The "Girl Power" Game-Changer! By James Thomas
Debbie Sterling came up with the brilliant idea of creating a construction/engineering toy for girls. With this one idea came the birth of GoldieBlox. GoldieBlox’s goal is to get girls building at a young age by tapping into their verbal and spatial skills. Debbie Sterling did not even know what engineering was until her senior year of high school, but she ended up pursuing and graduating with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and Product Design.
Sterling started the company by spending all her life savings on a sample model and with the help of Kickstart, she was able to turn that one sample into thousands. Debbie used video marketing to lead the company from a small time starter company to one of the biggest toys on shelves today. Her first Kickstart video got millions of views and helped her raise over $200,000. It only went up hill from here. By making more online videos, she was able to capture the attention of kids, parents, and larger corporations.
In 2014, GoldieBlox won a contest and received 30 seconds of commercial air time during the Super Bowl, which allowed GoldieBlox to be viewed by over a 100 million people. After the Super Bowl came the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. All this was good publicity until the Beastie Boys sued them for sampling their song in a video. Though this could be seen as bad publicity, I would beg to differ. Even though GoldieBlox was sued, they were able to get the attention of one of the greatest bands of all tie and this allowed them to get more publicity. With the extra publicity, the world was able to see what GoldieBlox’s goal was and they began to gain more and more supporters.
It has been three years now since GoldieBlox has been created and in those three years, the company has made incredible accomplishments. As time goes on, hopefully they will be able to attain their goal of influencing younger girls to get into building. One day in the future those same girls who are customers today, will be the workers of the engineering sector.