A mum who set up a doll company because her daughter couldn't find one that looked like her hopes to inspire young girls of colour with her creations. Olivia Thompson, 32, from Leeds, created Akila Dolls in 2020.
She was inspired to do so because her 10-year-old daughter Amira, who is mixed-race and has ADHD and autism, became upset that there were no dolls in the shops that looked like her. The first prototype was a doll called Bessie, which was based on the first female aviation pilot, Bessie Coleman.
Ms Thompson told the PA news agency: "I want my dolls to be educational. So, the concept is that every doll will be named after a figure in history and I tried to choose people in history that we don’t tend to learn about within school.
"[Bessie Coleman] was the first black female aviation pilot and she had to go to France to learn to become a pilot because she couldn’t do it in America because was a woman and she was black. She also had to learn to speak French and I think it is such an important story to tell young people, especially girls, and show them this fantastic figure who had to overcome so many hurdles to achieve her dream and she did it.”
Ms Thompson is passionate about the subject of representation. She said: “If children do not see themselves represented in the media, and represented in a positive way, it affects their self-esteem, it affects how they seem themselves and think: ‘I can’t do this.’
“When I grew up in the 1980s, I was a mixed-race child – my mum was Black Caribbean, my dad was white British – and I grew up watching TV shows, playing with toys and reading books where I didn’t see anyone that represented me or my mixed-race family.
“I started to think, is there something wrong with my home environment? So, for young people, it is important for them to see themselves in a positive light.”
She hopes to expand her business to include dolls of children with disabilities, and also male dolls. And she said that it is important for toy brands to include the communities that the dolls are meant to represent in the design process, which she tries to do with her company.
“It is important to have people’s advice because these are the people that are going to be buying the dolls and they will have children represented through these dolls,” she said. "I want to give them something they deserve to have and something they should have had a long time ago.”
