Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
Barbiecore has taken over fashion, beauty, and even rugs and Maseratis. Now, it’s coming for beverages.
This week, zero-sugar lemonade and iced tea brand Swoon is debuting Barbie Pink Lemonade in collaboration with Mattel (a collab we first spotted at Expo West in March). It’ll be sold in 4,000+ retail locations across Target, Whole Foods, and Publix for the rest of the year, with 10% of net sales benefiting the Barbie Dream Gap Project.
Swoon was founded in 2015 by Jennifer Ross, who has Type 1 diabetes, and Cristina Ros Blankfein. The two created a monk fruit-sweetened beverage to help limit sugar consumption. Mattel resonated with “this idea of taking a personal challenge and turning it into something positive,” Ross said, while the brand aligned with Barbie’s women’s empowerment ethos.
Ross said the two know the consumer “advocacy and awareness” that come from pop culture collabs—the brand debuted a matcha lemonade with Emma Chamberlain’s Chamberlain Coffee last year—and they have learned a thing or two about establishing and making the most of a collab since then.
Pretty in pink: So how did the small brand secure a partnership with the iconic toy maker?
“Jen and I just scoured our network and just really tried to figure out who has ever worked at Mattel [or] with Mattel,” Blankfein said. The two sent an email to Mattel in July (around when Barbiecore first started gaining steam). They said Mattel passed it around from team to team, and with many layers of approval to go through, discussions were taking a while, and the two got antsy.
“One of the things we don’t have as a newer company is patience,” Blankfein said, so they made product samples and sent them to Mattel, which worked to “re-engage” them. “You can fall in love with something in theory, but it’s much easier when you see it, hold it, and even drink it,” she said.
Making lemonade: While the Barbie-adorned packaging for the product is new, the lemonade inside the cans actually isn’t, as Swoon already sells a pink-lemonade product. Being solely a packaging change makes it much easier to leverage Swoon’s current retail footprint, as its current pink lemonade will be restocked with the Barbie collab in stores.
It’s a lesson the brand learned from its Chamberlain Coffee collab: bringing a completely new limited-edition product was tricky for a small brand in brick and mortar, Swoon’s main sales channel. Blankfein said once conversations with buyers and distributors for the matcha lemonade product were complete, Swoon had missed many product review cycles for the category, and the product was only in retailers for a shorter period of time, making it a “less successful” performance at retail compared to e-commerce. For the Barbie collab, it’s sticking to an existing product.
“That was definitely a learning, both the positive of just the power of partnerships, but also how to harness that even better for our retail business,” Blankfein said.