How Singapore's Barbie Guy Made a Name for Himself

Meet Jian Yang—the Barbie Guy. He owns over 12,000 Barbie dolls, which inhabit his 1,050 sq ft walkup terrace, 2 storage units, and 4 bedrooms of his parents’ home. He’s been collecting Barbie dolls since the 80s, and now owns the largest Barbie collection in Asia—and the second largest in the world.

No one would guess that Barbie isn’t even the Barbie Guy’s favourite toy.

…wait. What?! If Barbie isn’t Jian’s favourite toy, why the heck does he have over 12,000 Barbie dolls?

Well, let’s just say, the Barbie Guy is no accidental public identity—but neither is he an artificial media persona.

This article is a deep-dive into Jian’s personal branding as the Barbie Guy, and how he stays true to himself—he’s much more “insanely regular” (to use his words) than you might think. Read on for 10 things he’s taught me about personal branding, self-authenticity, and finding the happy middle in between.

1. Find your USP

Let’s begin by breaking down the term “personal branding”.

Personal: It’s about you. What makes you, you?
Branding: It’s a unique identity. What makes you distinct?

Harrison Monarth, bestselling author of The Confident Speaker and Executive Presence, has this to say about personal branding:

“Everyone has a reputation. The first impressions you make, the relationships you form with managers and peers, and how you communicate — all of these things impact how others see you. […] Your personal brand, on the other hand, is much more intentional. It is how you want people to see you. Whereas reputation is about credibility, your personal brand is about visibility and the values that you outwardly represent.”

Jian summarises these ideas in 3 words we’ve all heard applied to product marketing, but that not many of us have thought to apply to ourselves: Unique Selling Point (USP).

“I am basically a marketer at heart. My whole being runs on unique selling points,” Jian admits. “All of us have our own corporate personalities and our own human personalities. But we need to have something that makes us a bit different. Otherwise, we just become one with the crowd.”

For Jian, his USP is obvious: He’s a guy who collects Barbie dolls. No, he’s the guy who collects Barbie dolls. My point exactly.

Interestingly, this wasn’t an identity Jian set out to create for himself. He didn’t aim to make himself the Barbie Guy—the media did. And that brings us to our next point.

2. …Or let your USP find you

Jian is an advertising/marketing guy at heart, and a smart one at that. He knows opportunity when he sees it. So when the media began making him out to be “the Barbie Guy”, he leaned into it.

For starters, his house got a Barbie makeover: “Once you become ‘the Barbie Guy’, when people come to your house, they expect to see Barbie,” Jian explains. “That’s why the curation of my house suddenly became very Barbie.”

Today, Jian’s walk-up terrace is his own brand of Barbie dreamhouse. His very own Mojo Dojo Casa House, if you will. We’re talking about a 3-wall living room Barbie display, 9 full-height mirrored closets along his walk-in wardrobe and study, and the entire living room floor painted in the official Barbie pink—Pantone 219C.

“I’ve never been media hungry, but I’ve been media savvy—if that makes sense,” Jian tells me. “Having the media build me into something of a brand, and then using the doll thing as my unique selling point for that brand, was a fantastic learning point for me.”

Jian learnt that the media and their audience lapped up his “Barbie guy” image. Here was a public persona that he could sell himself with, handed to him on a ~~silver~~ Pantone 219C pink platter. “The Barbie Guy” was no 15 minutes of fame, but a long term personal brand he could take as far as he wanted.

And take it far he did. The Barbie brand and its influence on his own personal branding came to mean a lot to Jian in years to come. After he became Managing Partner at media and advertising agency Distilleri, he knew exactly which client he wanted: Toys-R-Us.

So off the Barbie Guy went to hunt down arguably the biggest toy retailer in Singapore. Today, Toys-R-Us is his social media client, and Jian is grateful to Barbie for getting him here: “I have the Barbie dolls to thank for it. I think if I wasn’t so crazy, stupid, obsessive about this particular brand, I wouldn’t be working on Toys-R-Us today.”

3. Own your own authenticity

At this point, you might be wondering: How much of Jian’s Barbie-collecting obsession is for him, and how much is for his personal branding? That’s the beauty of Jian’s identity as the Barbie Guy. It is as authentic to him as much as it is marketable to the media.

You see, Jian doesn’t identify as a Barbie doll collector. Heck, he doesn’t identify as a collector at all. Jian Yang is a toy enthusiast. He doesn’t consciously collect his toys—he just does what makes his inner child happy.

jian-barbie-guy-playing-with-hair — Jian the Barbie Guy is also a master doll hairstylist. He loves playing with Barbie’s hair.

“I’ve never been a collector,” Jian affirms. “I’ve never been someone that puts a particular kind of value on collecting these toys. I’m just someone that really enjoys what I do.”

Jian grew up with toys—lots and lots of them, thanks to his grandfather. “My grandfather was somewhat of a collector himself, and he was a bit crazy with his collections,” Jian recalls with amusement. “When I was a kid and we watched Star Wars, the Millennium Falcon would have 20 Stormtroopers, one Darth Vader, etc. My grandfather would buy me 20 Stormtroopers. Every boy had 1 stormtrooper, and I had 20!”

Make no mistake, Jian’s childhood was full of not only Barbie dolls, but all kinds of boy’s toys that he’s kept from the 80s till now. “All my He-Man toys, Star Wars toys, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, Ghostbusters toys, they’re all still around,” Jian says with a touch of pride.

After spending an hour talking to Jian, it was clear to me that he’s the Barbie Guy by design, but he could just as authentically have been the Star Wars Guy or the Transformers Guy. These are true to him, but just wouldn’t have “sold” him as well as Barbie could.

Jian doesn’t just love Barbie, but loves so many toys. In fact, if you were to go to his office right now, you’d see some 500 Transformers and 200 Jurassic World dinosaurs. This is a grown man who is still crazy about kids’ toys, and I love that he isn’t afraid to display that enthusiasm.

4. Being authentic should feel easy

Being authentic is easier said than done. But one sign you’re doing it right is ease—it shouldn’t feel too effortful to just be you. Even tasks that might be difficult or unappealing to other people should feel almost natural to you.

Take Jian for example. During my 1-hour conversation with him, I was constantly amazed at the depth of his knowledge about everything Barbie. This is a man who can take one look at a Barbie and tell you what year the doll was made, what she wore, and what accessories she came with in the box. He’s a walking Barbie encyclopaedia. I thought for sure that he must have spent dedicated hours reading about Barbie, watching Barbie, and talking about Barbie with fellow enthusiasts. But I was wrong.

“I grew up with Barbie. You know when you’re a teenager and you cannot afford all the Barbies, you buy a few that you want and then you just forget about the rest?” Jian asks.

(Honestly, I don’t know, but I can see where he’s coming from.)

“In the meantime, you studied the catalogue, you studied the brochure, you absorbed the information,” Jian continues. “So my learning process has been a lifelong one. It wasn’t like, oh, I hit 30, and then I decided that I want to know everything about Barbie. I’ve just always consumed this brand.”

Jian didn’t even have to try to become a Barbie expert. He’s always just done what interested and motivated him. And somewhere along the way, Jian slipped from casual toy hobbyist to an authority on Barbie.

Today, Jian’s Barbie knowledge isn’t just limited to her history over the years. In line with everything else he’s shared with me, Jian gets personal with his dolls. He sees them as individuals: “If I change the earrings from one doll to another doll, I’ll actually know who’s wearing the original earrings and where they are. And if I ever needed to reassemble the doll to its original condition, I’ll be able to.”

Inside Jian’s fascinating brain is a mental catalogue of every single one of his 12,000+ dolls—including what they’re wearing right now, what they came with originally, and what’s missing if he bought the doll secondhand. I was beyond impressed. But I suppose the ease with which he remembers all this is the mark of someone who truly loves what he does, and does what he loves.

5. Don’t be afraid to spend your hard-earned money (responsibly!)

What’s the biggest difference between Jian the kid and Jian the adult? If you ask me, it’s his income level.

The Jian I spoke to is still authentic to the child at heart, but with the disposable income of a pretty successful working adult—Jian is Managing Partner and Head Of Strategy at communications agency Distilleri. Being vaguely affluent and still possessing some child-like whims can be a pretty lethal combination. In Jian’s own words, “the danger is real.”.

I feel privileged to have observed some of Jian’s child-like excitement when I asked him if he’d purchased any of the Barbie movie collectibles.

“I’m obsessed with the car,” Jian gushes. “I cannot. I won’t even explain it, but I’m obsessed with the car. Oh my gosh, it’s so nice. I mean, it’s quintessential Barbie, right? It’s vintage, it’s convertible, it’s pink.”

barbie-movie-car-mattel-pink-convertible — Jian LOVES the Barbie movie car.

Jian’s voice carries no trace of regret as he hoists Barbie’s car up and tells me, “that’s $199 of my life gone.”

To Jian, it’s $199 well spent and well deserved. “I’m in my forties. I work so hard for my money. I’m not going to apologise to anybody when I spend it,” Jian declares. “I think that I work very hard at my job, and I work very hard at being successful. So should any doll excite me at any one point, I will be able to buy it.”

Who said money can’t solve all our problems? Jian begs to differ in one aspect. “In the collectible scene, money can solve everything.” he proclaims. “Scarcity is not a real thing. Someone has the damn doll. They just won’t sell it to you for $2,000, but they will sell it to you for $4,000.”

“I never wanted to be in that situation where let’s say the Queen dies, the Queen dolls goes up to $2,600, and now I wish I’d bought the Queen back then,” Jian shakes his head. “I did buy the Queen doll back then. And to be very honest, if I wanted to buy a second one for $2,600, I would.”

Jian’s philosophy is this: You earn your own money, and you earn your right to spend it—within reasonable means of course. That means not incurring a debt, and knowing how to budget your money.

“I don’t spend money flippantly,” Jian asserts. “I have savings, and I have spending money. I have doll money, and I have travel money. If I didn’t spend all the doll money last month, it rolls over to this one.”

6. It’s never too late to do you

Jian the Barbie Guy does not have his very first Barbie doll. At least, not the original doll.

“You know that one point in your growing up years when you put all your toys in a box?” Jian said. My heart sank as he continued. “In my late teens, I discovered girls, clubbing, all that kind of stuff. I had girls coming to the bedroom, friends coming over to do projects. And so despite me loving those dolls, they were all thrown away or given away.”

I was horrified. All those toys must have meant a lot to this toy enthusiast! Mind you, he had about a 100 Barbie dolls by the time he was a teenager. This was before gender norms and stereotypes mattered to him—which, truth be told, should be the way all kids get to play with their toys. But once Jian started becoming more aware of these societal norms, his Barbie dolls got the boot.

Fortunately, there is a happy ending. “I have bought every single doll back, including all the clothes that I had as a kid.” Jian says proudly. “Now, I keep them all in a special little section.”

Now, I’m not saying that money is always the solution. There are certainly things that can never be bought back, and others that can never be bought in the first place. But what Jian has shown me is that we all have the capacity to show the world what makes us tick—societal norms and expectations be damned. As long as you’re not breaking any laws or committing any moral atrocities, you do you. Be authentic, because that’s the only way your personal branding will be too.

7. Value is relative

swarovski-barbie-one-of-a-kind-jian-barbie-guy — Jian’s most expensive Barbie is a $3,600 one-of-a-kind doll covered in Swarovski crystals. He doesn’t like it. (Source: Hype and Stuff)

“Hideous.”

That’s the word Jian used to describe the most expensive Barbie doll he’s ever bought—a one-of-a-kind Swarovski auction piece that cost him $3,600.

“I don’t bloody like it at all!” Jian exclaims. “But at the time, like any investor, I thought if I have the opportunity to buy it, I will. Like how I used to buy vintage watches. With vintage watches, when a timepiece becomes available, you just buy it because it’s there and it could be an investment.”

“So this Swarovski one-of-a-kind auction piece was available to me, and I put in a bid for just $3,600 at the time. But I won it,” Jian tells me. Note his use of the word “but” back there—the man was not pleased he won the bid.

“Now, she’s in the showcase there with the rest of the dolls,” Jian gestures vaguely to a side of the room. “And now, 43-year-old me questions 21-year-old me on why I was so stupid to spend $3,600 on this hideous doll.”

Conversely, some of the most run-of-the-mill, mass-market Barbie dolls off the shelf bring Jian a great deal of joy.

“I buy a lot of dolls for ‘no reason’. I just like them,” Jian explains. He dives down and resurfaces with an unopened doll box in hand. “I bought this ridiculous, stupid thing called Marine Biologist Barbie for $45. She’s wearing a life jacket and you can’t even take off her swimsuit. The swimsuit is painted onto this damn doll, so it’s completely useless.”

marine-biologist-Barbie-jian — Jian purchased Marine Biologist Barbie for $45, and you can’t even take off her swimsuit.

“But what I really wanted was this fish tank. It goes into her suitcase because she’s an on-the-go marine biologist and she has to keep samples. So I bought this whole $45 set just so that I can have this suitcase with the fish tank,” Jian says with laughter in his voice. “Super nonsense, but I wanted it.”

Marine-biologist-Barbie-fish-tank — If you’re wondering how the heck Barbie can keep a fish tank in a suitcase, that’s the point. Jian’s shown me that the joy of toys comes from a touch of whimsy.

It’s not about buying the most expensive things. Don’t bother investing in “high-value” items just for the sake of making an impression on others, or having something you can show off. Jian simply enjoys buying toys he likes, restoring toys he finds, and playing with all of the toys that inhabit his home. “And to me,” Jian says, “that is the value of my so-called investment.”

8. If you love her, let her go

If you need further proof that Jian isn’t in this whole Barbie collecting thing for the money, let me spend this section proving it to you with another interesting discovery I made about Jian. The Barbie Guy does not own the hallmark, original 1959 Barbie doll.

It’s not that he can’t afford to buy it. The first reason why he doesn’t have the 1959 original Barbie is simply that she wasn’t his Barbie doll growing up.

“I wasn’t born in 1959,” Jian points out. “The Barbie that I played with was called Superstar Barbie, and she looked like the 80s Barbie. So 80s Barbie to me is nostalgic, and I like buying those. But vintage doesn’t excite me because I didn’t grow up with that face.”

But surely Jian of all people must recognise the relevance and importance of the first Barbie in the history of the doll?

He does. In fact, it’s this respect to the Barbie brand that keeps him from purchasing the 1959 original. It turns out that Singapore’s sticky, wet, humid climate isn’t just bad for keeping cookies open on the kitchen counter. It’s also a terrible environment to maintain Barbies from the 50s and 60s, which simply weren’t made for our weather.

“I have about a hundred vintage dolls from the 60s and the 70s,” Jian tells me. “And everything gets sticky in our weather because the vinyl doesn’t react well to it.”

Jian feels almost responsible for keeping Barbie alive and well, in the grander scheme of things. “What I don’t like is that I feel I’m messing up Barbie history. This is an artefact that I am going to screw up if I bring it into my country,” Jian explains.

It’s a rather selfless act, one that I described as “awfully considerate” during our interview. Listening to Jian, it almost felt like he feels he owes it to Barbie: “This brand does mean a lot to me. It’s shaped my personal belief systems, my confidence, my career for goodness sake,” Jian says. “I’m grateful to the brand and I treat it with some sort of reverence. I don’t go into some kind of idolatry or worship of it, but I appreciate it.”

So instead of buying vintage dolls from auctions (read: sentencing them to death in Singapore), Jian opts to visit flea markets and discover dolls there instead—even if their hair’s falling out or some kid has left them half-naked. He takes pride in restoring these dolls and finding their missing dresses, jackets, boots, hats and the like. After all, if there was ever a man with the mental Barbie database to make Barbies whole again, it’s Jian.

9. Do what makes your inner child happy

“I’ve always enjoyed playing with my toys,” Jian tells me. It doesn’t matter how expensive or rare some of these dolls are. At the end of the day, toys are toys. “Even if the doll is worth like $10,000—which some of them really are—I will take them out of the box and play with them. I want to change their hair, I want to Instagram them.”

Jian recounts to me a recent night out when he attended the Icon Ball with some friends. To match this year’s theme, “Modern Orientalism”, one of his friends was planning to wear a Guo Pei dress. And you guessed it, Jian has a Guo Pei Barbie.

“Guo Pei Barbie is about $500 retail, and her value now is very much higher than that. But I decided I’m going to bring Guo Pei Barbie to this event for fun, so that me and my friends can talk about it, laugh about it, and be silly.” Jian chuckles, then lapses into a bout of Singlish to drive home a point. “Must play one lah! That’s what dolls are for. What’s the point of a Guo Pei Barbie in a box in your storage?”

James Broughton, an American poet and poetic filmmaker, once said: “I’m happy to report that my inner child is still ageless.” And that’s the sense I get from Jian when he talks about playing with his toys. Jian’s toys, be they Barbie or Transformers, keep him young as much as they keep him authentic. That’s how he never loses sight of that young boy playing with his 20 Stormtroopers in his grandfather’s garage.

10. The best marketing honours authenticity

When I asked Jian what Barbie doll he wished they would make, I never expected this answer.

“I would like a doll of myself made by Mattel,” Jian says unabashedly. “And when I say myself, I also mean the influencers who have shaped the brand on social media. For example, I’ve got a friend called Azusa. She’s basically like my internet girlfriend because she’s Asian, I’m Asian, and we’re basically the two best looking Asians in the Barbie collecting world.”

“Azusa lives in pink. She’s a full-time YouTuber, and is basically like the Barbie person,” Jian tells me. “I would love a doll of her—an official Mattel version. And a doll of me, and of a few other personalities in the doll world. I don’t want another doll of another TV or movie celebrity.”

In Jian’s point of view, this isn’t about vanity. It makes marketing sense: “From a marketing standpoint, a lot of people are using the words ‘tribe’ or ‘community’ right now. Those are buzzwords in marketing. But the other buzzword in marketing is ‘authenticity’.”

“So let’s put those two things together,” Jian continues. “Then the only authentic way to represent a tribe or a community in the Barbie collector circle is to honour the Barbie collectors. To me, that makes marketing sense.”

It was at this point in my interview with Jian that I knew this article needed to be written. I went in expecting to find out about Barbie dolls for investment, but was pleasantly surprised to learn from Jian Yang the marketer just as much as I learnt from Jian the Barbie Guy.

11. So…which is the Barbie Guy’s favourite toy?

Before we end this article, I want to answer the question that was probably on your mind from the moment you read the title of this article: If not Barbie, which is Jian’s favourite toy?

“Growing up, I was really into this brand called M.A.S.K., which stands for Mobile Armored Strike Kommand,” Jian remembers fondly. “They were vehicles that transformed in between 2 forms. So maybe the car would fly, and the helicopter would turn into a plane. It was my favourite cartoon, then it was my favourite toy.”

“I was a very regular boy,” Jian insists. “Don’t let the media fool you. Because while I do this whole “wear a lot of pink” thing and that kind of sh*t, I’m actually insanely regular.”

“Regular” isn’t the word I would use—“authentic” is. Jian’s identity as the Barbie Guy is the personal USP he’s leaned into, especially as a marketing professional who’s aware of these forces. But it’s an identity that doesn’t detract from the simple fact that Jian is a toy lover at heart. He’s proof that you can stay true to what you love, while still fashioning for yourself a personal brand that works to your advantage.

Disclaimer: Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for clarity and brevity.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it.

If you learnt something from Jian or found yourself chuckling at something he said, share the article with your friends and family!

For more from Jian the Barbie Guy, check out our article on Barbie dolls as investments.

Are Barbie Dolls Good Investments? We Spoke To A Barbie Enthusiast With 12,000 Dolls To Find Out

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