What do Beyoncé, Mia Farrow, Jacob Elordi, and Carmela Soprano have in common? We know what they’d look like as Bratz dolls.
Bratz, the nearly 25-year-old doll brand, has become known for its social re-creations of paparazzi shots, memes, music videos, red carpets, and other pop culture moments. One video from 2022, in which animated Bratz dolls re-create a scene from the HBO series Euphoria, has amassed more than 42 million views and 10 million likes on TikTok alone.
Josh Hackbarth, CMO of Bratz parent company MGA Entertainment, told us the brand intentionally looks to re-create tastemakers in art, music, and fashion on social media to keep it on the “cutting edge of culture.”
Bratz, he said, have always been known for being edgy (and sometimes controversial), but it could still come as a surprise to see a doll brand promoting cocktail Friday or horror movies like Nosferatu and The Substance, which aren’t exactly made for kids. Hackbarth said that’s by design: the brand has shifted from targeting kids to Gen Z and younger millennials online, specifically those that may have played with the dolls as children or watched Bratz’s TV show or any of Bratz’s movies from the mid-2000s.
“We’ve evolved with our audience,” Hackbarth said, adding that “whatever’s hot in pop culture goes down [from young adults] to kids and up to parents and older.”
Bratz has amassed more than 5.5 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. While not every young adult is collecting dolls, Hackbarth said the fan engagement, brand differentiation, and cultural relevancy are more important to the brand than hard sales figures.
“You don’t last for 25 years by just focusing on sales,” he said.
Eternal Bratz summer
A proper Bratz re-creation requires a “very scrappy” social team that not only has its finger on the pulse of pop culture but also has the freedom to act quickly, Hackbarth said. That can be especially important when it comes to live events, like the Met Gala or the VMAs. One post re-creating Chappell Roan, Doechii, and Lady Gaga’s looks from this year’s Grammys red carpet, which racked up more than 600,000 likes on Instagram, took just 18 hours to create from concept to execution.
But that speed isn’t achieved with shortcuts: the creative team, he said, does not use AI to make its re-creations.
Like all important pop culture moments, the social media account Pop Crave frequently shares the brand’s posts and circulated its Grammys red carpet re-creation organically to its 1.9 million followers on X.
“Timing is everything in this space,” Hackbarth said. “That’s really what has encouraged our fans to stick with us...they expect us to be commenting every day on what’s happening.”
Hackbarth said he mostly lets social and production lead the charge on what to create for the Bratz accounts, whether it’s a picture of The Simple Life or the cast of Challengers. “There’s a lot of trust that maybe many brands wouldn’t be comfortable with, but we know that the team is really on top of culture and loves Bratz,” he said, later adding that “Me being deep in the approval process is not going to help anything.”
Get marketing news you'll actually want to read
Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.
Hackbarth said in some cases, the Bratz team will reach out to a movie studio to ask to re-create certain scenes that are trending, but for the most part, he said, people on the studio and talent side have been “very supportive” of the brand’s posts. In a comment on Bratz’s re-creation of Chappell Roan’s Statue of Liberty outfit, Roan expressed her support with a simple, “AHHH.”
Not so 2000 and late
As Bratz re-creates existing content, it’s also exploring new ways of creating its own. MGA’s in-house entertainment team works with its animation studio Pixel Zoo to not only make its re-creation videos, but also create its weekly original social series Alwayz Bratz, which consists of episodes under two minutes long and features original characters from 2001. Season 1 of Alwayz Bratz, he said, received around 50 million organic views across both channels; its second season premiered last month.
The strategy behind Always Bratz came in part from the Bratz audience through comments, he said. Making a short show for Instagram and TikTok instead of a longer show for YouTube (where Bratz once posted full episodes and compilations from its 2000s TV series on Fox) was a decision based on Gen Z and millennials’ preferred content length and platforms.
The series allows the brand to tell its own stories and bring its original characters into a modern context. One recent episode, which shows the dolls referencing peptide creams and the reality TV series Vanderpump Rules, received more than 1.6 million views on TikTok alone, which Hackbarth said was all organic and required no paid spend.
“We’re not pushing this,” he said. “We’re just dropping it on our channels.”
Bratzify me, cap’n
Not every Gen Z and millennial is collecting dolls IRL, but Bratz has a “large collector base,” Hackbarth said—large enough that the brand sometimes partners with collectors on user-generated content. Bratz’s DTC shop, which sells dolls and largely lives on social media, has been another successful venture for the brand since it opened last year, he said, but declined to share revenue numbers.
While Bratz regularly reimagines celebrities as dolls, it’s only recently begun bringing them to life. The brand created its first real-and-for-purchase celebrity doll in 2023 with Kylie Jenner, to some mixed reviews, and followed it up last year with the cast of Mean Girls and Colombian singer Karol G. Hackbarth wouldn’t share who the next famous doll might be, but said the brand is “always looking” at potential options.
As Bratz continues to post its re-creations online, the demand for real dolls is clear in the comments section. “If you click any one of our posts, the first question is, ‘When is this coming?’” Hackbarth said.
Even the stars want to know. Last year, a viral, dolled-up picture of Jenna Ortega and Sabrina Carpenter in Carpenter’s “Taste” music video captured the attention of both stars, he said.
“We want them,” Ortega said in an interview. “I’m writing an email to Bratz as we speak.”