For Elena Velasquez, work is play.
A giant Hello Kitty plushie sits in her Culver City office and watches as she writes emails, reviews designs and meets with designers from a laptop clad in kawaii stickers.
Velasquez, who is the vice president of design for girls’ dolls and collectibles at Jazwares, never expected that her childhood love of toys would grow into a career within a multi-billion dollar global industry.
She originally became a Hello Kitty fan when her mom first took her to the company’s Gardena store during the 1980s.
Now, Velasquez does store checks in Japan for Sanrio, which gave Jazwares the master license to produce North American toys for the brand Hello Kitty and Friends.
“[Being a toy designer] did really give me an opportunity to see the world in a way that I would have never been able to,” Velazquez said.
Small but mighty, toys represent about 0.5% of the entire retail market in the U.S., making $42 billion in sales in 2024, according to the Toy Association. Globally, the toy industry is valued at around $120 billion in a multi-trillion dollar market.
Jennifer Lynch, senior manager of creative communications at the Toy Association, said licensed toys, which are typically when branded characters are paired with a product, make up about a growing third of all U.S. toy sales.
Kitty plushies sit together in Elena Velasquez’s
Redondo Beach home office Friday, Oct. 10. Velasquez has many original, first-edition and special toy releases in her collection. (Nikki Yunker | Warrior Life)
“There is such [an] alliance between entertainment and the content that kids are consuming,” Lynch said. “It’s a way for kids and grown-ups — obviously fandom is everywhere — to tap into those fandoms and really just purchase the toys for those needs.”
Lynch said more adults are collecting toys, and that the industry started to emphasize this demographic, called “kidults,” around 2019.
As a collector who fills her Redondo Beach home with decades worth of toys, encompassing everything from Dodgers-game special edition Hello Kitty plushies to employee-exclusive Hot Wheels cars, Velasquez often feels like designing for herself.
“I used to drive by Mattel, and to think that I would like work there one day was pretty incredible,” Velasquez said. “All of the nostalgic brands that I grew up with, I’ve been able to work on and relaunch.”
The primary demographic growing the market now are people aged 18 years and up, according to research from the Toy Association.
“So I still play. I mean, people joke and say when they come to my house that it looks like a museum just because I have so many toys,” she said.
Velasquez, now 45, has also been a designer for brands including Polly Pocket, Monster High, Strawberry Shortcake, Flutterbye Fairies and even Barbie.
Growing up, she dreamed the most of owning Barbie toys.
However, Dreamhouses and cars were expensive, and her mom — who focused on activity toys including drawing and building sets — saw the doll being more about fashion than being educational.
“It’s interesting now, [having worked] on the brand, it’s so much more than that… It helps girls communicate and build stories. It’s amazing,” Velasquez said.
As a child at home in Hawthorne, shoe boxes and fabric scraps in young Velasquez’s hands transformed into dollhouses and furniture.
“I guess I was a toy designer as a kid and not even realizing it, building my own little toy sets,” she said.
Never owning a Dreamhouse as a kid, she experienced a full circle moment when working for Mattel.
When it came time for Barbie’s mansion to receive its triennial renovation in 2019, her team released the first one to feature a slide.
That slide inspired the one added to the Dreamhouse in the 2023 blockbuster film “Barbie,” which starred Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling and made over $1.4 billion in worldwide releases, according to IMDb’s box office tracker.
“Barbie’s Dreamhouse is one of the biggest toys in the entire industry… so it’s a really huge project and she [Velasquez] brought great innovation to [it],” Kim Culmone, Mattel senior vice president and global head of design for dolls including Barbie and American Girl, said.
Velasquez’s background designing for Polly Pocket helped bring the slide idea to life.
“Polly is very toyetic and fun and adventurous, which I wanted to merge that kind of whimsiness of Polly and bring my experience of that to Barbie,” she said.
Her team’s 2018 reimagining of Barbie’s younger sister Chelsea’s purple treehouse also made a cameo in the film as the only non-pink structure in Barbieland.
Beyond being immersed in toys, Velasquez’s fashion style is reminiscent of a doll that’s also just walked out from a perfectly packaged box.
Petticoat dresses splashed in vibrant colors and vintage inspired outfits with mixed prints, accented by unconventional accessories, comprise her day-to-day look.
“Just being able to walk by and see someone smile just because of what I’m wearing is like, it’s fun,” she said.
The size of her wardrobe rivals that of her toy collection. Other than her glasses, her statement accessory is a colorful beret, 30 to 40 of which stack about 3-feet high in her closet.
Yet Velasquez — whose star-studded cat eye glasses punctuate her bright, brown eyes and shore her long brunette waves — didn’t always see toys in her future.
Learning the industry
Velasquez’s journey began in 1998 as a first generation college student at El Camino College, equipped with only the thought of working in a creative field.
She enrolled in art classes after graduating from Hawthorne High School and was open to seeing where they would lead her, upon encouragement from her mom Janina Velasquez, who served as the executive director of the ECC Federation of Teachers from 2000 until about 2017.
“I just loved El Camino, too, just because it gives you the opportunity to kind of figure out what you want to do,” she said.
One of her professors, Andrea Micallef, suggested she consider attending Otis College of Art and Design in Westchester and offered to help her create a portfolio.
Micallef, who retired in June after teaching at El Camino since the late 1980s, taught Velasquez two-dimensional design.
“I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but I felt like she was the kind of person who felt she could learn something from everyone,” Micallef said.
Velasquez was one of the last students to sit down after a class critique was finished, examining all the art for what worked and what didn’t.
Micallef said she would call arts colleges every semester and recommend a few of her students who were applying, including Velasquez.
After graduating El Camino in 2000 with an associate degree in studio art, Velasquez was accepted to Otis as a transfer student.
At the time, she didn’t know the institute offered a toy program. She initially wanted to learn set design, but the program had been cut.
“I had no idea that you could have a job, you know, as a toy designer, although literally Mattel was down the street,” Velasquez said.
Just two years before she transferred, Otis became one of the first universities in the world to offer a baccalaureate program in toy design.
Jennifer Caveza, chair of Otis’ toy design program, said about 10% to 15% of students in the program are transfers, and that there are over 350 alumni in total over the nearly three decades it has existed.
“We have a great relationship with El Camino,” Caveza, who was Velasquez’s professor for toy marketing and history classes, said. “The transfer students are very successful here.”
Work as play
A feature of Otis’ program is paid internships with companies in the toy industry.
When Velasquez was there, she applied to Mattel to design for Barbie, but didn’t get the internship.
“But I ended up finding a different route,” she said.
At Otis, she was placed with Equity Marketing, a company that later rebranded to Pop Rocket, where she designed toys found in Burger King’s “King Jr.” kids’ meal boxes.
She received full federal financial aid to attend Otis, but worked while she was a student at a mobile portrait studio and at Trader Joe’s, which is still one of her favorite jobs.
Her first role out of college was as a project manager of girl’s toys for Playmates in Costa Mesa, a company known for producing licensed toys including the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Mark Taylor — who was a co-creator of and main toy designer for the “Masters of the Universe” or He-Man series — hired Velasquez, where she helped design a relaunch of scented Strawberry Shortcake dolls.
The Shortcake redesign involved a wardrobe makeover, ditching costume-like outfits for friendly, everyday girls’ wear.
“To be a little bit more fashionable,” Velasquez said.
After four years at Playmates in Orange County, Velasquez missed her friends, family and the food in Los Angeles.
This time, when she applied to Mattel in El Segundo, she got the designer job — on Polly Pocket’s playsets.
Designing for Polly Pocket would start with the assignment of creating a toy at a certain price point, like $20. Then, she would research themes online and in stores before sketching ideas.
If her manager OK’d the concept, she would render the idea further and present it to the executive team for approval. From there, she worked with engineering and product development teams and partners in Asia.
During this process, she would review sculpted prototypes and the “first shots,” which are molded plastic injections, to make sure everything’s working, like “doors are opening, and you know, heads aren’t falling off dolls,” she said.
Lastly, she would review the toy in its package, checking final colors and other details.
“I love it [Polly Pocket], you know, it’s such a great license and so toyetic. I had a huge passion [for it],” Velasquez said.
At the time, Mattel was also launching the Monster High toy line and she designed some of the doll’s accessories.
Her boss was Garrett Sander, the creator of Monster High.
“That was an exciting time just to work and be next to my manager,” Velasquez said.
In 2011, three years after returning to Mattel, she made another change and became a product designer and manager in LA at Spin Master, a company founded in 1994 that was starting to take off.
She designed playsets for brands including Zoobles and Flutterby Fairies, but also outsourced projects — where she researched and sent trend vision boards to outside vendors for reference and would receive concept sketches back for approval.
Back to Barbie
After three years at Spin Master, in 2014, Velasquez received a call from Mattel to return as a product designer on Polly Pocket — where she would also eventually lead a redesign of Monster High.
After years of experience at other companies, she turned her focus to working in a leadership position.
The vice president of design for Barbie at the time, Culmone, interviewed Velasquez to be a product design manager in 2015.
Culmone said the doll is over 65 years old, and the ideal candidate was someone who could reimagine the product.
“It’s an innovative breakthrough thinker who can not just develop toys based on the brand’s DNA, but can think even beyond where we’ve been before,” Culmone said.
As a product design manager, Velasquez oversaw a team focused on Barbie Entertainment, creating toys for the brand’s animated films.
“It was great because a lot of times they were building the story as we were designing the product. So, we were actually building product[s] that would be in the movie, which is a lot of fun,” she said.
Eventually, Velasquez became a senior director of product design for both Barbie and Monster High.
She directed the 2020 relaunch of Monster High, giving them a new look a decade after they originally appeared on store shelves.
“We didn’t want to lose sight of the amazing fans… we were really passionate about staying true to what the original Monster High was,” Velasquez said.
She added that as Barbie progressed and added more diversity to the line, it was important that Monster High also “led the way,” creating a new body type for the dolls.
“I think in dolls there is a lot more pressure because… when you’re looking at a doll, versus like an action figure, for some reason, dolls get judged so much more,” she said. “So you do have to take all of that into account when you’re designing.”
Velasquez said people may not realize how much thought goes into every aspect of a toy.
“There’s literally meetings where we’re sitting in a group and we are talking about like the color of Barbie’s shoes or what print she has on her shirt,” she said.
Culmone and Velasquez shared a similar career trajectory at Mattel, as both started in product designer roles before moving up to senior director positions.
“Elena really lives her life really immersed in toys, it comes from a really deep centered passion she has for toys in general,” Culmone said. “She’s a super innovative thinker, so her ability to think beyond the expected, to bring newness to the line, was really powerful and I loved having her on our team.”
Velasquez leapt upwards from Mattel and onto Jazwares’ ladder after being tapped in 2022 to build a girl’s toy division at the company.
The call came from an executive she used to know at Playmates, where she worked from 2004 to 2008, who was serving as a co-CEO and president at Jazwares.
New business
Florida-based Jazwares, LLC was founded in 1997 by CEO Judd Zebersky.
After being acquired by billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway company in 2022, Jazwares reported $1 billion in earnings the following year, according to Time.
The company produces Squishmallows and toys for several popular licenses, including Pokemon, Harry Potter, Sonic the Hedgehog, Care Bears, Stranger Things, Fortnite, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Avatar: The Last Airbender and more.
Velasquez’s domain, the girl’s division, is a space where Hello Kitty meets new friends from Squishmallows’ Squish-a-longs, Kutie Kups, tokidoki and others, all designed by Velasquez’s team of about 30 people situated locally and across the nation in Pennsylvania.
She recently led the fall 2024 launch of Royale High, a Roblox-based doll line for girls, and the July launch of Kutie Kups, a surprise toy featuring miniature collectibles.
When she’s not overseeing product designers for top toy brands, she can be found at craft fairs and vintage markets around LA, gathering inspiration and new ideas, or at San Diego Comic Con, announcing new toy releases.
From her childhood Hawthorne bedroom covered in Strawberry Shortcake to her toy museum at home in Redondo Beach, the littlest things in Velasquez’s life eventually became the largest.
“It’s just been really fun, and a way for me to just stay a kid,” she said.
