This month, Mind Candy interviews Topps, Mattel helps build thousands of snowmen and a controversial breastfeeding baby doll arrives in the UK
TAG-TEAM INTERVIEW Vs
Darran Garnham, Chief business development officer and chief licensing officer, Mind Candy
Chris Rodman,
VP and group managing director, Topps International
Mind Candy’s Darran Garnham asks Topps’ Chris Rodman how to spot the next hot licence and about changing kids media
Darran: Topps has had some big hits over the years from Pokémon to Match Attax, and WWE to Moshi. How do you look for the next hot collectable? Chris: From a licence acquisition perspective, it’s taking both a global and a local approach to unearthing properties that can really engage our demographic: boys aged six to 12. While the holy grail is finding a global property that we can take to every corner of the world, at the same time we need to take a local approach.
Moshi Monsters, Skylanders and Club Penguin are all hits from new platforms. How is children’s entertainment developing? Fortunately we are partners of all these brands, and based on our business to date, are extremely bullish on this sector of the market and its growth prospects. I think we are very fortunate to be involved in the toy business during what is a fascinating period in the evolution of the industry. It’s a time when innovation and creativity can create whole
224 February new business models.
I’ve seen scan readers, QR codes and Augmented Reality. How do you see new technology affecting the collectables business? The challenge for the collectable business, which is a pocket money category driven by frequent multiple purchases, is incorporating new technology that markedly improves the consumer’s experience, but at the right price. For example, Topps was the first collectable company to incorporate AR into card products and whilst we got great PR from the activity, it really didn’t pay out.
How can Topps attract more girl consumers? It’s an interesting challenge and one that our NPD team is focused on, as we would love to double our business overnight. Girls are certainly avid collectors if the product format is right, however the explosion of trading card games over the last ten years has taken collecting further away from what girls find inherently compelling in a collecting experience. We now need to find a
platform, allied of course to the right IP, that will engage girls. All suggestions welcome.
Topps Huddle achieved some nice press in the digital space with its marriage of online and offline content. Do you have plans to roll this out into entertainment IP? Yes. It’s an ever increasing piece of the Topps business and follows on from the success of our Topps Bunt and Pennant products for baseball. Where we currently think the greatest opportunities lie is building on the power and reach that collectables have in the playground, to drive digital engagement, whilst developing a business model that can be monetised profitably.
Which is your all-time favourite collectable? It’s a hard choice between sport and entertainment, so for sport it would have to be the first English Premier League sticker collection we did (as Merlin) and for entertainment it would be Pokémon, when Topps sold over 800 million packs of cards and stickers.
Creating a monster
No, not a new Moshi Monster, but Mind Candy’s own consumer products manager Dave Tovey. He was caught striking a rather cool pose while showing off some garb – what better advert for the Moshi bike and clothing? The pictures were uploaded to Twitter by Mind Candy’s retail coordinator Sophie Dalmedo just before Christmas.
“[I’m] bringing the summer to Shoreditch, although it’s probably best to lock that picture away deep in the web vaults,” Tovey told us on Twitter. Oh no Dave – these pictures are far too good to be stuck online only. Send your embarrasing pictures in to ToyNewsand we’ll print them.