Her name is Isabelle Palmer and she's a ten year old ballerina who has a hobby of making clothes. She has blonde hair with pink highlights and green eyes (they're really beautiful). She lives in Washington, D.C. and goes to a dance school (Anna Hart School of the Arts) with her older sister. She makes ballet costumes but struggles with adjusting to her new dance school. Isabelle also struggles with her self esteem as she compares herself to the other dance students. Her best friends are Luisa (a modern dancer) and Gabriel (a magician).
She has pink hair extensions which cause her to be more expensive doll at $120 (normally dolls are $110). The general hair extensions cost $14 so even though you're paying more, you're saving $4. Some people said that they had issues putting the hair extension in. I haven't tried to do it myself but there are directions that come with her hair extensions.
The lines at the store (the Washington, D.C. one) were wrapping around the store, both upstairs and downstairs. Ironically, many people didn't even know that the new GOTY was being released today (they had just come on their day off). People waited in line for as long as an hour to buy Isabelle and her clothing and accessories. People who had lined up before the store opening all went directly to the Isabelle displays and started grabbing stuff.
Isabelle has a lot of clothing. Quite a bit of it is just single pieces of clothing like "sparkly scrunchy pants" or "practice top". I suppose it's like that because you can mix and match almost all of it. Unlike Saige (2013 GOTY), whose clothing cost $24+, a lot of Isabelle's clothes are $12 or $14 for one piece. On the website, there are about 14 single pieces of clothing or specific outfits that come together. There are 20 mix and match outfits in total for girls to create. Girls can match three of their dolls outfits with human sized clothes. The outfits are very interesting and many are asymmetrical and very different than past GOTY dolls.
Isabelle has a cat and a dance case which comes with ballet slippers, hair accessories and stickers to decorate the case with. She also has a little studio where she makes her dance clothes. It consists of 24 pieces, some of which are a body (mannequin) display, sewing machine (needs 2 AAA batteries), a closet, stool, a table... It's a lot of stuff and is $275. She also has a barre which comes with several things as well (a water bottle, rubber/plastic mat, and a few other little things). She has some pretty cool things that girls will love.
Nearly everyone who came into American Girl today bought an Isabelle doll. I went into the stock room to check for something and overheard someone say that we had sold 275+ Isabelle's within the first two hours of the store opening [I can neither confirm or deny that this is true]!!
We did not anticipate the amount of sales and people for today but we still were well-stocked and didn't run out of anything.
The store had some fun things as a celebration for the new GOTY. From 12-4pm we had crafts outside of the top level of the store and from 1-2pm we had a dance performance outside of the Macy's down the hall from the American Girl store. I wasn't able to go to the crafts but I did walk by the dance thing on my break and saw a lot of spectators. We also were giving out giftcards and free Isabelle tshirts for the American Girl dolls. We ran out of those pretty quickly, probably due to us not realizing how many people would come today.
The store was unbelievably busy but the girls had a lot of fun and were always very excited for Isabelle. Many people asked us to open Isabelle for them at the register so that they could carry her home or around the rest of the mall.
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