brighton studio gomi melts discarded barbie dolls and accessories into marbled electronics with spiraling colors.

daily desk October 6, 2026 4 min

A Barbie doll that has spent years in the back of a closet could soon reappear as a Bluetooth speaker. Brighton-based design studio gomi has teamed up with Barbie on the Childhood Memories Collection, a limited series of electronics made partly from dolls and accessories that have reached the end of their time in the toy box. The familiar pinks and candy-colored plastics are melted down, remixed and pressed into gomi’s swirling marbled surfaces, leaving traces of their earlier lives visible in the material itself.

The project starts with the toys themselves. gomi is asking people to send in Barbie and Ken dolls they have stopped using, then processing the recovered plastic at its Brighton workshop. Those materials are blended with discarded plastic bags, a waste stream commonly left out of household recycling, before being shaped into the studio’s housings. Each batch produces its own color distribution and pattern, so every piece comes out differently.

There is something special and quite literal about turning a toy into the casing of another object you might keep around for years. Rather than disguising the recycled material, gomi lets it become the visual character of the collection. Flecks of saturated pink, pale blue and other colors meet in dense swirls across the surfaces, giving the products the irregular appearance that has become part of the studio’s language.

gomi continues the same approach inside. The speakers and power banks use repurposed e-bike batteries, while their housings are assembled with screws in place of glue. Components can therefore be opened up, replaced and repaired as they age. gomi also plans to offer trade-ins and upgrades, allowing parts to move into future products instead of reaching landfill after a single use cycle.

Handmade production gives the collaboration a scale closer to a small design edition than a conventional electronics launch. The Childhood Memories Collection will arrive through monthly limited releases, with each object shaped by whatever recycled material enters the workshop. Two pieces may share the same silhouette, yet their surfaces retain different mixtures of color and fragments.

That variation is also where the Barbie connection becomes most interesting. The collaboration avoids simply applying the brand’s color palette to an existing product. Barbie itself becomes part of the raw material. A plastic object once designed for imaginative play moves into a speaker or charging accessory, still colorful and recognizable in fragments, though its function has changed completely.