Barbie packaging powered by Adobe Firefly Generative AI hits store shelves this holiday season
Each year Mattel Inc., the leading global toy and family entertainment company, delivers thousands of new toys to store shelves. They capture the interest and imagination of children, parents and fans of all ages eager to lay their hands on the next Barbie® or Hot Wheels®. This volume translates into a massive amount of eye-catching packaging, which must be designed, approved and iterated across different creative and marketing teams in the company. At this level of scale, Mattel looked to the preproduction process for opportunities to be more efficient and get toys into market faster — while also maintaining a high bar for delivering amazing packaging concepts. Enter Adobe Firefly generative AI, an ideal solution to augment Mattel’s creative process and gets the hottest new toys into the hands of children faster than ever.
Bringing packaging ideas to life
Previously, designers at Mattel used something called “bluelines” to create the early concepts of Barbie packaging. These sketches provided a rough sense of the environment that Barbie would be placed in, but it presented challenges in that teams outside of the design organization didn’t always fully grasp the creative vision. Design teams would need to create multiple options and present them to reviewers across the company. These review cycles often required constant iteration on the bluelines, a time-consuming process that required multiple rounds of feedback.
With Adobe Firefly, Mattel designers now use simple text prompts (through the Firefly web app and Adobe Creative Cloud applications) to instantly generate high-quality packaging concepts. Firefly takes the initial kernels of an idea and accurately portrays them on digital paper, often with imaginative creative elements that surprise the design teams. When concepts are ready for internal review, the images also provide reviewers with a way to visualize renderings that are much closer to the final packaging.
Once sign-off is received, Mattel designers can easily edit and enhance the images through Adobe Photoshop. Backgrounds can be expanded for different packaging sizes with Generative Expand, while Generative Fill allows users to add or remove different creative elements. This new process has greatly shortened the time it takes to get toys into stores.
“Bringing Adobe Firefly into our design process has created better alignment between our creative and marketing teams, eliminating time-intensive review cycles that often limited our ability to finesse and polish our packaging designs,” said Sal Velazquez, Barbie Staff Packaging designer. “And while the efficiency gains were welcomed across the organization, we continue to be impressed with the imaginative ideas that Firefly generates from our text prompts.”
Available now at a store near you
Barbie packaging powered by Firefly can now be found on shelves at your local store. For the Barbie Signature 2024 Holiday Doll, Mattel designers began the creative process with this simple Firefly prompt: Gold square sculpted frame with intertwined red ribbons and red presents with gold bows, white background. After generating several variations, the review process was a breeze. Designers polished the winning image in Photoshop, and a new environment for Barbie to step into was ready to go.
For the Sue Bird Barbie Role Model Doll, which celebrates the sports legend whose record-breaking legacy pioneered the way for growth in women’s professional basketball, Firefly helped to capture the excitement of the court. Using the Firefly prompt “Basketball court in stadium, crowd in the background seats, view of standing on the court looking out, basketball board and net angled perspective, side three quarter view,” Mattel designers were able to quickly visualize the concepts in their heads. Firefly also captured unexpected elements such as stadium lights, which brought a sense of energy and excitement to the packaging concept.
From the beginning, we designed Adobe Firefly for safe commercial use. We accomplished this by training Firefly on the highest quality Adobe Stock assets and openly licensed, public domain content where copyright has expired. At the same time, brands have the opportunity to obtain IP indemnification, helping bring teams some peace of mind. Users can comfortably bring generative AI into their daily work, using the Firefly web app or directly in applications such as Adobe Photoshop. The response has been humbling; Firefly has now generated over 12 billion images globally since its launch. We continue to be impressed by the way enterprise customers have used the technology, from digital marketing campaigns to rebranding efforts.
In the case of Mattel, they are using Firefly to reimagine packaging design, defining a new process that gets products to market faster while also driving new forms of creative expression. Adobe built Firefly to augment longstanding processes, focused on portions of design workflows that were often repetitive and created organizational inefficiencies. With most creative professionals spending only about 30 percent of their time on actual creative work, this freed up resources for Mattel designers to focus on what they do best: Creating compelling and exciting environments for Barbie that spurred the imagination of the brand’s fans. Mattel is demonstrating the power of taking early ideas and bringing them to life instantly on digital paper, a process that now enables the company to ship products with greater speed and capture rising consumer demand. We are looking forward to seeing what they create next!
Don’t miss Mattel's VP of Packaging and Ecomm Creative, Jamie Dunn’s Adobe MAX 2024 session: Barbie, Hot Wheels & More: Unboxing Content at Scale with Mattel Packaging.