A partnership between HMD Global, maker of Nokia phones, and Mattel will see a Barbie Flip Phone launch this year. And we spoke to the company about it.
A most unexpected brand partnership has given us a surprising phone to get excited about at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024. HMD Global, the company that makes phones under the Nokia name, has partnered with toymaker Mattel on the Barbie Flip Phone. Yes, that Barbie. But don’t worry that this is going to be little more than a pink version of an old Nokia phone.
“Let me put it like this,” Adam Ferguson, HMD Global’s head of product marketing, said with a smile as I chatted to him over Zoom during the show. “Mattel, and Barbie in particular, is not the kind of brand you offer something off the shelf to.”
Excitingly, the two companies have far higher ambitions than releasing just another product tie-in to forget.Isn’t it a bit late?
The Barbie Flip Phone has been announced at MWC 2024, but the enormously popular, Oscar-nominated Barbie movie came out in mid-2023, so hasn’t the company missed out on all the Barbie fever and Barbenheimer chaos that seemed like the perfect opportunity to launch such a device? While that’s a fair point, Barbie is not just the movie; — far from it. In a recent interview with The Drum, Mattel’s president and CEO Richard Dickson said, “Barbie manifests itself through product interpretations, but the idea is bigger than any one product.”
Ferguson agreed, and said that thinking the phone was ‘late’ “missed the point of what the Barbie brand is about, the trajectory it’s on, and what it means.”
What will the phone be about, if it’s going to be more than just another collaboration? Ferguson continued: “It has been an absolute joy and pleasure working with the team at Mattel, and seeing the journey that Barbie’s gone on over the last years, and we have been able to talk about things like digital detox and girls in tech.
