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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