Marvel Stepping Up Their Female Fashion Offerings

It's about freaking time!

The T-shirts have actually been available for a while now - according to Marvel, they were released to "test the waters," but in the next year or so, we should see a load of new girlie products start to flood the market as Nerd Chicks finally get to wave their freak flag a little bit higher with Marvel branded lip gloss, jewelry, clothing and more. I do think that this comment about not releasing the female oriented product earlier for fear of alienating the guys into comics smells of BS, but hey, I'll smile and take it if it means my daughter has girlie clothing options other than Barbie/Bratz/Disney Princesses/Insert Other Super Pink Product Line Here.

“Since our core customer has always been guys, we need to be very careful when we introduce female product so that we don’t alienate our core,” said Paul Gitter, president of consumer products, North America, for Marvel Entertainment Inc. “What we have found through testing is that we haven’t alienated them, which gives us the OK to move forward with female product.”

“Hulk was a big component for us when it came to being eco-friendly, with T-shirts featuring the character and sayings like ‘go green.’ We also introduced a more stylized character graphic which looks like Japanese animation,” said Susan Fields, vice president of product merchandising at Marvel. “Also, anything that we can relate to current music trends does well. For instance, we have a T-shirt where all the superheroes were assembled into a band with a saying like, ‘I heart boys that rock.’”

In 2009, Fields said the company plans to roll out a series of female-friendly products with a new range of licensing partners. Currently, stores are selling contemporary fashion tops licensed to Mighty Fine, junior fashion tops from Junk Food, mass fashion tops with Fortune Fashions and jewelry with H.E.R. Accessories. Starting with holiday, a larger array of items will be introduced, including handbags from Bioworld, stationary with iScream, color cosmetics with Lotta Luv, and watches and fashion jewelry with MZ Berger.

Though I'm not clear what message this Spider-Man/Green Goblin broken heart pendant is trying to send.