Step into the world of Disney City Girl, where style and apartment décor are the measurement of success and New York City is the only city suitable enough for dream chasing.   

Disney’s new venture in social gaming is surprisingly targeted at adults, and more specifically, those with big city dreams. In the game, which is available for play on Facebook and playdom.com, players move from small town America to New York City to pursue their dream life. You get to chose to work towards two obviously fabulous careers: fashion designer or chef. Watch your player climb NYC's social ladder a la "Sex and the City" by challenging friends in a "Daily Look" fashion competition and throwing "awesome parties for friends" in your apartment. 

Sounds fabulous, right? 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...

Kimberly-Clark is selling conversation – and its working. Their U by Kotex brand has taken 7% market share of the $2.6 billion feminine-protection business in the U.S. since launch in 2010, and now they’re turning up the heat in an integrated marketing campaign, “Generation Know,” which launched January 7th.

The tone is refreshingly direct in talking about issues of vaginal health, menstruation and wellness, with a goal of busting myths and letting young women understand issues key to their well-being and self-esteem.

“There’s way too much misinformation about girls’ health and bodies out there today; so much that more than half (51%) of girls say it’s hard to separate myths from facts when it comes to vaginal health,” Lauren Kren, brand manager, U by Kotex brand, told brandchannel.

TV spots hit the airwaves, dancing around the “V” word to pass network standards, while franker videos aired online such as the ones above and below, featuring two bold personal testimonies.Continue reading...

What do girls want? For one big sister this holiday season, the right for her brother to have the same toys in a non-stereotypical design. Almost 45,000 signatures and a slew of international headlines later, McKenna Pope, the 13-year-old who started the online petition at Change.org to convince Hasbro to consider boys in their marketing and design scope for the Easy-Bake Oven, has scored a big win for gender equality.

McKenna and her family met with execs at Hasbro on Monday and came out all smiles. Execs at the Pawtucket, R.I., HQ of the toy manufacturer, as AP reports, were deighted to show her design prototypes for Easy-Bake ovens colored black, silver, or blue — ready for her brother and other boys eager to get Easy-Baking.

Pope’s quest had started when she wanted to get her four-year-old brother, Gavyn Boscio, an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas. After all, he had shown a love for food prep by attempting to “cook on top of a lamp's light bulb” at their New Jersey home. Pope only found ovens in pink or purple and the boxes only featured girls in its marketing images.

So Pope went out and scored more than 40,000 signatures on a Change.org petition, the support of a slew of male celebrity chefs such as Bobby Flay, and a meeting with Hasbro, which now says it is going to unveil the new oven at the annual Toy Fair in New York this coming February. Consumers who are looking to purchase Easy-Bake ovens that aren’t pink and purple will be able to snag them next summer. Plus, the new ovens will come with a boy or two pictured on the box as well.Continue reading...

Most of America’s top-rated restaurants are run by male chefs, yet cooking is still conventionally considered to be something that women are more interested in than men. So where do these guys come from, anyway? Where did they keep themselves out of sight all their lives before getting their Michelin stars?

Well, one young fella who likely hopes to be on that list someday isn’t hiding himself away anymore. Four-year-old Gavyn Boscio of New Jersey has been thrown into the limelight this holiday season thanks to a hue and cry raised by his sister, 13-year-old McKenna Pope.

Gavyn would like to have an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas but he told his family that knows that “only girls” cook. So Pope is lobbying Easy-Bake’s manufacturer, Hasbro, to not market the product exclusively to girls.

The least they could do, she says on her Change.org petition that has been signed by more than 40,000 people, is to put a boy or two on the packaging and offer it in a color other than pink or purple.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...

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...