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Dow Jones & Company Inc Jun 6, 2002 THE COMPANY that brought Barbie to little girls now wants them to put on a hard hat.
Mattel Inc., making a direct foray onto turf dominated by Lego AG, this week is showing retailers a new construction and activity set called Ello. More than two years in the making, the new brand explicitly aims to draw girls to building toys, a segment that has been geared almost exclusively to boys.
Last year, more than 90% of Lego sets purchased were for boys, according to NPDFunworld Consumer Service, which tracks toy sales. Mattel says Ello -- with interconnecting plastic squares, balls, triangles, squiggles, flowers and sticks, in pastel colors and with rounded corners -- will go beyond Lego's linear play patterns. The Ello pieces snap and string together to create not only houses, but also people, jewelry, picture frames and other decorative items. Each year will bring an Ello set with a new theme: Mattel plans to have a basic set, Ellopolis, and one with an undersea theme, Aquaria, in stores in time for Christmas.
The idea is for girls to use Ello both to build and to engage in the social play and arts and crafts that are usually associated with girls. A five-year-old might use Ello to build a house with figures to act out simple stories. A 10-year-old might design Ello jewelry, or construct an elaborate world of decorated buildings and people. Future Ello products could include furniture or music.
"The idea was to create a totally new hybrid between a building set and an activity set," says Ivy Ross, head of girls' design. "We went into it with no parameters."
Toy companies have been trying for a long time to sell boy-oriented toys to girls, and vice-versa, with mixed results. Among successful crossover brands are Playmobil, which first made sets of knights, firefighters and pirates and then came out with a fairy tale set featuring a Victorian dollhouse.
But makers of arts-and-crafts toys, which sell almost exclusively to girls, haven't had much luck coming up with boys' products. And David Hesel, co-owner of the Toy Shop of Concord, a Massachusetts store, still remembers a pastel-pink train introduced several years ago by LGB, the German line of trains. "It was an obvious attempt to appeal to girls, and it just didn't make sense," Mr. Hesel says, noting it soon vanished from the LGB catalog.
Even Lego has tried to reach girls. Several years ago it introduced Belville, a princess-themed play set, but withdrew it from the U.S. market following disappointing sales. "I actually got complaints about it because it was too obviously sexist," Mr. Hesel recalls. Belville and a girl-themed construction set, Lego Scala, are still available online and in foreign markets.
Mattel itself has been around the block on the gender issue. Several years ago, it introduced Construx, a gender-neutral line of building toys that failed. But in the mid-1990s, Mattel launched the popular Fashion Designer Barbie, one of the first CD-ROMs for girls at a time when the vast majority of computer games were revolving around combat and conflict stories geared toward boys.
To create Ello, a design team began in 2000 by watching play patterns of five- to 10-year-old girls. The company plans to target this age group, and their parents, with samples of the new toy. In five years, Mattel says it expects Ello to generate $500 million in sales.
Construction play makes use of fine motor skills that stimulate development of the right hemisphere of the brain, says Michael Shore, a psychologist and full-time Mattel employee. Boys seem to gravitate toward building things, an activity that sharpens the senses, increases concentration and refines ordering and sequencing skills. Girls, on the other hand, tend to stimulate their right brains with activities like bead-stringing, cutting and pasting. But they don't use that portion of the brain with activities such as doll playing, which are associated with the brain's left hemisphere.
Girls' failure to gravitate toward construction toys isn't the result of a lack of interest in building, Dr. Shore says. It is probably because building toys are often infused with boys' themes, such as cars, trucks, forts and castles. Encouraging girls in construction play "sets up experiences for girls to take on new roles at a very early age," he says. "Who knows? Maybe parents will recognize spatial or architectural skills in the child."
Ello takes into account other differences in the ways girls and boys play. For example, boys enjoy stacking blocks and working toward a goal, such as finishing a building. Their play is more physically active, and they like to create conflict between characters. Girls don't like repetitive stacking. They prefer to create relationships between characters, build communities and decorate spaces.
To set Ello in motion, Ms. Ross chose 20 designers, marketing executives, engineers, model makers and copywriters to study architecture by Frank Gehry and Le Corbusier and architectural aspects of the work of Georgia O'Keefe and Martha Graham. The team watched girls play with pipe cleaners, scissors, glue, paper and cardboard. "We saw that they wanted to make curves and connect panels," Ms. Ross says. Next, the girls wanted to tell a story about the space. "It was all about the narrative," she adds.
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