Word: toy
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Walk around the airy orange-and-yellow-hued loft of Rumpus Toys in New York City. Stick your hand down the throat of a plush Gus Gutz and remove his stuffed organs. Toy companies are supposed to be like this--creative places where adults dream up wacky stuff for kids. "I make the kinds of toys I love to play with," explains the 29-year-old founder, Laurence Schwarz, standing next to a showroom of Harry Hairballs, a cat whose stomach contains fish bones, slippers and hair balls. "We don't put this stuff through focus groups or watch kids...
Even if Rumpus' toy line strikes adults as gross, it has struck a chord with children, driving revenues from $1 million in 1997 to an estimated $15 million this year. More important, Rumpus represents the kind of fun-first, marketing-second approach to toymaking that has become alien to America's corporate giants Mattel and Hasbro, which together control about 30% of the toy business. The corporations instead scheme to recoup their nine-figure licensing fees for movie characters by filling the pipeline with action figures...
Executives at Mattel, for example, can't remember the last hit toy the $4.8 billion company incubated without a movie licensing tie-in or an idea purchased from a smaller company. The days when the firm, based in El Segundo, Calif., was capable of organically growing a brand from the roots up, building Barbie or Hot Wheels into multibillion-dollar annual businesses, seem long gone...
...news in an industry that relies on hits to get kids and parents into the stores. This year, for example, Hasbro and retailers were betting on products licensed from Star Wars' prequel Phantom Menace to drive sales into the crucial fourth quarter, which accounts for half of all toy sales. However, the force has not been with the Star Wars line. "It was very strong in May and June, during the movie's release," says Leslie Rauch, a senior buyer for Target stores. "But since then, it's become nothing more than a boy's action figure." Schwarz of Rumpus...
...look at some of the hit toys of the past few years--Super Soakers, Air Hogs, Beanie Babies, Furby, even Gus Gutz. They came from small companies with no movie licensing tie-ins. That's bad news for Mattel's Barad. She needs a hot toy this holiday season more than any six-year-old does. Otherwise, the only thing Barad may get for Christmas is fired...