The Bratz dolls have beaten Barbie in a plastic cat fight of epic proportions. A US jury has found that Barbie toymaker Mattel had stolen trade secrets from a smaller rival, MGA Entertainment, and awarded the house of Bratz $88.4m (£53.5m).
The battle of the dolls has been ongoing since 2006 and the verdict will come as a bitter blow to Mattel. Both sides have spent millions of dollars fighting over the rights to the controversial line of bestselling pouty-lipped dolls that became a global phenomena.
Mattel had argued that the dolls' designer Carter Bryant developed the Bratz concept while working for it in the late 1990s and secretly took the idea to MGA. MGA denied the claims and countersued, accusing Mattel of corporate espionage, using spies with fake business cards and dummy invoices to gain access to MGA's ideas. MGA also accused Mattel of threatening to scupper business deals with retailers and media firms if they did business with Bratz.
Bryant has always argued he came up with the idea for Bratz while living with his parents, in between stints working for Mattel.
Multi-ethnic and trendy, the Bratz styled themselves as "the girls with a passion for fashion!" They became a huge hit in the mid-2000s, making $1bn in annual revenue at the height of their popularity, spawning real life clothes ranges and even a movie in which four actors struggled like "colour-blind drag queens" to "replicate their plastic precursors' range of expression," according to the Guardian review. The dolls also sparked a furious debate about the sexualization of young girls.
But it was the impact on Barbie's bottom line that had Mattel reaching for their lawyers. Mattel said in court that the more demure Barbie had lost more than $300m in profit as a result of the Bratz dolls' success.
The case has been in and out of court for years. The original trial in 2008 found in favour of Mattel and awarded the company $100m in damages. The trial judge also ordered MGA to turn over the Bratz franchise to Mattel. But in July 2010, an appeals court in San Francisco threw out the original decision after deciding the value of the Bratz line had "overwhelmingly" been created by MGA and that the original decision had failed to take into account all the development that had gone into the line after Bryant's original creation.
The jury in the latest trial considered both Mattel and MGA's claims and concluded that Mattel did not own the idea for the Bratz line or any of the sketches that led to their creation. Isaac Larian, chief executive of MGA, cried while listening to the verdicts.
Last autumn MGA celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Bratz line with the release of a new generation of slightly less pouty dolls. The latest incarnation has generated only lacklustre sales. Barbie has seen a bounce-back in sales, although Mattel has seen revenues eaten up by legal costs.