Brian Raftery for Wired:

Early last winter, while browsing Manhattan’s Strand bookstore, roommates Carina Hsieh and Claudia Arisso came upon a keychain featuring a tiny version of the totemic, subway-friendly Strand tote bag. "Claudia said, 'I wish there was a 'Commuter Barbie' who came with a Strand bag,'" Hsieh recently recalled. "And I was like, "Oh my God—we have to do that."

The two women had never written together before, but they quickly devised a script for a “Commuter Barbie” sketch. Arisso, a packaging designer, created an array of Barbie-sized accessories, including a beanie—made out of a black-dyed baby sock—and a tiny pair of pink headphones (to help “tune out the creeps when you’re stuck in the middle seat”). After recruiting a pair of young actors, and hiring a jingle writer, Hsieh and Arisso used their Brooklyn living room to shoot the video, for which they spent around $1,600 of their own money. “The production value was a really big concern for us,” says Arisso, 24. “We wanted to make sure people kept watching after three seconds.” After a few weeks of editing, Hsieh and Arisso had a sharp, spot-on three-minute commercial parody ready to go.

Now, they just had to figure out how to get people to watch it.