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18 THE BIG INTERVIEW MIND CANDY


What’s that coming over the hill?


Is it a monster? No – it’s a Moshi Monster called Poppet, which is getting its very own licensing programme. Mind Candy’s head of licensing Darran Garnham and senior consumer products manager Sam Ferguson tell all to Dominic Sacco about how they’re growing the Moshi brand even further


Why licence out the Poppet Moshi Monster in particular and how big do you think it can become? Garnham: I don’t know if it’s being ignorant or arrogant, but it’s retailer feedback – those who are selling Poppet merchandise. They said it was starting to sell neck-and-neck with Hello Kitty. For us that was the penny-drop moment where we realised we’ve actually got something pretty special here. We’ve been internally building a whole new girls’ IP, but we’ve got a hero character that millions of kids already know. So why are we trying to reinvent something when we’ve already got it?


The first product will roll out in spring/summer next year and it’s looking incredible. We’ve got a whole Poppet range and style guide that was on show at Brand Licensing Europe. Within some of the skus, we’ve got some backpacks with Poppet on, and a range of watches. Poppet was selling 52 per cent of the [Moshi] watches in Argos and that’s 52 per cent of the six characters on offer, so that’s a massive weight. We’ve got hair clips and all these other Poppet products that were sitting beside Disney Princess and Hello Kitty, and it was a retailer-led discussion looking at how can we get more of this character. We’re not going to go high and hard, we want it to look really cool.


NOVEMBER 2012


Ferguson:We’re in such a lovely position where we’re going to retailers, and they’re saying, you know what, you should look in this space. Working backwards from retailer to licensee is better for all. It’s a great position to be in. Garnham: On the flipside of that, we’ll be growing some key Moshi characters on the boys side too. We’re still toying with the new IP we’ve got down here in terms of which direction we take it in terms of


Moshi will always be our Mickey Mouse but it is important to have other irons in the fire and other brands to have a look at.


When will your new brand launch? How’s it going? It’s our difficult second album, isn’t it? I call it our Duffy (laughs). It has to be right. We could have launched it six months ago, but we didn’t, and I’m pleased we didn’t because we’ve made a few incredible tweaks. It’s


At the moment we control our content. Moshi is on air 365 days a year. Kids


can log in anywhere in the world. Darran Garnham, Mind Candy


character base. It’s more boy-skewed while Moshi is more girl-skewed.


Why develop a new property to sit alongside Moshi? Garnham:We’re big fans of Pixar and Michael [Acton Smith, Mind Candy’s CEO] very kindly took a dozen or so of us to San Francisco to visit them earlier this year. When you’re in the atrium at


Pixar, and you look around and you’ve got Cars, Toy Story, all these franchises. And that’s what we want to become – a company that has franchises.


more skewed towards boys and it’s more action-packed. It goes into a very toyetic space that is tried and tested for decades, so it’s really exciting.


Are we talking action figures? Potentially… for consumer products [the new IP will arrive in] 2014. For launch we’ve been trying to get it out for the end of this year. We’ve had kids testing it but it’s not quite there yet. It’s close.


What about the inevitable Moshi Monsters TV show or cartoon?


I assume you must have had TV stations approach you? Yeah. I sound old fashioned, but the minute you go traditional then you’ve got a commissioning editor that can take you off air. At the moment we control our content.


Moshi is on air 365 days a year. Kids can log in anywhere in the world. So we will have animation but it will be shown on Moshi TV, in the game and then a week later it will go onto our YouTube channel. But never say never.


Michael let the cat out of the bag that we’re going to be doing a direct- to-DVD movie for next year. That’s another one of my key projects at the moment – I’m just finalising our global distributor for the DVD.


And again, the movie, like our magazine, will be produced in-house. We are working with the two biggest global distributors in the entertainment space. We had the opportunity to go on the big screen, but I think we did the right thing by not going theatrical on the first wave. We will have theatrical premieres in the UK, the US and Australia. But it will be a DVD. We’re working on a product that will be sold with the DVD, or separately to the DVD, but will have some interactivity, so it’s really cool.


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