash cow for Disney by captivating many girls until the age of three or so—is aiming a bit older with its "I Am a Princess" manifesto.

The video is the latest in a campaign that debuted in the third quarter of 2012, touting the values that the Disney Princess embodies. (B will this new breed of empowered, self-award Disney Princess grow up to be hipster Disney Princesses?)

Check out Disney's earlier "I Am a Princess" videos below, along with another new campaign: an international push for the upcoming Disney Infinity console, starting with this UK commercial:Continue reading...

With a pink elevator, hot tub and spa, pink granite countertops and only three walls, Malibu's most famous resident is finally putting her house on the market. That's right: for a cool $25 million, Barbie's Malibu Dreamhouse in the 90265 zipcode can be yours.

It's being "sold" via a listing on Trulia—"The only house in Malibu with a truly unobstructed view of the ocean (after all, it only has three walls)—and a celebrity real estate agent in Bravo's "Million Dollar Listing: Los Angeles" cast member Josh Altman. It's all part of an effort by the iconic toy company to highlight the doll's revamped image and new playset, set to be released for the 2013 holiday shopping season.Continue reading...

In a world that is constantly shoving the idea of a woman only being beautiful if she looks like Kate Upton or Kate Hudson or … well, whoever the latest aesthetic ideal is, it can be hard for a preteen girl to figure out how to own the fact that she’s beautiful, too, no matter how different her body is from the supermodel du jour.

Along with most of American society, Unilever’s Dove soap has girls becoming more anxious, instead of more confident. And rather than prey on that lack of confidence by offering beauty "solutions" and use that info to their marketing advantage, Dove is actually trying to get at the root of the problem and boost girls' confidence and self-esteem.

For three years, Dove has been hosting events for preteen girls across the globe to help them feel better about themselves, according to Cincinatti.com. The aim is to reach 15 million young women globally by 2015, thanks to Dove's Self-Esteem Fund, with an empowering message that takes the brand's highly praised Real Beauty campaign to a critical age.Continue reading...

While the Boy Scouts brand has been rocked by the organization's mishandling of pedophilia charges, the century-old Girl Scouts have gone from strength to strength in their centennial year. The latest change: the iconic Girl Scout Cookies are getting a redesign for the first time since 1999, honoring the significance and continued growth of the $790-million girl-led business. 

The iconic packaging highlights five financial, literacy and entrepreneurship skills that the Girl Scout Cookie Program teaches: goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills, and business ethics and the redesign matches the embodiment of Girl Scouting in 2012, part of the brand’s 100th anniversary celebrated in March. 

“We have more than 50 million cookie customers across the country, and the cookie box is the most tangible and powerful way for us to communicate directly with consumers,” stated Girl Scouts USA CEO Anna Maria Cháve about the new cookie box packaging, which features "stories of what Girl Scouts do today."Continue reading...

The tween girl market wields unprecedented economic sway, social influence and digital aptitude. Why do you think Cynthia Rowley's latest brand collaboration is with JCPenney for a tween clothing line? FashionPlaytes, a digital design site aimed at tween girls, is hoping to inspire the next Rowley by giving her a virtual studio, showroom and sales channel to call her own.

The statistics alone speak to the clout of tween girls. According to NPD Group, 73% of girls ages six to eight go online an average of three hours per week, while 92% of girls between nine and 12 are online an average of five hours weekly. And it's not behind their parents backs (well, for the most part), either: “iGen’s parents belong to Generation X, who act as the invisible hand empowering and guiding the $150 billion a year that Tweens influence. The Gen X parent is raising a new type of young consumer that has more independence and financial prowess than any generation of kiddos to toddle along before them.”

Given the role that moms, in particular, take in influencing their daughter's choices — Rowley's dreampop JCP collection was inspired by her own daughters — it took an enterpreneurial mom to see the opportunity that the web provides to create a fashion-centric site for her own fashion-crazed offspring.

Sarah McIlroy, mother of two daughters and a son, started FashionPlaytes after her then five-year-old daughter asked to design her own clothes. McIlroy liked the idea but lacked the technical design skills, so she founded a site for tween girls to dream up their own clothing ideas and have them produced and shipped right to their door, from their own digital design studio.Continue reading...

Canada's upscale yogathletic brand lululemon has a younger sibling: ivivva athletica, a dance-inspired activewear label for girls and teens that has been dipping a pointed toe in the tween/teen market with a modest debut in Canada and a co-branded line with Disney.

The younger brand has been available in lululemon’s hometown of Vancouver and in Calgary, and this summer has been quietly slipping south of the border to the US via showrooms (not full-blown stores) to test the waters in Bellevue and Seattle, WA, plus Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.

“A note to all of our amazing + loyal ivivva girls: an ivivva SHOWROOM is a little different from an ivivva STORE," a blog post explains. "A showroom is a small space that we open in new cities to show a few pieces of our product line. It is the perfect place to go to get decked out in all of your core essentials and try on all of our sizes so you know what size to order in all of the crazy colours online! And, if you want more, you can always purchase online using the iPads in our showrooms.”

Parent company lululemon athletica, of course, is the yoga-inspired athletic apparel lifestyle brand that, while a little overreaching to some observers, has certainly raised the barre in technical fabrics and functional designs, not to mention in convincing women to pay a premium for yoga pants. But will lululemon moms stretch their wallets as wide for their dance-, track- and gymnastics-obsessed daughters?Continue reading...

One woman, somewhere in the world, becomes a victim of sex trafficking, forced prostitution, gender-based violence, or maternal mortality every 90 seconds. Now, a powerful cabal of producers, NGO’s, gamers and celebrities have joined forces in a transmedia project of unprecedented proportion to address this heinous reality.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, the acclaimed book by Pulitzer Prize-winners Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, is the centerpiece of the project which includes a four-hour PBS miniseries (trailer above), mobile games in India and Africa, websites and educational materials, and a social action game coming to Facebook in November.Continue reading...