and this is that story.

- I'm Barrett.

- I'm Carter and this is Felicity.

- So my best friend Carter and I

run the account hellicity_merriman together.

We met about five years ago.

- We had the same job at the time

and one of the very first things that we bonded over

was both having American Girl dolls growing up.

- So we were spending a lot of time

getting to know each other and our other coworkers

largely through a series of personality quizzes

that we would find online.

One of those was the Buzzfeed

Which American Girl Doll Are You quiz

which she and I instantly bonded over

because we had both grown up with those dolls

and had read those books

and were really familiar with the characters.

- We not only took the quiz ourselves

but it became a bit of like a team building exercise

for basically our entire staff.

We all knew who everyone's American Girl doll was.

It was a bit like being sorted into your Harry Potter house.

We knew who was a Ravenclaw

and we also knew who was a Josefina.

- We actually once went on a business lunch together

to the American Girl doll cafe.

It became kind of an in joke

throughout the course of our friendship

then in late 2021, we were living separately

in different cities and bonded

because we began seeing American Girl doll memes

from other creators on Twitter mostly

and we would send them back and forth to each other

and laugh together.

- And I think it was just very organic

in terms of coming up with our own ideas

for things that would be funny

featuring American Girl dolls.

In February of this year, after a few glasses of wine,

I just kind of decided to take these ideas

that we were coming up with and actually make an account.

- Carter texted me one day and said,

"I made us our own American Girl meme account.

The name is hellicity_merriman and here's the login details.

I want us to do this together."

The first memes we ever made for the account

were super stream of consciousness,

whatever we thought would be funny

to see an American Girl doll doing.

A lot of the original ones were like fake YouTube thumbnails

with like real YouTube titles.

We had absolutely no intention

of this ever taking off in the way it has

but we were dead wrong.

- [Carter] And then we started to make the

we need an American Girl doll who memes that really blew up.

We were not the first account that actually posted

we need an American Girl doll who X, Y, Z

but it was sort of a meme format

that we had seen once or twice.

One day, I just had like a bunch of ideas,

posted them on the account

and very quickly, the comments started rolling in.

- People started sharing those on TikTok

and in their stories all over the place

and it really exploded from there.

Carter and I both have a background working in politics

and we're both very involved in politics

so that was inevitably going to be a big part

of what we wanted to communicate through these memes.

A lot of our followers will note

that one of the first big memes

that brought them to the account

was our reaction to Roe versus Wade being overturned

back in June of 2022

and there's actually a funny story

that goes along with that.

- At the time, I was actually on a mountain

with no cell service and had kind of told Barrett

do whatever you want with the account while I'm offline.

She posted a meme about this news.

- Because we had commented on it in the past

in the lead up to this announcement

that our followers would be looking to us

to say something else now that it had been made official.

I mocked up something really quickly,

shot it over to her and said, this is what I have.

I'm gonna post it if you can't respond to me

but I really want your feedback.

- Later that day, was driving down the mountain

and started getting pings on my phone.

- Very serendipitously,

she was just coming down off the mountain and she texted me

and she was like, "oh my God, this is wild but I love it.

Go ahead and post it."

- It's one of those moments

that I will always kind of remember like what I was doing.

Where was I when the Taylor Swift

Look What You Made Me Do music video dropped.

What was I doing when we found out this news

that Roe Wade was getting overturned?

I was driving down the mountain

and I found out about it from a meme on my own meme page

and realizing that this meme

about this decision was blowing up.

- That got us like 40,000 followers in the span of one day.

Over a million people saw the post.

It started getting printed out and taken to protests.

We saw photos of that sign

at protests in the New York Times.

It was all very bizarre and surreal.

We haven't had any direct contact

with the American Girl doll brand.

That being said, a lot of their employees

have actually reached out to us.

Obviously, our content

may be not the most child friendly in the world

but they're very much aware of the account

and they love it a lot.

Since we started this account in 2022,

a midterm election year

and because some of the political content we were making

did so well, Carter and I felt like it made sense for us

to use this account to do something that we care about a lot

which is getting young people to the polls.

- Talking about it in a way

that feels like we're talking to our peers

and we're not reading off some stuffy messaging

that I think really just doesn't work.

One of my favorite things about the account

is that it really has felt like a growing community.

People send us a ton of things,

tons of stories, lots of pictures.

- Honestly, at this point, we would've expected

everybody to have unfollowed the account

but we're still growing a little bit every day.

(calm music)