There are still a wealth of industry pioneers, toy company entrepreneurs, product innovators, and yes, a few inventors as well, that are deserving of recognition by the Toy Industry Hall of Fame as being the giants of our industry. These are individuals whose efforts built our industry and whose leadership still has a powerful influence even today. 

            

 

Here is what I would propose as a guideline for future inductions:

The Toy Industry Hall of Fame inducts one person from several categories of industry contribution.

A. Company Founder/Industry Executive - select one each year that has been a major contributor to the industry. Past and present, alternating years, choosing from the past one year, and from the modern day industry the next.

B. Honorary Inductee - every three years recogize someone from outside the toy industry who has had a profound contribution in the industry. Jim Henson is an example of one such person who richly deserved being inducted.

C. Other - an inventor, an innovator, or another powerfully influential person in our industry who was instrumental in the building that which our industry is all about, the physical toy or game itself.        

 

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Posted February 25, 2010

There have been many great innovators, entrepreneurs, inventors, and business leaders honored in our Toy Industry Hall of Fame, and there are many others who deserve consideration for the honor of inclusion. In the past we have honored inventors such as Reuben Klamer and Eddy Goldfarb. How about other inventors and creators of enduring and influential products such as Mike Bowling of Pound Puppies fame or Mr. Xavier Roberts who created the Cabbage Patch Kids? Perhaps Dan Lauer, inventor of Water Babies? Mr. Rubik who invented the cube, perhaps? Maybe Mel Taft should be recognized, who during his long and influential career at Milton Bradley first saw an electric mining game from Marvin Glass that he turned into the classic game of Operation? What about Burt Meyer, who is credited with creating the Lite Brite and other toys now considered classics? These are individuals whose products have sold billions of dollars at retail and have made an indelible impact on our industry. 

            

 

We should not only induct inventors, of course, though I may be partial. Who else deserves recognition in our Toy industry Hall of Fame? How about those long-forgotten entrepreneurs who started companies that once dominated the industry such as Remco, Topper Toys, Schaper Toys, Gabriel, Lakeside, or Ideal, just to name a few? These companies were the toy industry. Their founders and CEOs built our industry.

            

 

Louie Marx, Milton Bradley, George Parker have been recognized in the past. How about some of our current company founders and CEOs, such as Jack Friedman of LJN and currently Jakks Pacific fame? Russell Hornsby comes to mind, having built Trendmasters in the 90’s and having done it all over again with Cepia?

 

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Toy Fair was great; energy and optimism level high. The T.O.T.Y. awards were elegant, and Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was named to the Toy Industry Hall of Fame, along with John Lasseter of Pixar.

            

Now, yesterday I posed a question that was posed to me, “Why do we induct people from outside the toy industry into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame?” Why not reserve that for recognizing industry veterans, industry movers and shakers, founders of companies, and innovators of note? It's a good question I think.

            

 

 

On behalf of the Walton family and Walmart, one of their executives gave a warm address of gratitude. She spoke eloquently about the special realationship between Walmart and the toy industry, of Walmart’s support of the toy industry, of the many toys Sam himself had in his office, and of the special emotional power of toys for the Walmart consumers. It was beautiful.

            

I am having difficulty understanding how that is consistant with the reality that Walmart has cut their toy department and reduced toy shelf space by a reported two thirds? A 66% reduction in toys merchandised in their stores - how does that reconcile with all these warm words about Walmart's high regard, affection even, for toys and the toy industry? I am flummoxed, bamboozled, and just plain confused. Please explain this if you can?

 

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This year the Toy Industry Hall of Fame inducted Pixar's John Lasseter, the animator and storyteller behind the Toy Story and Cars movie franchises that have been successful as toys, as well. Sam Walton, the founder and visionary behind Walmart, was also inducted. A Walmart executive gave a warm acceptance speech on behalf of Walmart and the Walton family.

            

 

 

Later, after we settled into the business of toyfair I heard someone ask, “Why doesn’t the Toy Industry Hall of Fame induct people actually in our industry and not movie makers or retailers?” They have in the past inducted industry leaders, inventors, and others that toil directly in our industry, but many of the honorees are from other industries. 

            

 

 

It is a good question, I think. Perhaps we need a special section in the Toy Hall of Fame for “Honorary Inductees,” much like honorary doctorates. There are, after all, many outside our industry who have been tangentially important to our industry - but they are not of the Toy Industry. There is no Oscar category for Best-Toy-Based-on-a-Movie, to my knowledge. 

 

 

           

Honorary doctorates are not real degrees based on years of study, real work, or accomplishment, and are distinguished as such from the real thing. Recognition of others by our industry may be appropriate or useful, but as they are not of our industry, perhaps they should not be placed alongside those who are actual industry veterans. 

            

There’s my two cents on the matter . . . What do you think?

 

P.S.  A very big Kudos to my team who scheduled, planned, prepared and executed this year's Toy Fair trip flawlessly.

 

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Back from Toy Fair!

 

We came, we saw, we met. We conquered. Well, time will tell on that last one. 

 

It all started with last weekend's T.O.T.Y. awards, which was a beautifully executed event on the Hudson River at the Chelsea Piers. My esteemed colleague Mr. Russell Hornsby and his company, Cepia, walked away with awards in three categories, including overall Toy of the Year. It was terrific to see him, his daughters, and their little company of sixteen people be so honored. It was a night of honors well earned and richly deserved. A colleague described Russell as a genius, and he may be right. I believe he is one of the great minds in our industry today.

 

 

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Everything begins with a yes. Nothing begins, nothing happens from the word no.

 

I have taken up roller skating recently and found that I love it. I began with great trepidation about falling, breaking bones, etc. After all, I am not 18 years old any longer. 

            

 

It was only a few years ago that I took up Karate again after a 25 year layoff and ended up ruining my big toe joint while breaking boards with a front kick. No regrets. 

            

It was that same summer that I took up tennis again after a 30 year layoff. Both tennis and karate were the passions of my life at different periods. After feeling a tear in my bicep while playing one day, I didn’t have the sense to stop, and on the next swing I felt a muscle rolling up in my arm like a windowshade that is pulled down and released. (Some people don’t have the sense the Good Lord gave a goose). 

 

And still - no regrets. 

 

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When traveling to the German Toy Fair in Nuremberg, I would fly into some German city far from there and rent a car so that I could drive pedal-to-the-metal, hell-bent-for-leather fast-as-possible on the Autobahn. My little rental cars would top out at 100 mph, maybe 120 mph tops with my foot buried in the floorboards. In the rear view mirror the lights of big, black, ominous looking Benz sedans would appear and close rapidly like I was in an aerial dogfight, suddenly overtake me, and fly past doing 200 mph or more. 

            

 

 

I would zoom through tiny Bavarian towns, off the beaten path through the Schwartzwald, or the Black Forest. Germany is a beautiful country. I could speak German fairly well, so I could ask directions when lost. My comprehension was much worse, so I could understand very little of their answers. Consequently, when I got lost I tended to stay lost for a while. 

 

 

            

It was all part of the adventure. Life, that is. This is it - this is our adventure.  Make it count.  

 

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Chinese food in China is not very good, I've found. It's certainly not what I was raised on. There are lots of sharp chicken bones that stick in your cheeks and fatty chicken feet that I have a hard time putting in my mouth, not knowing where they have been. And they don’t have fortune cookies in China - that is an American invention. Who knew?

            

 

 

My hosts In China and Hong Kong were extraordinarily gracious, and they still are, of course. They took me to a dinner of Peking Duck, which really is quite delicious, and at our table they did ‘The Noodle Show’ where they make noodles from dough, presumably as they have done for thousands of years. They stretch it, swing it, twirl it, fold it, and repeat, and before your very eyes the lump of dough becomes multiple strands that get thinner and thinner and thinner still, until they are the diameter of, well, you may have guessed it - noodles. And I thought they grew on vines! 

 

 

 

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Today in China and Hong Kong, factories are much more strict to make sure none of their workers are underage, especially at the larger ones utilized by Mattel, Walmart, Toys R Us, and others. Nonetheless, excruciating poverty is everywhere. Vehicles spewing clouds of black exhaust are everywhere. Busy highway intersections without stop sign where trucks, cars, and bicyclists go nose to nose, honking, jockeying, muscling their way in front of each other are everywhere. It is crazy!  

            

 

 

Cities full of millions of people are everywhere. We have a few that big, China has dozens. When people say the next hundred years will be dominated by China, as the last hundred have been dominated by the US, and you personally witness the racing economic engine that produces almost all of the world’s goods, you are more than inclined to believe such a prediction.

            

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I would like to dedicate this post to Kimberly who wrote to me that she enjoys my stories of travels. That makes one person. So, Kimberly, this is for you.

            

Every trip is an adventure. During my first trip to Hong Kong and China I was the guest of a small toy and game factory owned by a friend. Even a good Chinese factory is a shock to the system at first. The barracks in which the workers live on the factory grounds are not a pretty sight; more like a prison than a dorm, dark and dingy, with twelve or more workers allotted to a stark room filled with bunkbeds, a single lightbulb, and nothing else. 

            

 

 

Water, cold only it appeared, might come from a spigot outside the rooms - one per floor. The factory workers live, eat, and work in the factory compound. With today's new standards they get weekends off, and less overtime than in the past, which may not even be their wish as the result of less work is less money available to send back home. 

            

The workers are young, and there are hundreds of millions of them coming from distant parts of China so they can send money back home to their families. Every year about this time, they all head back home for a few weeks for Chinese New Year, which makes 300 million people or more on the road at the same time. 

 

 

 

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While in the UK for Toy Fair I stayed a couple nights by the ruins of a 10th century monastery where my good friend Richard grew up. His father had been the caretaker. We wandered through London together on Robbie Burns night, looking for the Scottish delicacy haggis, something only the Scots can stomach, as it is made of, well, a stomach of a sheep or some such. We drove almost to Wales. (Wales is to the UK as West Virginia is to the the US. Sorry I never got to Wales.)  

 

 

 

My friend Richard showed me the St. Andrews Cathedral that was untouched, unscathed when all the surrounding London was reduced to rubble by German air attacks in WWII. The hand of the Lord had spared His house for all to see. 

 

 

 

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During one of my first trips to visit UK toy companies I must have been advised that renting a car, rather than taking cabs, was the way to go to visit some of the companies at their home offices. It is hard enough to drive on the wrong side of the road and nearly impossible while sitting on the wrong side of the car and trying to operate a stick shift on the floor with your left hand. It took a little practice and a lot of gear grinding before I got the hang of it.

            

 

 

My first stop was to see Hasbro UK, outside of London. Now, they don’t have stop signs in that area - or intersections, lights or any such traffic control - only high speed and free-for-all round-a-bouts. You better have a good idea how to get where you want to go because you can’t pause at a stoplight to get your bearings or check your map. After fruitlessly going round and round, even while I was in sight of their office building, I had to pull off the road to contemplate the possibility that “I can’t get there from here.”  This seemed absurd, but was seemingly true.

 

 

 

After collecting my wits and taking a deep breath, I did finally stumble upon it. 

 

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I once went to Italy to break ground with the largest Italian toy company, a company that not only makes and markets toys, but also controls toy retailing in that country and has become a significant player in all of Europe. This is a company with reputed . . . ties. Know what I mean, Vern? Hey, it’s Italy after all.

            

I flew to Milan, where I thought they were based, grabbed a taxi with a driver that spoke no English, and we drove and we drove and we drove, out of the city, through small towns, and way out into the countryside. I began to think I was not going to visit this toy company after all because I was being kidnapped.  

 

 

 

Crazy, but maybe. I was a long way from home. 

            

We did finally make it to their factory, far north of Milan. I was coming back to Milan afterwards for one more meeting, loaded down with my giant suitcase filled with toy samples, like a Himalayan sherpa, or a human llama, (I had brought with me as much as I could humanly carry, drag, and wheel around) when a wheel on one of my large cases broke. I was stunned, and almost ready to give up. “For the loss of a nail the shoe was lost, for the loss of a shoe the horse was lost . . .” as my mother used to say. For the loss of one wheel, I ground to a halt.  

 

 

 

I did finally get back home to Chicago, somehow. 

 

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Like Aesop’s fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, I am the ant, a worker, and I love doing what I do. So when I travel, it is for work, all work, and rarely any play - but some, sometimes, on occasion, just a little bit. 

            

 

 

And as you may recall, my mantra is, “You can run but you can’t hide.” Some years back I set out to ferret out and work with all of the significant toy companies on each continent. I never did get to South America though, and that is probably just as well with their labrynthine duties and currency regulations.

 

 

 

Japan I found to be a brick wall too hard even for my hard head to break into. 

 

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We no longer travel from fair to fair, country to country, toy show to toy show, instead we ‘stick to our knitting’ inventing and creating new products based on new technologies. The international travel yielded many friends and relationships that we cherish and nurture to this day, but did not seem to yield sufficient results at the time to continue. Many in the industry continue that trek, and of course for a toy manufacturer and marketer the reasons to do so are clear. Each Toy Fair is a chance to put product in front of a buyer, or secure a distributor for your line in another country. 

 

 

           

Every year I hear that some companies aren’t going to be showing their wares at the New York Toy Fair, as it is out of sync with the buying cycle, redundant and unnecessary. Every year I hear that others won’t be showing at the Dallas Toy Show for the same reason.

 

 

 

Isn’t there a best time of year, and a best location for an American International Toy Fair? When is that, and where? What would be the rationale for this Toy Fair? What would we as an industry hope to accomplish - what could we accomplish? What do individual toy companies hope to accomplish at a Toy Fair? What do the retail buyers want and need? Does anyone consider these questions carefully? Whose opinion really matters? 

            

Who is in charge here?

 

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Why do we have Toy Fair?

            

Why in New York City? Why in February over Valentine’s Day, the very week that a blizzard hits NYC year after year? Does anyone know? Who decides these things? 

            

 

 

Every year we ask ourselves why we go and what we intend to gain by the expenditure of time and thousands of dollars. We walk 26 miles or more in dress shoes, shake a million hands, have a hundred meetings, see thousands of toys - so many that the mind boggles. We do see many old friends and industry colleagues, and that is both enjoyable and useful. I hope I will see you there this year.

            

In years past we traveled from the Hong Kong Show, to the German Show, to the UK Show, to Manhattan for what was once the only and the most important Toy Fair on the planet, and on to the Tokyo Toy Fair. And for what? 

 

 

 

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As we are now under a severe time crunch on this project we had to jettison the idea of using water, which was magical, and come up with another way. And we did - kudos to our team who arrived at that novel solution in my absence. 

            

We know that whatever we build, and whatever level of performance we can achieve, the factory will not be able to match it. What we build has to work much better than need be, so that when in production, the performance is still satisfactory, even when reduced. 

            

The solution to another problem encountered would have required that we glue a rod to one of the components. "No can do," says the factory. The component supplier cannot guarantee that the components supplied will be identical in dimension and other specifications, and the expected variation means we can’t use this approach. 

 

 

            

The factory is also concerned that their workers would not glue the pieces accurately enough, resulting in throwing out a lot of components. They were also opposed to specially training their workers to do that part of the assembly.

            

So, instead of gluing we tried magnets to attach these components - a brilliant idea on the part of our engineer. While this solved a lot of problems, it added cost. It also raised concerns that the strength of the magnets may not be sufficiently consistent from the supplier unless a higher price was paid for them. On top of that, the components may vary such that magnets might not work reliably in manufacture even if we could overcome the problems related to the magnets themselves. 

            

We aren't tearing our hair out yet. Maybe tomorrow we will start. 

 

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It is amazing that anything ever gets made.           

            

Hasbro’s game Lucky Ducks was almost killed a dozen times before it miraculously made it to market to become a hit, perhaps one day a classic. It is a great game - kudos to the inventors Fertig and Stubenfoll and to Harry Disko (rest in peace my friend) who was their colleague and backer, and who gave me my chance in the toy business. Who knows where I’d be now were it not for him. 

            

 

 

One of our team members is in Hong Kong, going back and forth into China, trying to save one of our big products for this year. The factory and the toy company's development team had not been able to come up with a manufacturable design of our new technology. The problems involved are myriad, and we are all working furiously day night to solve them. They work while we sleep, We work while they sleep. 

 

 

 

The material chosen won’t pass the 48-hour aging test, we are told. But is that true? The safe choice for the factory is to not use it because they are not sure, or unfamiliar with the material. If they do use it, and it fails later, whose fault will it be? I am sure the toy company will always blame the factory, just like with the magnets and lead paint issues of recent years. The factory takes the fall, even if it is the original design or material choice that is at fault. And they know that. 

            

 

 

So we try new materials, and some work, some don’t - some may be acceptable, some not. Paper was one solution. Whatever could be the problem with that? We had water initially, but water (regular, everyday drinking WATER mind you!) had to go through eight weeks of safety testing. Holy Cow, as Harry Carry would say. Un-freakin-believeable! This is the world we live in. 

 

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