Spin Master

“In, in like, 30 years, I've taken like five lunches. I eat them at my desk, I do everything in the office, but then when I leave the office, I know it's my time at the end of the day. And the other thing that I do is, is I don't talk about work to my friends o…”

“Because I would say that the rate of innovation is very high now, and the barriers to entry for people to enter into the toy business or children's entertainment has gone down a lot. So we have to be very, very quick as a company.”

“One of the things we did was we took a lot of the earnings that we made from Paw Patrol, and we bought Melissa and Doug, and the reason for that was to have, to even out the ups and downs of the toy industry, and Melissa and Doug is a very stable, you know, op…”

“By the way, Bakugan was discontinued in 2013, but after a major rebranding, it was brought back in 2019 with upgraded characters, a card game, and a new anime series.”

“We bought a company called Cardinal in 2015, so we're the largest manufacturer of puzzles and chess sets and poker chips and all that type of stuff.”

“The real decision why it went public was to actually set the company up for success in the future. We felt that for the company to outlive the founders, it's best for the company to be in a public construct rather than a private company.”

“It's a multi-billion dollar franchise.”

“It's an incredible demo for toys, very steady demo for toys and no one had ever done anything with that play pattern for that demographic.”

“The one thing we didn't do is we didn't cut our R&D budget. We kept that, and we kept on spending, and we kept on investing.”

“At that point in time, I think we had about 900 employees, and we had to let go 350 people in a matter of 24 months.”

“So by 2013, we weren't, we actually retired Bakugan. So it went from like hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year in sales to zero.”

“So basically our sales went from 2010, I think we peaked at about nine hundred fifty million. And then by 2013, the sales were down to five hundred million.”

“And then after Bakugan, we launched a show called Redikai, which was based on this really innovative card system that we created. Everybody was excited about it. All the retailers bought into it, and it was a huge disaster. Like, you could not give the product…”

“Yes, it became a billion dollar franchise. It aired in literally a 150 countries around the world. We did four seasons, over 200 episodes. It just captured the hearts and minds of kids.”

“Aldrich invented the item, so his genius was the idea to put an action figure into a marble.”

“We actually went there with a mission in hand, which was to try to find products in Japan that we could bring to North America.”

“This really, we were up against Mattel and their marketing and their design, and our design couldn't compete. Like, our dolls didn't look as nice as theirs. Our packaging wasn't as good. Our commercial wasn't as good. We didn't have the brand. We didn't have e…”

“They would literally go from city to city to city and visit the inventors and go to their offices, and I'd say that was like, 80% of the work was done that way, on location.”

“Entirely self-financed. Other than the bank would actually let us borrow against our inventory and receivables.”

“It cost about five 50.”

“You know, I can just tell you that by the end of. 1998. So we started marketing in that year. We had grossed thirty five million dollars in sales.”

“We did no research. Nothing.”

“When we signed the product, we basically put all the money we'd made to date into the design and development.”

“After we signed the product, we didn't realize that every toy company had turned it down.”

“In 96, we actually came across this invention, which was an airplane that you pumped up and would fly for about 45 seconds, and it came from these two British inventors, John Dixon and Peter Manning.”

“No, Devil Sticks is the generic term, and so we called ours the Spin Master Devil Sticks. So that's actually, that's the origin of the company name, is from the Devil Sticks.”

“Yeah, the product was selling very well, so we had money coming in from the other sales, and I mean, in our peak, we were producing 17,500 pieces a day.”

“She said, okay, well, I'll give you an order for 48,000 pieces, and if it goes well, I'll give you an order for half a million pieces.”

“What went through my mind was, we were going to charge her two dollars and 65 cents U.S., and I dropped the price to one 65 in my mind right then and there.”

“So Bob actually, when we started, the first place we actually went to look for people to work in the factory was we went to homeless shelter.”

“He actually had no manufacturing experience. He came to our office, and we literally made a deal within 45 minutes, and then he went down and started running the factory.”

“My attention to visual detail is, is very high. Like, when we were developing in toys or engineering, I could see, like, little changes when we were debugging the toys, and people would use rulers, and I could just see it with my eyes.”