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Posted February 8, 2010
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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Posted February 5, 2010 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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Posted February 4, 2010
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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Posted February 3, 2010
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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Posted February 2, 2010 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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