Interview with Garret Sander
Photos by Superstars Only
Interview by Daniela Rodriguez
It was 2010. I wanted to be cool. After two years of cosplaying as a tomboy, I decided to reclaim the color pink in my fifth year of school. My backpack was pink with flowers, which I considered to be a bold move because I was terribly afraid of how the boys would perceive me. I didn't want to come off as weak. My mom had taken me to Hair Cuttery, where I got my annual haircut to debut on the first day of school. We had uniforms: a pink blouse, a burgundy jumper, pink socks, and Mary Janes. Halloween was one of the few times in the year where we could wear whatever we wanted to school except for slutty costumes and weapons. This was a good opportunity to express myself and make my crush see me in a way he's never seen me before. The previous year I had waited 'til the last minute to get my costume and ended up being a zookeeper. I vividly remember doing the robot with a rubber snake around my neck in a dance circle at the halloween party. Every year, a kid named Ronald would host a Halloween party at his house because in school all you could do was walk around the field in a costume and call it a parade, but at Ronald's party we could dance 'til 9pm and feel reckless. My mom took me to Party City and costumes were already selling out. On the wall, they had pasted up all the images from the catalog that I had seen prior to going. I wanted to be girly but not too girly. All of sudden, I saw a cute goth, schoolgirl, Frankenstein and a pretty, edgy, hot-pink, dracula girl and a very fashionable werewolf. "Being a monster is dope, but being a cute monster? That's hot," I thought to myself at ten years old. My friend group at the time decided to be what we then discovered to be the girls from Monster High. I found out there was a whole world for these characters and I ended up getting the Frankie Stein and Draculaura dolls. It was perfect for me at the time because I wanted to embrace my girly-girl side, while also being edgy and cool and I didn't understand what that meant or what that looked like and Monster High was a way to express that side of myself. —Daniela Rodriguez
Daniela
I just want to start off with the origin story. How did you start? Did you always want to be a toy designer?
Garret
I grew up in Southern California. I'm from Seal Beach, where I still live. When I was in high school, I didn't know that toy design was a career that you could do. I went to USC where I was studying graphic design and that's when I found out you could be a toy designer because Otis isn't too far from SC and they did toy design there. So I took a summer of toy design at Otis. Art Center, which is in Pasadena, also had it, so the next year I took a summer of toy design there. Back at USC, one of my teachers said, "Oh, one of my old students works at Mattel" and she connected us. I got coffee with her one day and I really never thought anything would come of it, but then she actually called me and I got an interview there. They wanted to bring me in but I couldn't start because I had a semester left at school. Then, luckily, after I graduated in 2004, they called again because there was a position open and so I started off as a temp in the packaging department.
Garret
The first project I worked on was in the Winx Club brand, where I did the Icy box. I was a packaging designer from 2004 until 2007, where I worked on stuff from Winx to Shorties to a plush bear called Real Talkin' Bubba to Pixel Chix. Then I moved to My Scene and did the packaging for them, which was really fun. They called My Scene a flanker brand because it flanked Barbie. Like, it was for a girl who maybe wasn't into Barbie, but they still wanted a doll and were looking for something different. And so they wanted to find another My Scene flanker brand to do. The product team was doing research and they invited the packaging people to go help out with it, too. So we went shopping at the Fox Hills Mall with 12 and 13 year old girls just to see what they bought and what they thought was cool. One of the girls bought a Skelanimal and that was where the initial spark of Monster High was born. Their tagline was "dead animals need love, too." And I said, "What if it was like, 'Dead dolls need fashion, too?'" and everyone was laughing. So I went home and just started thinking about it while drawing and sketching. The first thing that I put down was zombie girls. But I knew that sometimes it's hard to tell Barbie and her friends apart. So I said, "Well, what if we wanted to be able to tell them apart and there's a reason to buy all of them? What if they were different monsters?" And then I sketched up Frankie, who was the first one that I ever drew up. She looked very different from what she actually turned out to be, but it was more just getting the idea down. And I just kept thinking about it. If they're a bunch of teenage girls, who would they be? What are they about? If they're teenage monsters, how would they want to be different from their parents? They would want to be fashionable and cool, you know?
Garret
So I put together a rough concept, and I shared it with some of my packaging friends at Mattel. We actually started meeting at lunch to flesh out the world. At the time—it was 2007—Buffy was big and skulls and goth stuff were starting to trend. We knew it was gonna be a tough sell at Mattel to get people to think that monsters could be for girls, so we wanted to give them personality. Facebook was big at the time so we created Facebook profiles for all the characters. That's how we started writing their bios.
Garret
Once we felt comfortable with who the characters were, we did some quick sketches. I think we did Frankie, Draculaura, Howleen, Laguna, and Operetta. Then we presented that concept to management because the product team was working on their own concepts to take into testing. They were like, "Well, we're going in testing anyway." So we took some rough drawings, some descriptions of what Monster High was and the idea behind it that could be read to the girls in the room. The testing girls went crazy for it. They wanted to know more about the monster world and about the girls themselves. And they liked the humor in it. So from there, we started working on prototyping them up. It was a little frustrating at the time because it was still a little bit like "packaging people don't work on products" and so I was told that I couldn't sculpt anything brand new. So I used existing sculpts and prototyped Frankie, Howleen, Claudeen and Draculaura and then the other designers did the same thing. I wanted Frankie to be green, but they were like, "No girl is gonna buy a green doll because girls don't like green." So we made her flesh toned.
Garret
Another designer, Jeff, did very monster-y ones: Frankie actually had green skin and Draculaura had really big fangs. Lily Martinez, who was an amazing doll designer, did human girls who were really into monsters. So we took a little bit from everything. When they saw Frankie as the human, a few different girls asked, "Well, why isn't she green? Frankenstein's green." That showed that girls wanted them to resemble the monsters that they were, so we knew that they could be more monster-y. We always call them half human half monster.
Garret
Then we started building out some of the other characters. We had those first three girls, and we finished off Laguna. They were concerned that the girls didn't know what the Phantom of the Opera was—which is fair—so we changed it to a mummy. With that, we had like our first line. Upper management decided they wanted to wait for a live action movie to launch the brand. So we waited. 2009 came around and we were getting ready to launch them, but there still was no movie deal. We actually tooled the lines—which means we cut all the steel to make the molds for all of the dolls—but they put it on hold again. I went home and was like, it's dead. I had never seen anything pushed back twice. But then they moved all the management around and they decided that the new branch shouldn't be a part of Barbie and that if there are new doll brands, they need to be a separate division. So we got new management and they were like, "Why are we sitting on this?" We finally got to launch it in 2010. It was worth the wait. I always hoped it would be successful, but never thought it would be that successful. You know?
Daniela
Yeah, I mean, there's like a whole world dedicated to Monster High. From the fashion to the dolls to the TV shows. I remember when I first saw Monster High growing up. It was actually during Halloween time and I didn't know who I wanted to be and Party City would mail those catalogs for the costumes. I was in fifth grade, so it's almost middle school but not quite. You kind of want to be cute, but you want to be scary also. And I saw these characters and just fell into the world. The aesthetic was very popular at the time—the hot pink, the black, the skulls.
Garret
Yeah, when we came out we were the only doll that was black in that aisle, so that helped set us apart on the shelf. Because I was still straddling the two worlds, I got to do the packaging and work on the doll at the same time, which was really fun. I also want to preface: it wasn't just me working. Yes, I had the idea but there are a lot of people who helped make it come to life. We had two amazing copywriters. I was scribbling down basic character stuff and they would flesh them out. They wrote the diaries and really brought them to life. And then, of course, there's all the designers who worked on it as well. They even did—it wasn't part of the doll line—but they did the Lisi Harrison books, which was a book series that came out around the same time. Some people will say the dolls are based on the books, but it's not true. Lisi wrote a really popular book series called The Clique and so they approached her to write a book about Monster High, but they only gave her the character names, the type of monsters they were, and a brief little bio. So she kind of got to write whatever she wanted, which didn't really line up with the brand. And then of course the webisodes came out, too. That was really fun to see the characters come to life.
Daniela
Yeah, I remember that around that time a lot of toy lines were starting to make TV shows as well. I think Barbie had a YouTube channel. Littlest Pet Shop had a TV show. My Little Pony, of course, was a huge one. Since Monster High was such a big world, I was wondering how big the team was—it ranged from dolls to fashion to even stuffed animals.
Garret
In the beginning, it was pretty small because the line was still kind of small. I think we had three designers, a copywriter, and a couple packaging designers. Of course, there were marketing people too. Then there was the entertainment team who had their whole team writing scripts and working with an animation studio for all the webisodes. But in the beginning, it was a pretty small team. Once the line got bigger, we got more people. If Mattel wasn't making it, we looked at everything and made comments on it. I read every script and diary and I watched every animation. I watched everything to make sure everything was consistent because there was nobody really to do it. Sometimes they would have a character do something that we had said they would never do, so I would try to point that out. I tried my best to create as much consistency across the brand as possible. If the entertainment team had done something that we had never talked about, we would try to retcon it back into the diaries at some point. We got pretty big; we had a licensing team and a publishing team who would handle all the books that got made.
Daniela
Did it ever get to a point where it felt kind of unmanageable?
Garret
No, it was always fairly manageable. I mean, it was a lot to do but I also loved doing it so I didn't really mind. The only time was when they wanted to do another brand. They asked us to go brainstorm another brand and I led that brainstorm. That's when we came up with Ever After High. We did the initial story for it and then we handed it off to another team and they worked on all the dolls. It was sad to not work on it, but at the same time I liked the monster aesthetic more so I wanted to keep working on Monster High and not let go of it to work on Ever After High.
Daniela
What kind of shows did you watch growing up? What kind of toys did you play with? Did you use any of them as references for Monster High?
Garret
Oh, yeah, I think they're in there. I loved Jem and the Holograms. Caddy is my homage to Jem. I liked the funny monster stuff: Scooby Doo, The Munsters, Addams Family, the Beetlejuice cartoon, even the Beetlejuice movie. I loved Elvira from the minute I saw her. I tried so hard to get her to be the voice of Headmistress Bloodgood but it didn't work out. It was tough to get people on board, so I'm excited that it's happening now.
Daniela
Are you no longer working on Monster High?
Garret
No. I left the brand in 2016. The last line I worked on was Great Skier Reef. At the time, they were looking to do a live action movie, so I was doing a lot of the mood boards and stuff for the movie while the rest of the team was working on the new reboot of the show. I designed Monica's outfit and did the Draculaura that came with Monica. I also did the design for Claudia's reboot outfit, but I didn't finish off the doll. I didn't agree with the direction of the reboot and when I dared to question it—that's when I kind of got pushed off the brand. A little bit of vindication, though: the reboot did terribly. That first reboot was not great because they kind of walked away from everything that made Monster High, Monster High. Their whole thing was they wanted more people to like it, so they made it less monster, but that wasn't what the brand was about and I think people could see that. So I moved over to the Barbie entertainment team where I did stuff like the Barbie vlog, Barbie Dreamtopia, Barbie Dreamhouse adventures, and then some of the Barbie movies. I left Mattel in 2018 and I went to work for Moose Toys, and actually moved to Australia for a couple years. Then I left Moose, came back here, and now I'm at a place called Just Play.
Daniela
Are you still making toys?
Garret
I still make toys, yeah. There hasn't been anything like Monster High yet, but I feel like that's just a once in a lifetime opportunity and I was so glad to have experienced that. And even though I'm not working on it anymore, it's cool to see it come back to life and continue on.
Daniela
They just released the trailer for the Barbie Movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. Who would your dream cast and director be for Monster High?
Garret
I'm not good with today's current stars. My hope for the characters would be that they find people who really embody them. Even though it was made for TV, I think that they found really great actors and actresses for the Nickelodeon live action. I love the actor they found for Frankie. That was exactly how I imagined Frankie would be. I'm also not that great with directors, but I think I would want somebody who just understands the world and can really make it come to life. I know that we're not on the level of it, but I appreciate what they've done with the Marvel Universe.
Daniela
There's so many unique characters and there's so much attention to detail. It's kind of like Pokemon in a way, you really do want to collect them all. Which character was your favorite to design?
Garret
It's always hard to pick a favorite. Frankie obviously holds a special place in my heart because I designed them first. I always loved Ghoulia. She was the closest one to me. Claudine was always really fun to design for because we could do whatever we wanted with her hair and her fashion could always change because she's into fashion. I loved Catty. I remember we got some pushback for doing a black cat girl, but we got her out there and she sold like crazy. I think we always wanted to make sure that there was a lot of detail in them because I knew that was what would bring them to life. We'd start off with brainstorming. What are the types of monsters we'd like to do? What are the types of characters we like to do? What monster works with what character? What's their fashion style? We really tried to flesh them out before we started designing them. Then we would say, "Okay, we have this character and this is their personality. Now let's design an outfit that matches that." We got to do some fun stuff that they hadn't really done in dolls yet. I love what we did with the shaved head on Venus. And even on River, where we had the bones inside of her body. They had done that on boys toys before but not on a doll. A lot of times it would be people telling us that we can't do that and us figuring out ways to make it happen. They told us we couldn't do Claudin's ears on her head in the beginning, too.
Daniela
I think it's cool that their fashion was based on their personalities. There's kind of been a resurgence of 2010 like alt-style fashion going on in the world. I feel like if you walk around the Lower East Side here in New York, a lot of girls look like Monster High dolls themselves. What were your inspirations when it came to the fashion? It was very of the moment but it's also very current now.
Garret
We tried to find stuff that was cool, but could also hopefully be timeless. We would use celebrities and stuff like that. For Frankie, we referenced Avril Lavigne just because she was really big at the time and she had that preppy, punk look going on and that's what we wanted for Frankie. We try to find words a lot of the time to describe their style and then we have those words to work with as we're pulling stuff. We would also look at runways. There's a service called WGSN where they take photos of all the runways and you have access to all the images. We were just trying to combine things together so that it has influences, but it also feels like something new. Everything had to go through the Monster High filter. I also took inspiration from things in my life. Like, I loved the Spice Girls and I loved their platform shoes so we would do platform boots every now and then. And then just trying to figure out—we used this term, but it wasn't necessarily 100% true—the goth version of it. What does the goth version of Abominable Snowman look like? We actually tried doing her in black but it didn't look right so we switched back to white. And then even some of the characters, like Twyla, will be inspired by more 50s, 60s stuff.
Daniela
Do you own every single Monster High doll ever created?
Garret
Yeah! For the original run from 2010 to 2016, I have every single doll.
Daniela
That's so cool. They're going crazy on eBay. It's insane. The Comic Con Frankie where it's all black and white is going for 2000 something dollars.
Garret
We pushed hard for Monster High to be at Comic Con, because they didn't know if it was right for it to be there. It was really cool to see that first introduction because people hadn't heard of it. I loved going to Comic Con and getting to meet and talk to the fans and hear their stories. You hope what you're designing will be impactful and you hope that people get the message so it felt good that people were enjoying it and that so many people felt seen by these little monster dolls.
Daniela
Was Monster High the first ever toy idea you had? Did you ever have other doll or toy line ideas that you had pitched to Mattel in the past?
Garret
Monster High was really the first one. The only reason I thought it was something was because every time I told someone about it they got excited by it. Everyone was always excited to know how they could help make it come to life.
Daniela
What did you think when Toys "R" Us started to shut down?
Garret
They're one of the reasons that Monster High really happened because Walmart didn't want it initially. So Toys "R" Us and Target taking it was the reason it was able to happen. Then it became successful and Walmart wanted it. What is so hard now is that Toys "R" Us used to help so many smaller toy lines happen and then those toys would blow up and there would be more variety in toys. Now, it's really just Walmart and Target and their buyers making all the decisions for what toys people get to buy.
Daniela
The stores used to have displays for all the toys and I remember Monster High would have like a full aisle or two dedicated to its world. Same with Littlest Pet Shop and, of course, Barbie. They don't have that anymore. All the toys are just sectioned off and it's always desolate. Where do you think the toy industry is going now? Also, what are your thoughts on iPad babies?
Garret
I don't have a problem with technology, I think it's done a lot to help us. I kind of feel like there's going to be a resurgence of physical toys. It's fun to play with stuff on your iPad, but I like to do things with my hands. I feel like, eventually, people are gonna want to touch things and experience things like that again. I do think there's a nice thing happening with a lot of individual creators who now have 3d printers and can make their own stuff and sell it. You can also reach more people online: you don't need to be in a toy store to make something happen. What happened to Toys "R" Us was a really big hit to the industry because they would support a lot of brands that other places wouldn't. When I was at Moose Toys, I found out Walmart didn't want Shopkins! But Toys "R" Us wanted it and it helped build it into the brand that it became. I hope one day there'll be some type of toy store chain that you can go to.
Daniela
You mentioned Walmart didn't want Monster High. Did they say why?
Garret
They just felt that their target consumer—Midwesterners—would not want it.
Daniela
Like it was sacrilegious or something?
Garret
Yeah. Monster High was huge in Russia because parents didn't want their kids playing with monsters because they thought it was evil. But the younger kids saw it as something new and different. There were stories on the news about how these dolls were going to get your child to worship the devil and they kept on selling. It was almost like the worse we made them sound, the better they did.
Daniela
I think the adult perspective on toys for kids is funny because, when I was playing with them, I didn't think anything like that. I just thought that they were stylish and gorgeous.
Garret
I remember we got a lot of comments on their outfits—their skirts being too short, their high heels being too high. The second season all the dolls were covered from head to toe, but even then people said they weren't wearing enough. So we were just like, "Whatever. We're just gonna make them wear what we feel is the best for them." I can only imagine how frustrating it is for a girl to be told what to wear, so I feel like dolls are a way to express that. Like, maybe your parents won't allow you to wear something but your doll can wear it. I think a lot of parents don't grasp that dolls are a form of self expression. And that was one of the things that was funny too, because the brand is all about not judging a book by its cover and accepting people for who they are and then these people are immediately judging them just because they're monsters or because of what they're wearing.
Daniela
Yeah, It's kind of like a social experiment. It says a lot about society when monsters are getting judged. They're all misunderstood.
Garret
A lot of us feel misunderstood and it's just learning to accept the things about yourself that either people make fun of you for or you don't like about yourself.
Daniela
Where in the country is the toy scene most predominant?
Garret
In terms of toy design, a lot of it happens in LA just because Mattel is here. A lot of the smaller toy companies are right around LAX, too. But, I mean, Hasbro's in Rhode Island. The place that I work for now—Just Play—they have an office here in LA, but their headquarters is in Pennsylvania. So there's still some outliers, but a lot of them pop up around LA because when the buyers come in to see Mattel, they can also swing by the other places. So it's sort of a little toy design enclave happening in LA.
Daniela
Is there a lot of toy scene drama?
Garret
I try to stay out of it. People will tag me and stuff and I look at it, but I don't want to be a part of it. There's a lot of people who don't like what's happening with the brand now and they want me to jump in. I don't like it either, but I still love that it's happening and that the characters are still alive. Is it the Monster High that we had? No, but we had Monster High. Like, move on to something else that you like and just appreciate the previous version. I wish we would stop hating things so much. I don't want to spend all my time hating things when I can go search for things that I really enjoy and inspire me.
Daniela
I read online that they made a collectible Draculaura just to calm down the people that grew up with Monster High.
Garret
Yeah, and then the other holiday doll was Draculaura, where they used the molds from the 2010 line: the G1 molds. There's two lines happening. There's the new cartoon line, the G3, and then G1 is still continuing with collector dolls, which I think is so cool. Mattel didn't have to do it, but they understand there's such a love for the brand.
Daniela
Which doll do you think was the most underrated? Was there ever one that you felt was overrated?
Garret
We didn't get to reuse some of the characters later on because we either ran out of time or it just didn't work with what we're doing. I wish we could have done more lines that continued. We only really got to do it once with Dawn of the Dance. In terms of underrated characters, I would've liked to have seen more of the ghosts from Haunted. That was a really fun thing to work on. And then overrated—I absolutely love her, but sometimes I'd be frustrated that Draculaura had to be in everything. It was because she was pink, so she was like the closest to Barbie. There always had to be a pink character, so she was usually in the line.
Daniela
I always had an issue with boy dolls. The Barbie boy dolls never worked for the stories that I was making, but the Monster High boy dolls were cool and edgy and were equally creative.
Garret
I've always liked boy dolls too, so I always wanted to make sure that they felt just as fashionable as the girls did. I think we might have been one of the first brands to do a boy with long hair.
Daniela
Yeah, they had personality.
Garret
We tried to make sure the boys weren't just accessories.
Daniela
The older I got, the more toys became more of a hobby to collect as opposed to something to play with. What are your thoughts on whether or not to open up the box?
Garret
My philosophy is, if you can, buy two. That was one of the cool things at ComicCon—there'd be a lot of dads who would come up and thank us for creating Monster High because they had something to collect with their daughters. Like, they'd go to Toys "R" Us on toy hunts together and the daughter would go look for Monster High and the dad would be looking for the action figures and then they would have something to bond over.
Daniela
How big is your collection? What toys do you collect? What kind of toys do you have your eye on at the moment?
Garret
I'm terrible because if I like it I buy it. I'm one of those people. I love superheroes, so I collect Marvel Legends and X-Men. In terms of fashion dolls, I tend to buy the Rainbow High dolls. I think they're absolutely beautiful. I don't love their heads, though. I think they're too big. I like to support them because it's a line that's all about super detailed dolls and they're at such a great price point. I buy a lot of fashion dolls just to take a look at them and see what people are doing and if there's any new techniques happening. I like a lot of weird doll lines, too. There's one called Gorgeous Creatures that only has four dolls. It was made by Mattel in 1979. They're anthropomorphic dolls, so there's a horse, a pig, a cow, and a hippo.
Daniela
Do you know the Blythe Dolls?
Garret
I do! I think that they're cool but I have an aversion to supergiant heads. I think they're really pretty. I have a Pull Up, which is close to Blythe. I have the Sailor Moon Pull Ups.
Daniela
Do you watch anime?
Garret
I watched Sailor Moon and a couple other things, but then I kind of fell out of it. I know some stuff, but I don't know a lot about anime. I think it looks cool and I like the style.
Daniela
I ask because Monster High had an anime.
Garret
They did! I didn't know that was happening until it got posted. We found out that the Japan team wanted to do their own series of shorts to appeal to the Japanese audience. I thought they were hilarious.
Daniela
Do you have any advice for aspiring toy designers?
Garret
I always tell people that I look for passion. I don't think of myself as like the best drawer in the world, so I tell people not to let their skill deter them. Just because you can't always draw what you want doesn't mean you can't communicate what you want. Try to do your best to communicate. I always want to see your passion for toys. I want to know that you love toys—that you're out buying them, that you like to collect stuff. Also, don't be afraid to show who you are. Don't be afraid to reach out to people. I always tell people that they can reach out to me. I can't promise I can get you a job, but at least make the connection. I have LinkedIn, connect with me there. And then I also think you should post your stuff online so people can see your work. Also, show your process! We love to see rough sketches.
Daniela
I've wanted to venture out into that world but I've never fully committed. I also studied graphic design but I feel like graphic design might not be my thing.
Garret
I mean I love graphic design, but I think it's about not pigeonholing yourself into something. I started as a package designer, then I did toy design, then entertainment design and now I'm doing product design again. The more you know about the industry, the more well rounded you are and the more you can bring to the table when you're designing stuff.
Daniela
You did graphic design and you just said that you don't think you're a good drawer. Did you ever make art on the side?
Garret
Oh, yeah. I have a website and I sell prints and stuff, but a lot of my stuff is toy art. I have drawings of stylized versions of the Monster High characters. There's a line called Golden Girl and the Guardians of the Gemstones. I did a spin on it called The Golden Girls and the Guardians of the Cheesecake where it was reimagining the Golden Girls as superheroes that are protecting cheesecake. And I think that toys, even though they're mass produced, are little pieces of art. Knowing the restraints that some of the designers are in, it's amazing what they're able to create.
Daniela
How much does it cost to produce a toy, typically?
Garret
Just to pay for the tooling of a doll is half a million to a million dollars. That's just to pay to mold the doll. It's expensive.
Daniela
I can only imagine that when you're working with Mattel's resources it can feel endless.
Garret
Yeah. What's nice is that they have a lot of resources in house to use. The hard part is that, because they're so big, they have more overhead too. Sometimes you get less money because they need to make more money on the toy in order to pay for everything that they have. It's capitalism, unfortunately.
Daniela
I can only imagine the cost for Monster High because they all have different faces.
Garret
We wanted different body types in the beginning, but we couldn't do it just because it was too expensive at the time. Every now and then we could sculpt new bodies for certain characters, but it would have to be sparse. We really push to have new heads on all of them. What I found out is that the heads are called roto heads because they're roto plastic. The way it's done is the machine is rotating to get the plastic to spin against the edge, that's why it's usually softer. Those are cheaper to mold so that's how we could get the heads.
Daniela
Toys are so cool.
Garret
It's an important part of the development process. I think some people like to shit on Barbie sometimes, but they don't understand that she also helps develop fine motor skills. Dressing Barbie is hard, so learning that process actually teaches fine motor skills and gets you to start to use your hands and stuff like that. Just by playing with this little toy, kids are learning so much.
Daniela
Yeah, that's a great point. I completely forgot about that struggle. What do you think makes someone a superstar?
Garret
Someone who's not afraid to try to be who they want to be. I don't think you have to know exactly who you are or exactly what your view on life is, but you just have to be who you want to be and do the best job that you can. Like, I knew that I always loved toys, so I just tried to find the path to where I could work on toys and that made me happy. Just keeping that star in your sight and following it is what makes you a superstar.