Stardoll Takes Girls’ Internet Fashions to Penney’s

One day last month, some 23,000 young girls logged onto Stardoll, a Stockholm-based social-media site where visitors dress up avatars in fashions of their choosing. The draw for the big turnout: A designer explaining how a virtual Stardoll apparel line had been transformed into real clothes to be sold in bricks-and-mortar stores. As she explained the complications of making a fashion line that had previously existed only in digital form, her audience bombarded her with 5,700 questions about everything from how quickly she works to what to wear with braces.

The event was marketing manna for J.C. Penney, the department store chain that’s bringing Stardoll’s Pretty n’ Love line to its 1,100 U.S. stores. Aimed at the 8- to 12-year-old “tween” set, the clothes include a $40 white tutu and flower-print legging combo and $20 T-shirts bearing such slogans as “Fame, Fashion and Friends.” The collaboration “makes sense, given what we’ve seen in social media and given how much more interactive consumers want to be,” says Erika K. Maschmeyer, a retail analyst at Robert W. Baird. “This is the next wave.”