It’s time to move over, Barbie dolls. An Indian American Harvard graduate with an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Neha Chauhan, has created a very different fashion doll of the future. Called Willowbrook Girls, these dolls are diverse, ambitious, smart and opinionated.
 
Chauhan is currently seeking funds for the project through a Kickstarter campaign, where she hopes to raise $30,000 to cover production costs, and with funds to the tune of $29,000 already having been raised so far, the campaign is fast nearing its goal.
 

The campaign page describes the project as: “We want to move away from the one-dimensional view of girls offered by most dolls, which focuses on appearance, and instead, introduce characters that celebrate girls for their brains, talents, and leadership.”

The characters are a group of seven friends in the fifth grade who are intelligent, goal-oriented, and outspoken. Each character is described as having incredible ambition, and being diverse not just in personalities, career ambitions, and interests, but also ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds.

From aspiring entrepreneur to a would-be senator or an engineer or even an actress, the goal of the project, the page says, is to give girls a different perspective on their gender identity relative to traditional dolls by exposing them to relatable female characters with career ambitions that include ones in which women are underrepresented.