ToyGuy
New York, NY
Male, 34
I'm a toy inventor and owner of a modestly successful start-up business. It's a tough field to break into so you REALLY have to love what you do to make it work. That said, toy inventing & marketing is still about the most fun job I can imagine. There are few things in this world as awesome as bumping into strangers who know and love your product, or seeing fan clubs for your toy sprout up in different parts of the country! Ask me anything!
About 95% of my sales have been online up until now, but I'm slowly working my product into select retail outlets and am considering options for getting it into some of the mass retailers in the future.
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If you are referring to my product specifically, I'm sad to say that almost none of my time is spent on playing these days (although I love my toy and often feel the urge to play it). One big reason is that it is a sports toy that requires some open space and multiple players, which gets increasingly hard to find when most of your friends are in their mid-30s. The only period that I got to spend significant time playing with and testing my product was in its early days (perhaps 50% of my time), it mostly became sales and admin stuff after that. In response to your other question, play NEVER seems like work to me : )
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I never signed a licensing agreement for either of my toys so I can't give an exact answer, but I would guess roughly 6-12 months (based on a few talks that I've had) if the process had been carried out to completion.
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Walmart is far and away the king of all retail as far as the independent inventor is concerned. With over 3,000 retail locations (I believe), there is some sort of saying out there that if Walmart ever decides to pick up your product, you can retire for life. I'm not sure exactly how valid that statement is, but it suggests that Walmart is pretty powerful. Toys R Us is still a presence, but my understanding is that its not quite the toy/retail powerhouse it used to be because of increasing competition.
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There absolutely is a sweet spot for different categories of toys and toy manufacturers seem to put a lot of focus on it. I don't believe that toy companies ever pick a price range first and see what kind of toy they can come up with that fits within that range (I could be wrong). I believe that most toy companies come up with a concept that they like and then try to figure out how to work the manufacturing cost down in order to fit the appropriate consumer price range that they are targeting.
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I'm not sure if there ever is a "right time" to go to market unless your product is waiting on some big media event or some brand licensing tie-in (i.e. Marvel Comics/Spiderman movie). Big companies with large market research budgets might have specific launch windows, but my product was ready to go to market (online sales) as soon as I received my first production batch from the factory. I'd love to reveal the identity of my product, but would rather wait for now because of discussions that I'm having with other companies. I'll let you guys know as soon as I'm able!
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In the past, I've tried a little bit of everything to get in touch with retailers about the possibility of licensing (direct e-mails - never worked, LinkedIn - only slightly better results, Toy Fair - easiest way, but extremely expensive). I've also been approached by other companies on several occasions. I refused to use a broker (unless as a last resort) since they typically charge anywhere between 25-50% of your lifetime profits and I was already way more invested in my product than most toy inventors since I had paid 100% of the costs myself. This also makes licensing a tough deal for me in most cases since I already did 90% of the heavy-lifting and most large companies are only interested in deals where they reap 90% of the profits. As my business continues to grow, licensing gets worse and worse as an option for me as time passes. I'm an unusual case because I'm essentially married to my product/brand and only want to make it great (the money isn't nearly as important to me). Most of the would-be toy inventors I come across tend to be much more profit-minded, (and I don't mean this negatively) "get-rich-quick" types. My advice to these guys is to sketch a concept on a napkin, get some sort of protection on it (usually a non-disclosure agreement since patents are brutally expensive), use a broker, talk a company into licensing the concept for the best deal that you can get (even if for just 2-3% royalties) with as little of your own funding/work as possible and just move onto your next toy or project... clean and simple. This would be the "smart" way to do things. My product is patent pending.
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