It has been forever since I posted and with good reason.  Some of the reason had to do with the fact that my every day is crowded with tiny virtual items, animated pets and a new doll named Megan.  Another part of the my blog absence is that blogging has to become a habit or I will never do it. I am so busy living the dollhouse life that I don’t want to stop and talk about what is going on.

The big news is that we broke 100,000 registered members last week.  On October 2, 2009 Digital Dollhouse officially launched across the Mattel Digital Network-most  significantly on www.barbie.com and we had 6000 people sign up the first day.  I thought the team might run screaming from their various virtual offices.  Especially our technology team who had been watching the servers function nice and steady at 500 visits a day only to see our numbers climb into the tens of thousands.  The site slowed a bit and showed us where the problems were but did not crash which was shocking but heartening.

Digital Dollhouse Banners on Barbie.com

As a former Mattel employee, long time Barbie movie producer and life time Barbie fan, I got pretty choked up seeing Digital Dollhouse on the same website as Barbie.  It was sort of like standing next to Oprah…but better, less pressure.  And even more amazing were the girls and their moms, streaming into Digital Dollhouse and staying to play.  The results?  Over 5 MILLION dollhouse images have been posted!  A surge of people have purchased allowances and coin cards to play with this crazy virtual toy idea.  They GET it!  A dollhouse on your computer?  Cool!

Here are some of the latest rooms including a spooky room for Halloween!

A room designed by a Digital Dollhouse member

It has been a wild couple of weeks.  Digital Dollhouse is lucky to have a team of talented and very patient professionals who are willing to sit on my head if I get truly out of hand.

The Campion Platt Beach House is up and running!  We are incredibly excited (and slightly sandy and disheveled) by the flurry of activity on the site.  Tonight our Flash Game genius Chris Etches of Kill5 Games will be going out to portals tonight with our glorious free flash demo game.  The sound of the surf and the seagulls alone are enough to relax the unsuspecting casual gamer to take pause.  It is like a mini vacation on your computer!

Please take a look and check out the site.  There have been lots of changes over the last week.  I’m especially happy with the welcome page which makes the whole site feel more interactive and more like a community then a stand alone dollhouse experience. You can try it out at http://www.digitaldollhouse.com/game/beachhouse

Cute Beach Bedroom with puppiesOr make the same room into a living room

There is a lot of excitement in the dollhouse!  We are getting ready for the launch of the Campion Platt Beach House sometime next week which includes a wave of email campaigns, a new flash game from Chris Etches of Kill5games.  The Beach House looks GORGEOUS and I can’t believe how far we have come in less than a year.  Digital Dollhouse now has 25,000 members which still shocks me.  Next week we will have a second house and over 1000 virtual items to design with.

And while I know I have had a huge gap in my blog posts, I will leave you with some wonderful visuals from the new Beach House.  Can’t wait to open the doors!

A beautiful guest bedroom

A modern Kitchen in the Beach House

I have only myself to blame for the lack of posts.  It has been a grueling couple of weeks for me and for the Digital Dollhouse team as we get ready to launch the Campion Platt Beach House.  I have started playing with it and it is truly glorious.  If you would like to see a preview of some of the incredible design from Campion Platt please look at his newly renovated site www.campionplatt.com.  Campion was here for a visit last week and remains enthusiastic about how the beach house is looking and we had fun talking about PR possibilities.  I have not made up my mind if building a virtual house is as difficult as building a real one, but certainly this digital beach house has proven to be a real handful.

But I did have a quick escape this weekend to watch my dear friend Stephanie get married in beautiful Paso Robles.  She was married at Zenaida Cellars winery and it was fantastic.  We had great weather and I couldn’t help wondering if there should be a Digital Dollhouse winery in the works.  And if not a winery than we definitely need to give members everything to create a wedding in their dollhouse….flowers, cakes, music etc.   And if not a wedding right now then perhaps mini bottles of wine…..

We also spent an afternoon taking a tour of Hearst Castle. Now THAT might make an interesting digital dollhouse.  I did not like the interiors-too dark, too grand and really who wants to have chairs from the Spanish Inquisition in one’s dining room?  But the grounds were beautiful and reminded me that we need to plan out digital dollhouse gardens and potentially swimming pools.  Perhaps something a little less spectacular than this…

Just a little wading pool

We had a lovely time in Cape Cod last week.  I can’t help looking at every house an imagining what it would look like as a Digital Dollhouse.  I find myself mentally clicking on furniture and moving items around in my mind.  I sometimes think I am actually undressing rooms with my eyes as I walk in.  It must be disconcerting at best for others when I walk into their homes.  But at least I’m doing this with houses and not people!

It was wonderful to be away but naturally I stayed close to a computer as much as possible.  Digital Dollhouse has almost fifteen thousand users and some incredible new designers.  I want to create new items for them every day just to see what they will come up with!  We’ve had people create salons for card playing, gorgeous Victorian nurseries and more!  The creativity out there is shocking and like any miniaturist the patience, regardless of the fact that Digital Dollhouse is-well,digital-it takes to create a dramatic room is inspiring.

The team has been working non-stop on the Campion Platt  Beach House and we are lucky to be working with Campion, who really gets the the “home as fantasy” concept.  Every time I look at one of the new rooms overlooking the ocean or see a new piece of desinger furniture, I feel the need to break out the Mai Thais and take off my shoes.

Here is a sneak peek at a furniture item still in progress but looking beautiful and oh so different than our lovely Victorian.

Fairport Daybed from Campion Platt in Sky

I just knew this would happen!   Digital Dollhouse would reach ten thousand users and my mind and ego would get crazy and ask “when are we reaching 100, 000?”  When is it enough?  The traffic finally did slow down a bit which gave us a little breathing room. We had some issues with the tidal wave (though much fewer than I thought we would have thanks to Kai) and now we are back to the grindstone as to how to make the overall experience better, faster, smarter.  We cling to our improved google analytic stats (wow look at our increase of 444%!) and hope that our investors and cheerleaders understand how hard this is.  Digital Dollhouse is an infant digital brand in a world filled with ugly, free online games and stuff.  And while our traffic is slower, our sign ups to membership is still consistent.  And there are members who are on the site EVERY DAY and now own everything virtual item we have.  I’d like to feature some of their rooms here in honor of these lovely individuals who don’t know how much they help me sleep at night.  Twinky, Firefromherlips and hknutton01 you rock!

FirefromHerLips is impressive

OK, actually 10,271 to be exact!  The team is incredibly busy sailing this busy ship but I wanted to share.  We can’t thank Chris Etches from kill5.com enough for creating a mini digital dollhouse application and sending it out to his portal contacts.  Lucky for DDH, we landed in the generous hands of Inga at www.dressupgames.com and we are still getting waves of users.  Thank you so much!

I’ll leave everyone with a sneak preview of our new Victorian boutique.  As we are launching the Beach House soon we are getting ready to offer the Victorian as a free item in the boutique.

Coming Soon-the Victorian Boutique

It was been quite a ride at Digital Dollhouse! We are in full production on the Beach House which feels like I’m shopping for my real house with an unlimited budget.  All of us were busy working through our tasks and I would stare vaguely at our member lists-blogging and pasting with hopes of hitting a vein of new user and then BAM!!! we got linked on a girls webgame portal yesterday thanks to an incredibly generous flash artist in London.

We had 1500 new users sign up in one day.

And they played with it!  A lot of them stayed on Digital Dollhouse and made rooms and really played with it!  I know I shouldn’t sound surprised, after all I’ve been making girls technology and media products for most of my career.  But suddenly I had the incredible opportunity to watch over a thousand girls actually play with something that I’ve been thinking about, dreaming about and working towards for almost nine years.  For the first time it wasn’t a Barbie/Tinkerbell/major-brand-with-millions-of-dollars product that I was looking at but truly something born of my own head and with the enormous effort of a small and incredibly talented group of people.  It was equal parts exhilarating and terrifying.  I kept refreshing my screen in shock while the rest of the team seemed puzzled…I mean isn’t this what was supposed to happen eventually?  Shouldn’t we be expecting thousands of users playing on the site?  Isn’t that the whole point?

But here is the funny thing about working towards goals and dreams.  Often there is a fuzzy awareness that one day something might result from the risk taking, begging money from strangers, the desperately hard work and the gnawing anxiety that you might have cratered your career for the hopes of something better. Yet generally that something has a fantastical quality to it.  Mine sort of included an Oscar, a smaller dress size and the easy ability to always fly first class.  It included fantasies of hundreds of girls playing and naturally progressing to thousands and millions of girls making dollhouses and proudly sharing with friends and family. And it all would take something like…um about two weeks.

Instead traffic and feedback and usage and information comes in drips, drabs and an occasional tidal wave.  Instead of learning to swim in life, I should have been taught how to build a boat, crash it and then rebuild a better one, every few minutes.  I am not a zen surfer.  My creative spirit is not light and cheerful and effervescent.  Mine is more like liquid lead, pliable but not something you want in your running shoes.

And the site works in some ways and not in others.  Some of the girls from our tidal wave have come back, new users stream in and consultant gurus are demanding that we all (ok especially me) keep our heads down and our eyes towards our ultimate goal-a great, rich user experience.  I’m taking my finger off the refresh button, my hand out of the m&m bag and my stomach out of my throat.  As of this moment we have 6117 Digital Dollhouse members.  Wow.

I’ve had a few readers ask me how did I start Digital Dollhouse (and something in the way they approached the topic gave it the significant context of “just how crazy do you have to be to want to build a virtual dollhouse?” ) I completely understand why it must seem strange that a woman nearing 40 would be in love with the idea of creating a perfect virtual toy.  But then again, I was the same person who used to change the outfits on the Barbie outfits on her desk with some regularity.  Thank goodness I worked at Mattel and only a few people thought it was strange.

My answer and thoughts about this matter are a little complicated.  I am still extremely aware of my…I guess you could call it “inner child”  (I live in Los Angeles so I’m allowed to say such things.)  I remember being eight like it was yesterday.  My husband is often shocked at how clear my memories are -and how quickly I can revert to some rather unflattering child like behavior.  I also find that I have always had a strong affinity for young girls.  Girls between five and twelve immediately peg me as the one adult who will gladly share her lipstick, discuss the Jonas Brothers and show you how to make a fortune teller out of paper that really works.  I’ve lost countless beaded necklaces to strangers’ children and am pretty much willing to dump out my whole purse if a perfume sample will make some little girl somewhere happy.  I  speak Barbie, Tinkerbell and Disney Princess fluently.

Digital Dollhouse exists because I wanted to make something beautiful and affordable for girls of all ages to play.  I didn’t want it to be too frilly or young so that a 12 year old would lose her self respect by playing “dollhouse” but I still wanted it to be pretty enough and engaging enough for a six year old.  I know so many kids are into the cartoony and complex worlds of Sims and Habbo and Club Penguin but I wanted to create something truly unique.  I keep reminding myself that this is an experiment.  There are no guarantees that enough girls will come to play here and buy gifts and treasure what they create.  I’m often stupified when I realize how far I (and the team) have yet to go with all the necessary features (the new Beach House, the Facedoll (more about that later) and more explicit feedback between members and the site.)  But I also remind myself that every day is an adventure at the dollhouse and that this was my choice.  And the site gets a little bit better every day and that is all I can ask of my tremendous production team.

So I hope that answers some of your questions.  More dollhouse updates to come.  Here are some new rooms from our amazing member designers.

Wonderful Digital Dollhouse Kitchen from Meegha

Parlor by Digital Dollhouse Design Winner Willie

There is a lot of fear in the air.  We aren’t immune to it in the dollhouse.  Stress tests on banks….markets bouncing up and down.  I try to remind myself to not get wrapped up in it.  And all of us at Digital Dollhouse  try to focus on how to make our dollhouse experience relaxing for our users.  We received a letter the other day from one of our best member designers.  She likes to use the site as an escape during her day.  How amazing it is that we can offer people of any age an indulgence in their day- a way to step away from the news and relax?

When things get to be too much, I like to take a bath.  When we started Digital Dollhouse my fingers were perpetual raisins.  I had never created a website, rented an office space or juggled the million and one tasks a small business owner has to do.  I was completely overwhelmed.  I’m still overwhelmed at times but the team has gotten stronger and I’m fiercely carving out responsibilities that can happen in the moment, one day at a time. If I look too far down the road I’ll probably jump in the nearest tub and never get out.

Of course, if I HAD to pick a tub, I’d chose this beauty from Digital Dollhouse.

Clawfoot tub in Digital Dollhouse