Meet Kim Culmone, the Mattel doll designer who made Barbie a star again

However improbably, last summer saw a brief return to monoculture. Take, for instance, the soundtrack of the summer, which inarguably featured the songs “What Was I Made For?” “Dance the Night,” and “I’m Just Ken.” And who could forget the tongue-in-cheek-until-it-wasn’t Barbenheimer trend?



Greta Gerwig’s Barbie blockbuster amounted to a winning combination of campy, self-aware, nostalgic, and joyful that translated into more than $150 million in Barbie sales . It was a sales increase of nearly 25% that no one could have predicted. No one, that is, except Kim Culmone, who planted the seeds for Barbie’s comeback a decade earlier.



“So much of what is happening now, whether it’s the Barbie movie or the positive sentiment that is rallying around Barbie, it is not lost on me that those things built on a foundation of a very brave team,” she says. Culmone is now head of design for dolls and Mattel creations, a position with oversight of brands including Barbie, American Girl, and Polly Pocket.



In her 25-year tenure at the company, she hasn’t been afraid to break the mold at Mattel, most notably with Barbie’s 2015 reinvention that embraced more realistic and representative figures, skin colors, and hair types. Suddenly, a doll that was once a feminist firebrand because of its unrealistic proportions and regressive career options was . . . changing to fit the modern era? Cool, even?



The rebrand couldn’t have come at a more necessary time: From 2011 to 2015, sales of Barbies had dropped by 33% . In 2013, Culmone had become head of design for the doll brand, and she held an all-hands-on-deck meeting with her team.



She remembers asking them: “If you could do anything right now with Barbie, what would you do? If you were starting this brand today with the same values that Ruth [Handler, the creator of Barbie] had in 1959 when she launched the brand, what would you keep the same and what would you do differently?”



That meeting sparked a series of doll launches and redesigns that brought Barbie’s image in line with human women. One Barbie uses a wheelchair ; another has Down syndrome ; Barbie can be a paramedic or a cinematographer. A decade after the shift, Culmone credits her team’s willingness to take risks for shepherding in a new wave of commercial success.



Nowhere was the team’s audacity on fuller display than in making the Barbie movie. While Mattel executives met extensively with Gerwig, Screen Daily reported that Gerwig didn’t show the company an outline before she finished the script. (Gerwig told the New York Times : “It wasn’t like I ever got the full seal of approval from [Mattel], like, ‘We love it!’ I got a tentative, ‘Well, okay. I see that you are going to do this, so go ahead and we’ll see how it goes.’”)



But ceding control was always part of the plan, Culmone says. “Barbie is ultimately a tool for storytelling, and this was Greta’s story. We were okay with Mattel being represented the way that it was in the film, and we enjoyed it.”



Yes, she even chuckled at the movie’s all-white, all-male representation of Mattel’s C-suite—which, in real life, would have included her. “I laughed at it when I watched it, but there’s a lot of companies that look like that still in the world,” Culmone says. The real-life leaders at Mattel were less worried about their own portrayal and more concerned that the film contained something for everyone, from Barbie skeptics to longtime collectors. For the second category of viewers, there was no shortage of cinematic Easter eggs that highlighted short-lived doll launches and vintage outfits.



Culmone and her team of doll designers haven’t rested on their laurels since the movie’s success. In the past year, Culmone has taken on new responsibilities, overseeing the design of the American Girl brand. Monster High, another Mattel company, launched a dragon doll inspired by drag icon RuPaul Charles (of RuPaul’s Drag Race ). Culmone points to these dolls as further avenues for showcasing diverse experiences and connecting with young people. “Each of the brands allow us an opportunity to express inclusion and representation in different ways,” she says.



And in May, Mattel released Barbie doll likenesses of nine female athletes, including tennis player Venus Williams and gymnastics phenom Rebeca Andrade.



Culmone is branching out these days, but like many young girls, her relationship with Mattel began with Barbie (full name: Barbara Millicent Roberts). “Barbie was a central figure in my life as a kid, as were all kinds of other playthings, including Hot Wheels,” she says. “[I was an] equal-opportunity Mattel kid—not knowing that I would end up working there.”



But if there is a traditional path in the world of doll design, Culmone did not take it. She was the first person in her family to attend college. When she told her family that she wanted to study art and design at Louisiana State University, she was met with resistance. “I told my mom that I wanted to go to university for design, and she flipped out a little bit,” Culmone says. From her mother’s perspective, a creative career would not allow her daughter to support herself.



Out of college, Culmone cofounded The Design Garage, a studio focused on fabric design. After weaving, knitting, painting, and creating prints for the garment industry, Culmone hit a fork in the road when her cofounder decided to go back to school.



Culmone recalled thinking to herself, You know what, I need a “real company” on my résumé . Mattel hired her on a fixed term to fill in for back-to-back maternity leaves. She expected she’d return to job-hunting after the nine-month stint. Instead, Mattel hired her as a designer for Barbie—and she’s never left.



In the toy industry, a brand that lasts five years is considered to be an extraordinary outlier. For a brand like Barbie to be celebrating its 65th anniversary this year is unprecedented. Mattel’s staying power and ongoing cultural influence speaks not only to its leaders’ business acumen, no doubt, but also to executives’ understanding of the importance of play. A 2023 study commissioned by Barbie found that both neurotypical and neurodivergent children may use dolls to practice social scenarios and to develop empathy. Indeed, Culmone says doll play was critical in her own self-determination.



“You’re playing out what your real-life future might be in doll play. We say role-play leads to real life, and dolls play such a central part of that,” she says.



It’s not just children. Culmone understands that some of Barbie’s biggest fans are grown-ups. Take drag superstar Trixie Mattel, who took her name and persona from her lifelong love for Barbie. In Culmone’s view, fans like Trixie demonstrate the versatility of the brand. “I can make a doll: Someone’s going to see a drag queen in that doll ad [and] someone else is going to see a heterosexual prom queen. And that’s the beauty of Barbie,” Culmone says.



And lest it be subtext: Queerness is a guiding principle in Culmone’s work. “My lived experience of being invisible or otherized or left out, or even my community being threatened, I carry with me in how I guide my teams and the things that I advocate for within my scope of responsibility,” she says.



What that looks like in her own career, Culmone says, is speaking up and holding space for her identities as a queer woman and first-generation college student. She pays it forward through mentoring future leaders; supporting the Los Angeles LGBT Center; and serving on the board of the Freedom to Choose Project, a nonprofit that leads workshops for incarcerated people.



All these years later, she remains driven by the impact that Mattel’s dolls and toys can have on individual young people. “There’s the grand scale of things like movie premieres and launching new brands, and then there’s the single impact of somebody feeling good . . . because they saw themselves reflected in a toy,” Culmone says. “I’ll take that any day.”