Case study Frozen

Walt Disney invented movie merchandising. Even in 1929 Disney had Mickey Mouse's face plastered on toy writing tablets.

Mickey Mouse Merchandise from 1930

Now Disney owns five of the ten highest grossing merchandise lines of all time. Since their acquisition of Star Wars the merchandise of which has grossed around $12 billion. Disney animations are designed for merchandising, their colourful simplistic style appeals to children who have tremendous buying power. While some of their newer live action acquisitions such as Marvel and Star Wars also have huge merchandising potential as they appeal to adult audiences with large disposable incomes.

Disney stores and parks seem to be primarily platforms to exhibit their products, which all helps to fuel this merchandising empire. They are also very litigious about unlicensed products. “According to one report from Etsy, one Amazon seller actually got served with a lawsuit since their online store had such a large amount of unlicensed Disney merchandise for sale. Apparently, Amazon is even freezing their earned assets as Disney states the money is theirs”.

…and what merchandising were they selling? Well this:

Frozen Merchandise

All of Disney’s expertise in the world of merchandise has come to the fore with the phenomenon that is Frozen. In just 2 years the merchandise alone has grossed $5.3billion and has made Frozen the most lucrative animated film of all time. People have joked that part of the merchandising success is the fact that there are two princesses, so doubling the merchandising prospects.

‘For some parents, their children's obsession with the popular animated flick, is costing them thousands of dollars, with many spending up to $800 on special themed birthday parties and, in some cases, more than $1,500 on sold-out limited edition toys’1.  Even Disney did not expect how successful Frozen would be and sold out of certain designs within a few weeks. However this shortage of toys only made them even more desirable. Parents who are desperate to please their children are willing to pay extortionate amounts. ‘Some Disney Stores — either caught on the hop or cannily trying to fuel the hype, depending on which way you look at it — are restricting parents to two Frozen toys per trip’2. Even though the film has been out for over a year it products are still the must have this Christmas.

This continued pull of Frozen merchandise and the children’s increasing demand for the toys, is because of competition with their friends. The more products Disney produce the more the children have to get the latest one or be out done by their friends. Which is why this Christmas ‘Frozen’ merchandise is reigning supreme, with the survey finding one in five parents this holiday plan to buy Disney’s ‘Frozen’ merchandise. That topped the nearly 17% that expect to buy Barbies”. “Behold the bewitching power of branding”.

I spoke to the costume designer Jean Gillmore of Frozen she said therefore animation character design is very much a “collaborative process. The first priority is honouring the movie." Insuring the film is good is the first step to insuring a good foundation for merchandising. But She starts with that the beautiful almost unrealistic perfect Disney figure to fit within their existing brands. She is very much aware of what Disney likes as she has worked on a number of Disney films. So she knows what makes a successful Disney image. Therefore while she is being creative she is still bound by what the Disney brand wants so cannot be as original as she could be.

She says when she sees her designs all over the merchandise it is either “validating OR dismaying, but one must let them go--- like children--- as they enter the bigger world.  You conceive them, grow them and launch them, and what happens after that in a commercial world is pretty much out of one's control”.

She has very little say over what happens to her design. As you can see from the images her designs have been altered firstly to fit the Disney brand and then for merchandising.

First Idea for Elsa' Dress

Later Concept art

Elsa in the Film Frozen

An Elsa Doll, One of many designs

So when she created the design it then goes to a merchandise designer.  Cody Reynolds  was responsible for creating Elsa’s costume, first he has to decide what makes it recognisable. He works closely with designers to finalise the shape of the garment. He then examines various swatches to create the right colouring and make it safe for a child to wear.

The designer and the merchandisers work very closely together to create the most popular garment. The main focus is making the costumes "Fabulous" (Jean Gillmore) which is why they are so appealing. Normally the whole process is quite amicable. But occasionally this amicable relationship falls apart, like in the case of Brave where the Pixar designer objected to how Brave's Meredith was ‘sexed up’ by Disney’s merchandise designers.

A clear difference between the Pixar design and Disney's

For Disney they have a formula that works and Frozen has just proved that going back to the traditional princess model is the most lucrative for Disney. The problem with successful formulae is that they become stale and then Disney tries to force more out of the success than they should. Look at Disney’s history; it has huge successes, then the audience becomes bored so they try to lure them back with unsuccessful ‘straight-to-video’ sequels of films, such as Peter Pan 2 or Little Mermaid 2. Disney needs to try to learn not to recreate formulae but to be original. Unfortunately as long as merchandise keeps paying off, movies with greater merchandising prospects are more likely to be made. This can only mean that history will repeat itself and Disney will once again become stale and unoriginal until the next Frozen.