Photo: Instagram
To celebrate their niece’s 8th birthday and commemorate her role as flower girl in their upcoming wedding, grooms-to-be Matt Jacobi and Nick Caprio of Scottsdale, Arizona wanted to get her a Barbie Wedding Set. However, the only Barbie wedding play set available in stores featured a Barbie doll as the bride and a Ken doll as the groom, alongside two flower girls and a cake. Jacobi and Caprio had to get creative to make dolls representative of their family.
To celebrate their niece’s birthday, they sought a gift that would have an extra special meaning, that while she will enjoy playing with it, it would also be a meaningful connection to her special part in her uncle’s wedding in May.
The grooms swapped out the Barbie doll with a second Ken to make their own “Gay Wedding Set,” Jacobi told Good Morning America.
After creating the custom Barbie set to reflect their family, their eight-year-old niece Natalie was very excited to receive her new dolls. She exclaimed, “They look exactly like you,”as the couple revealed to CNN.
After seeing his niece’s reaction, Jacobi wanted to give others that chance to experience the same emotion because after all, love is love. So, he posted a photo of his custom Barbie set on Instagram alongside an open letter to Mattel to share this concept with other children.
“This toy brought so much joy and happiness to my 8-year-old niece, and there are thousands and thousands of families just like Nick and I. I just had to do something,” Jacobi told CNN.
The toy company responded and the couple has set up a meeting to discuss making their custom Barbie set a potential reality. Jacobi revealed on Instagram that Mattel responded to his idea and they are in the process of scheduling a meeting with the company’s design team, including the head of Barbie’s design team.
“We have a confirmed date set in early January, and we are extremely excited, grateful and incredibly determined to make this happen,” Jacobi said. “We are over the moon with all the positive responses we have received. We really just want to thank all the people out there for believing in our message that love is love.”
Mattel has manufactured Barbie and Ken dolls since 1961, and in recent years, have made strides to redefine the dolls’ appearance to reflect more children with a new range of skin tones, eye colors, hairstyles, sizes of both Barbie and Ken. Last year, the company even introduced the first Barbie to wear a hijab. While the company has yet to meet with the couple, it is a genius idea and would be so lovely if they adapted the custom playset for a variety of children to see more dolls like them and their families.
Barbie has even taken a stance on marriage equality before, posing two dolls with “Love Wins” shirts in 2017.
If Mattel creates a same-sex Barbie Wedding Set, Caprio is hopeful that parents will see it as another instance of the toy company shifting focus to resemble modern lives rather than a political statement.
“It’s going to come up in your family no matter what,” Caprio told ABC Chicago. “As more same-sex couples are having kids, your kids are going to have kids in the class that have gay parents and things like that, too, so it’s not this huge shock anymore.”
