Oakland's Jendayi Smith Has Designed Some of My Child's Favorite Toys

My seven-year-old daughter’s bedroom is decorated with colorful stickers and family photos, along with assorted stuffed animals tucked into a small circus tent. I know all of their names. There’s also a toy house from the movie Encanto, and another house for her L.O.L. Dolls. Behind that is a soft pink toy box that holds the motherlode.

Among the mayhem of toys is an array of Barbies and their accessories. Plus there’s one Karma doll — a brown-skinned little girl with curly hair from Netflix’s animated children’s series, Karma’s World, created by famed rapper and actor Chris “Ludacris” Bridges.

At this point I have no idea where all these toys came from: Christmas? Birthdays? Gifts from family? But that Karma doll, I know exactly where it came from. I remember going out and specifically buying it because my daughter and I both like the show, and because I was inspired that one of the people who helped create the doll is from Oakland.

“That was one of the most exciting projects that I’ve worked on,” says Jendayi Smith, graphic design manager for Mattel’s dolls portfolio. She worked on a team that saw that project from pitch to product, and she even sang in a video proposal that was delivered to the Karma’s World team. “Ludacris probably heard me sing when he heard this pitch,” Smith, a huge Ludacris fan, tells me.

The beauty of working on that toy wasn’t just Smith’s brush with stardom. It was the fact that Smith and her team created a doll that represents something much bigger. “To see Karma, a Black girl with big hair like me,” says Smith, “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is the brand that I wanted as a child.’”

At Mattel, Smith has designed the “chip art,” or the flat background and scenery, for the revitalized version of the Polly Pocket toy. She’s added touches to the dolls from Harry Potter, and helped design the Dapper Dan line of Barbie dolls.

Smith also designed the accessories for the Madam C.J. Walker doll, using advice from Madam C.J. Walker’s great-great granddaughter to change the doll’s blouse to the famed entrepreneur’s favorite color, purple, to be historically correct. And earlier this year, when Mattel debuted a series of Cross Colours–inspired Barbies, Smith was in the mix.

“Cross Colours was a huge part of my childhood,” says Smith, who was moved by the fashion line’s ethos and signature bright colors. “A lot of people think fashion can be vapid and not make anything meaningful, so I really connected to what Cross Colours meant and what it stood for. It stood for more than just looking cute. It was for the people.”

A fashionista since elementary school, Smith was taught to sew at the age of eight by her mother, a multitalented entrepreneur. Smith attended Oakland public schools — Skyline for high school and Montera for junior high — but it was her experience in elementary school, at Redwood Heights, that laid the foundation for her future. “That’s when I realized that I wanted to get into fashion,” Smith says. “I would draw little clothes and dress up my dolls.”

Now 40, Smith sports a forest green blazer, tan sweater, striped scarf and fly earrings as she tells me via video chat that she’s always styled her own clothes. Her friends and family know her as the person who wears “kind of weird clothes, and is always fashionable,” she says with a laugh. “It’s definitely part of my brand.”

But Smith’s path from East Oakland elementary school-aged designer to a decade of designing toys for one of the biggest companies in the world was a circuitous one.

At 18, she left the Town and went to the East Coast for college, attending Howard University with a focus in was fashion merchandising. The business side of the industry wasn’t exactly what she wanted to do, but it proved to be an entry point.

After graduating, she landed a gig in New York at Macy’s Merchandising Group, working in product development for utility bedding — pillows, mattress pads, any type of cover for your bed that’s off-white or white. “I remember calling my mom and crying. I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore, I see in color,'” says Smith, lamenting that what she was doing wasn’t “fashion.”

She left and took a job at Anthropologie, where her creativity was reignited. She was soon recruited by someone looking for a personal shopper at Saks Fifth Avenue, which exposed her to the expensive world of high fashion.

“We were working with these high-end profile clients — millionaires and billionaires — who’d come to Saks and they’d have their personal shoppers pull all the clothes for them,” Smith says.

As eye-opening and luxurious as the position was, it didn’t satisfy her creative needs. So Smith applied to the Fashion Institute of Technology and got a second degree in fashion design. “After that I started working as a fashion designer in women’s cold weather accessories — hats, and scarves and gloves,” says Smith. But the company she worked for was soon bought out. Around that time, Smith began to yearn for the warm sun and familial roots of California, and left New York.

Back in Los Angeles, where she was born, she got word that Mattel was hiring. It wasn’t exactly fashion design, but Smith was impressed by the upbeat company culture and the aesthetics of the office (much livelier than depicted in the Barbie movie, she says). Plus the position spoke directly to her and her husband’s interests.

“We’d actually bonded over watching cartoons — Avatar and Nickelodeon,” says Smith, adding that the couple’s shelves are filled with toys they’ve collected. “I was like: it makes sense.”

The position required her to use Illustrator and Photoshop to create clothes for dolls from the animated series Monster High. What was initially a six-month contract turned into Smith staying at Mattel for 10 years. “I’ve worked on over 20 different brands since I’ve been here,” says Smith. “It’s been exciting to have the variety of work.”

When Mattel designs a doll, Smith explains, no single person does everything. They work in teams: one group might design the face, while another takes the hair and yet another does accessories.

Smith credits Carlyle Nuera, lead product designer for the Barbie brand, for bringing her into some of her favorite projects, including the Karma’s World doll and the Madam C.J. Walker doll.

One day Smith received a message from her mom with a link to an article. Her mother, clearly excited, said, “This is the Madam C.J. Walker doll that just came out!” Smith proudly replied, “Yeah, I worked on that.”

In discussing what’s next, Smith is driven by improving diversity and inclusion in dolls. She knows, both from her own personal experience as a child and now as a mother of two, that having a diverse set of toys is important. With each toy comes a different story, and as an avid reader, Smith sees how simple child’s play helps introduce people to new stories, which leads to further understanding among people of different backgrounds.

“I want to see how far we can go,” says Smith, ambitiously. “How many people can we reach with the brands that we work on? How many people can we make happy with bringing these toys to life and encouraging play?”

Looking at my daughter’s bedroom, she can add at least one more happy person to her long list of toy owners.