Back in 2001, Carter Bryant, a former Barbie clothing designer, created the first generation of Bratz Dolls. These dolls were a direct response to Barbie’s legacy of idealised femininity—they were ethnically diverse, fashion forward, and unapologetically imperfect. For the first time, Barbie’s monopoly over the ‘girl toy’ market was under threat. As Barbie sales plummeted, Mattel was scrambling to find itself a new hit. Enter Ivy Ross, the then Vice President of Product Design and Brand Image for the Girls’ Division. She was already somewhat of a maverick: prior to Mattel, the jewellery designer had had stints at Calvin Klein, Swatch, Gap, Bausch & Lomb, and Coach.
She decided to shake things up by bringing a dozen people from different departments together in an innovation lab to boost creativity. She called it Project Platypus, a nod to how the platypus is a composite of seemingly incongruous characteristics from different species.
“I did crazy, wild things,” Ross laughs over a Zoom call from her elegantly cheery Silicon Valley home. “I saw creativity as part of the human experiment.” She brought in an improv artist to lead a workshop on free association, a Jungian analyst to talk about pattern recognition, an architect to lead a session on forms and connections. A particularly out-there project, conducted in collaboration with brainwave expert Dr Jeffrey Thompson, involved getting everyone to sing a particular note. The aim was to find the fundamental frequency at which all 12 of them resonated and embed it into a song that, when played, would bring everyone onto the same emotional wavelength.
Her experiments paid off. It was through Project Platypus that Richard Manville came up with the idea for the Ello Creation System construction set for girls—the toy that flew off the shelves and won several Oppenheim Platinum Toy Awards.