Garnham (left) and Ferguson are part of a 14-strong consumer products and licensing team at Mind Candy, with offices in London (pictured right), New York and Los Angeles. Garnham says: “When I joined we were a digital online gaming company, but we’re developing more into an entertainment company”
You generated over $100m in total gross retail sales in 2011. Do you expect to generate more this year? Yes, we’re up. We’ll definitely be up because of more product going into the market and the shelf space.
How are you going about taking the Moshi brand worldwide? We’ve signed a mobile agreement with Gree and it’s part of that agreement that Gree will launch Moshi into certain Asian markets in the middle of next year. So it’s about us as a consumer products team making sure that we have our foundations in place for that game launch before we actually bring MoshiMonsters.com into that language. We’re also focusing on Latin America and Spain. We’ve also got Spanish Moshi. Spanish is the first non-English language that we’ve localised the brand in, and we now have more localisation plans.
Will you ever licence a toy that has a higher, £60-plus price point? The Treehouse was our flagship product from Vivid and that was £24.99. We sold a couple hundred thousand of those.
This year we’ve got more flagship product like the App Monster coming out, which is £20. We are working on a toy product that will be slightly more expensive, but it’s very
smart technology. For me it’s a real head scratcher – when I was talking to the developer, we could have gone very heavy and charged a high fee, but that would have taken the price point for that item quite high. The real challenge is on Boxing Day – is that going to be 25 per cent off? Or in the January sales will it be 40 per cent off? Then you’re clearing it out. Ferguson: Ultimately Moshi Monsters is free-to-play online. So the consumer products need to reach all of our Moshi fans, regardless of price points, and especially in the times we’re in. We need to have an attainable price point, that mums and dads won’t feel will break the bank, but will allow them to buy into the brand.
What do you think about increased competition?
I’ve been in this long enough to know that competition is good. You’ve just got to make sure your stuff is better than the rest – it’s as simple as that. We’ve got a very loyal fanbase and retailers that are loyal to us as well. Obviously now they’re looking for the next big thing. It’s just making sure we have the best product.
Somebody said to me: “Who’s your biggest competitor?” And I honestly don’t think we’ve met them yet. The
ones that are out there now – Club Penguin and Bin Weevils – are great because we know who they’re signing and what partners they have. But it’s the next Angry Birds that is potentially our biggest threat. And that could be some university student doing it as a project. And that’s why we’re looking for those new things as well. But we’ve got such a rich in- house IP slate coming through we’ve not had to look elsewhere.
It’s been an incredible few years for Moshi Monsters. How has it fared in the past 12 months? Garnham: If you look at the growth of the company, it’s been an explosion. For the consumer products and licensing team, we’ve gone from probably two of us maybe three of us this time last year, to 14 of us, with offices in London, New York and LA. We became the number one licensed toy brand in the UK (NPD June/July data), and it’s just about keeping us up there as long as we can, really.
And where would you like to see yourselves in five years time? I joined we were a gaming company, a digital online gaming company. We’ve now morphed into content, into music, into publishing, so I think we’ll develop more into an entertainment company.
Pokémon vs Moshi
BEFORE HIS time at Mind Candy, chief business development officer Darran Garnham worked at Kidz Entertainment and 4Kids. At the latter he worked on brands including Nintendo’s game phenomenon Pokémon. And Garnham says working on the Japanese brand helped him to develop Moshi Monsters.
“When I first emailed [Mind Candy CEO] Michael Acton Smith, I said I think you’ve got the next Pokémon, because of the number of characters,” he tells ToyNews. “At the licensing show the year
before last, our booth was next to Pokémon, just by accident. And it was really interesting to see the two brands together, because Pokémon has characters with eyes that are quite deep-set. It’s that raw Manga- style, Japanese-looking, very successful look, whereas Moshi eyes are very push-forward eyes, they’re very human eyes. Garnham adds: “The strategy now for Pokémon is incredible as they’ve got that longevity locked in. They shot off like a rocket, burnt brightly for a few years and came down. “It’s key we don’t do that.”