Rebel Toy Company Launches New Quest to Turn Princesses Into Engineers

04-08-2014 • http://www.wired.com, By Laura Hudson

It seems that someone forgot to tell those girls.

In the past seven months, GoldieBlox has raised more than $285,000 on Kickstarter, garnered millions of views for a video about its toys (thanks in part to a brilliant re-imagining of the Beastie Boys’ song “Girls”), pre-sold more than a million dollars’ worth of products, and parlayed that groundswell of support into winning a contest for a Super Bowl commercial slot. Its toys are stocked by big retailers like Toys R Us and Target, even expanding into the United Kingdom and Australia. And now, it’s filming the follow-up to the original video—which is where Shepard and I are sitting at right now.

Shepard has a simple answer for how GoldieBlox was able to bypass the barriers of the toy industry. “It’s the internet,” she says. “That’s what’s really enabling companies like ours to surpass the conventional wisdom that says an idea isn’t relevant or that the market doesn’t want it. Social media and crowdsourcing was an incredible way to circumvent that.”