Meet GoldieBlox, your soon-to-be new favorite toy company for girls.
Toy stores are one of the single most thrilling places for any kid, coming in second only to maybe candy stores. But there are some real issues stacked on each and every shelf of the world’s toy stores. Always segregated by gender, the designated boys’ section of toy stores offer up immeasurable inspiration for thinking outside the box and creating new things, either by invention or building or both. Girls, on the other hand, can choose from dolls (and their endless high gloss pink accessories), kitchen playsets, Easy Bake Ovens, and fairytale princess costumes.
GoldieBlox believes our girls deserve more, and unleashed an adorable mob of little girls for their commercial to celebrate the toy company’s disruption of the pink aisle.
GoldieBlox was founded last year after a successful Kickstarter campaign by Debbie Sterling, an engineer with an education from Stanford University. The idea for the line came to her after being troubled by how few women were working by her side. Engineering sits at the forefront of solving major challenges in our society; it offers a high salary and great job security, yet the field is dominated by men, who make up 89% of working engineers. That is a big problem.
Offering young girls a much-needed female engineer role model that makes engineering and problem solving fun and accessible, GoldieBlox aims to nurture a generation of girls who are more confident, courageous, and tech-savvy, giving them a real opportunity to grow and directly contribute to the progress being made in the world by engineers.
The first toy to be released in this exciting new line is GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine, available now in toy stores across the country and Canada, almost like a beacon of light and hope emitting from the otherwise constant sea of pink.
GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine is the debut story of Goldie, the girl inventor who loves to build.
In the book, Goldie decides to build a spinning machine to help her dog, Nacho, chase his tail. Soon, the whole gang wants in on the action. As girls watch Goldie build the spinning machine in the book, they can build their own using the construction set.
GoldieBlox has already been told that they cannot survive in mass stores next to Barbie, and that convention says engineering toys for girls are a “niche.” What a depressing outlook on the girls toy market today. That is precisely why it is so important to take on the responsibility of surrounding our girls with toys that will inspire them to believe that they can achieve great things, set out to do the so-called impossible, and do good in the world around them.
That is so cool! I always love building with Lincoln Logs when I was little which was supposedly a boys toy!
Maybe if all the Mom’s out there started asking for this toy for their daughters at the major stores it would magically appear on the shelves!! Gender bias has always made me mad as a hatter–I don’t have children-but if I did have a daughter I would certainly get her one of these sets!!
Love this! I am kind of a “handy” person now, was a “tom boy” as a kid, and would have loved to have this. What a good idea.
I love this idea, and what a great commercial! I want one of the ‘More Than a Princess’ t-shirts some of the girls were wearing.
These look really awesome!!!
What a great idea! I definitely would have wanted to play with something like this when I was growing up. I hope it catches on!
I love this idea! If you look at ads in the 60’s the whole pink and blue thing was not common. Now they have segregated the market into blue for boy toys and pink for girl toys. I would like to see them produce toys without any gender color. Like red, green or brown.
I do love the idea behind goldieblox and think it will be a huge success.