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!
Fortunately my toy was simple enough for me to make the prototype myself. I don't have any experience with prototype making companies so unfortunately I'm not the best resource for this information. Unless your invention is incredibly complicated, I'd highly recommend that you try to make your prototypes yourself (they don't need to be incredibly polished, they just need to work for the most part).
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Without any hard evidence to back it, I would guess that kids today are still getting outdoors as much as they did 10-20 years ago since video games/electronic entertainment were still popular then (Pac-Man/Mario Bros. vs. Angry Birds). If you stretch this back to the 1950's, then perhaps kids might have spent a greater portion of their playtimes outdoors, but even then I'm not 100% sure. In response to your second question, I actually believe that the sporting goods/toy market is actually growing. Obviously, as the general population grows so should the overall toy playing demographic and one advantage that outdoor toys have over others is that there are fewer age barriers. While it's hard to imagine grandma and grandpa playing around with Barbie and G.I. Joe, classic outdoor toys like Frisbee or Wiffle Ball never really get outgrown and can be enjoyed for life. A common line of thinking is that the proliferation of electronic/mobile gaming devices must be followed by an inevitable decline in the sporting/outdoor toys market . While this may be true if mobile gaming devices and outdoor toys directly competed against each other, anecdotally speaking I don't believe that this is the case. I believe that video games and outdoor toys exist somewhat independently of each other. While it's true that the average 12-year old boy might spend a few more hours each week playing Call of Duty than he does playing Nerf football, I don't think that his love of video games necessarily weighs on his decision to purchase outdoor toys (either he likes playing outdoors or he doesn't). There's ample room for all kinds of toys in a kid's life and if Facebook is a reliable indicator of people's purchasing preferences, there might even be some strange correlation between sports toys and war video games because I'd estimate that 80% of my fans in the 12-18 male demographic also like Call of Duty.
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In a way, but not exactly. Although toy-making was a job that I certainly dreamed about as a kid along with being an astronaut or playing baseball for the Mets, I never had serious designs on becoming a toy-maker when graduating from college. It was only after I worked at a normal office job for a couple of years and realized how bad a fit it was for me that I began to look for alternatives. This was also right around the time of 9/11 which really shook me up since I had several friends nearby (thankfully unhurt) and was also inside of the building myself a few months prior. It was a strange time in my life and after a few months of careful soul-searching, I decided to throw caution to the wind and immediately start doing some of the things I always wanted (travel, making toys).
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I haven't met anyone who has gone though the NY FIT toy design program so I can't give an opinion on that. You'd be better off asking them for a list of notable alumns and possibly getting in touch with them. Most of the other toy inventors who I've met were small-time, non-professionals (like myself) with diverse backgrounds (engineering, PR, sales, video production, etc.). The one guy I've met with the wildly successful product by most inventors standards (licensed deal for minimum annual guarantee of $150,000+) was the engineer, but his toy was quite simple (and brilliant) and I doubt that he needed any special engineering degree to develop it. I don't have an engineering or design background myself, but luckily my toy concept was simple enough for me to simply research what I needed to and develop as I went along.
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I've only invented a couple of toys up to this point. The first one didn't really go anywhere and is pretty irrelevant to my current/planned product line (I still love it though). My second invention seems to have some legs and is an outdoors/sporting goods type product.
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There are definitely companies out there that do just that, but I've never actually used any of them and if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that these toy services (like most others) will be ridiculously overpriced. I don't know your end goal (selling on your own, licensing to a bigger company) but I would probably recommend 90% of the time that you try to create a working prototype of your own. In addition to the obvious cost benefits, it might also be a good litmus test of sorts with the idea that any product that is exceptionally hard to make on your own will likely be 10 times harder to have mass produced and marketed effectively. If your toy idea is inherently complex (i.e. electronics or something) then you might need to have a company make the prototype, but even then I think it might be easier to sketch the concept on a napkin and approach a large toy manufacturer to have them possibly license your idea and handle everything for you from start to finish (but make sure to have them sign a non-disclosure agreement first).
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The easiest (and most expensive) way to do this is to exhibit at the NYC Toy Fair held at the Jacob Javits center each February, but the smallest booth will likely run you over $5,000 when all is said and done. It is extremely expensive and probably not the best option for a lot of people, but it will get you some degree of exposure to hundreds of potential distributors who might have an interest in your toy. I think that a far more practical option for most is to simply Google search or just visit a small specialty toy shop and ask who their favorite distributors are and try to contact them directly. Its probably easiest to start small first because the bigger the distributor, the harder it is to get them to talk to you unless you have a guaranteed smash hit type of product (rare). There are also all sorts of ways that you can pay to have set-ups or meetings with various toy people (just Google search Toy Industry Association and look around for their different services). I don't have any experience with these but it might be worth looking into if not too expensive.
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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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I don't since I run a very small-budget company and can't throw dollars any service unless it's absolutely critical. Also, it wouldn't matter to me if my toy scored a 20% rating on focus tests or 100% because I would be very skeptical of any kind of analytic attempt to measure "fun" (just remember the movie "Big"). Focus group testing is riddled with problems and I'm sure there are tons of instances where toys, TV shows, movies, etc. focus group tested off the charts and were absolute flops commercially and I'm sure that the reverse is also true. I'm not saying that focus group testing is completely useless, I just think that people put way too much stock into numbers/analysis as opposed to looking at the overall picture before deciding to put a product to market. For example, I once read that Pepsi cola kicks the crap out of Coke in almost every blind taste test, but that Coke is far and away the top seller. Why? Because Pepsi cola might just taste much better in smaller quantities and because people might base a lot of their purchasing decisions on factors that they are completely unaware of (perhaps a large portion of this has to do with superior marketing/branding, but I'm not sure how much). Instead of worrying too much about focus group testing and results, I think it's more important for small inventors and would-be entrepreneurs to realistically assess their core market, estimate how well their product would serve that markets needs, and then figure out the level of cost and difficulty in getting that product to that market. Obviously, if you grow to become a giant company like Apple or Google, it might be very worthwhile to spend $20 million on focus group testing if it helps you to arrive at a 5% more accurate product marketing decision.
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