Debra Sterling was one of the few women in her engineering class at Stanford, and that always bothered her. Later, a conversation with a friend who had, unlike her, played with construction toys made Debra realise that from a young age, children started to think about what they would do when they grew up, and toys and media had a huge influence on them.

The problem was that these were very stereotypical – toy companies developed toys based on what they believe were innate play patterns, entertainment companies worked with toy companies to develop content based on those play patterns, and retailers contributed to this with girl and boy aisles in stores.

Feeling that it was a ‘shame’ that so many girls missed out on getting excited about anything besides ‘pink,’ she decided to start GoldieBlox, creating a construction toy and a character named Goldie – a girl engineer children’s character, says Debra who was in the city in connection with the Animation Masters Summit organised by the Toonz Media Group.

Story book

The first prototype she developed was an illustrated storybook and it came along with a construction set. It was put up on a funding platform, and to her surprise, she sold a million dollars worth of the toy before she had even manufactured a single unit.

That was seven years ago. Today, the idea of getting girls into STEM (science, engineering, technology, and mathematics) is very popular with parents, she said.

Debra always dreamt of creating a GoldieBlox franchise – showing girls that they could be an inventor, a maker, solve problems, and that it was way more fun than being a princess. She knew that introducing engineering concepts through play and creating characters that were cool, appealing, and aspirational were the way to make girls interested in STEM. Today, GoldieBlox has sold over a million-and-a-half toys, expanded into mobile apps, entered into a partnership with Random House for GoldieBlox books, has a YouTube channel with over 6 lakh subscribers.