Dreaming Up and Designing Toys Is Far From Child’s Play
The people who work at creating play, who craft the whizzes and the bangs and the dings and even the dongs, will tell you the same story: Designing toys is a very serious occupation.
Oh, sure, people like Eric Ostendorff of Mattel Inc.’s Hot Wheels design group get to shoot little metal cars along precision plastic tracks all day.
Or maybe, like Ryan Slate of Playmates Toys, they spend their time helping dream up dolls that can remember your birthday or ask for cereal for breakfast.
But they’re also working hard, meeting tough deadlines and trying to figure out the unmet desires of a big-spending consumer group with an extremely short attention span.
The business of inventing toys is hotter these days than a Pokemon trading card at a 7-year-old’s birthday party. After all, someone has to cook up the estimated 6,000 new playthings introduced each year by the $27-billion toy industry.
In fact, so many people are eager to join the ranks of toy designers--which number in the thousands at toy companies and design houses big and small--that the only two colleges with accredited degree programs in toy design are flooded each year with applications. Many more would-be designers go it alone in workshops and garages across the country.
“Toy design is a great area for people to go into and it’s an important area, because it focuses on children, and children are important,” said Judy Ellis, chairwoman of the toy program at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, which pioneered a bachelor’s degree in toy design in 1989. Otis College of Art and Design in West Los Angeles launched a toy design program three years ago.
Theirs are the only academic programs devoted to toys, but designers come to the profession by a variety of routes and with a range of specialties in engineering, robotics, illustration, model-making, sculpting, textiles, packaging and marketing.
“To be a good toy designer, you have to be a bit of a designer, a marketing person and an engineer,” said Martin Caveza, chairman of the Otis toy design program.
“You have to be creative like a designer . . . strategic like a marketing person . . . and technical like an engineer,” said Caveza, a 13-year veteran of Mattel. A good designer not only comes up with an idea for a toy, but also considers how to sell it to the trade and to children, and how to manufacture it so it will be safe and not too expensive, he said.
The training can be grueling, Ellis warned, noting that FIT students are required to work as teaching assistants in a children’s center and study child psychology and development to get to know their market. The students also take courses in design, engineering, product safety, computers, packaging, marketing, promotion and business.
“This is such a rigorous program that our students have been known to say we are worse than medical school,” Ellis quipped. FIT toy design alumni have created such popular items as the Tickle Me Elmo doll, Street Shark action figures and the Don’t Spill the Beans game. (Otis College will graduate its first class of toy designers next June.)
Salaries for newly minted graduates begin at about $35,000; they may be double that depending on experience and specialization, Ellis said. Top-notch designers can earn more than $100,000 per year.
Ostendorff is a former aerospace engineer who switched from jet engines to miniature cars 16 years ago when he joined the Hot Wheels design team at Mattel.
Nearly 30 people devote their time to creating Hot Wheels cars, tracks and accessories for the El Segundo-based toy company, and about 800 people toil at various aspects of toy creation and packaging at Mattel’s design center. Mattel employs about 2,000 people in the El Segundo area.
Ostendorff might spend his day building a model for a new programmable car or making minute adjustments to an elaborate plastic track set-up.
“All of my kind of geeky hobbies as a kid--ham radio, robotics . . . come together here,” Ostendorff said.
The job might be fun, but it also involves long hours and tight deadlines, particularly around the big toy trade show each year: the American International Toy Fair, mounted each February in New York by the Toy Manufacturers Assn. of America. And while designers might dream of the ultimate toy, hard-headed business realities must be addressed.
“We’re constantly meeting with our marketing people,” Ostendorff said. “It is a business. There is a certain amount of shelf space for toys. Springtime is not the time to design a high-priced toy that is better suited for Christmas.”
Slate, as vice president of marketing at Costa Mesa-based Playmates Toys, helps design dolls and other toys for girls.
For example, a recent Playmates hit, the interactive Amazing Amy, was developed first by a freelance inventor. But the concept was refined during a long weekend by Slate and the rest of Playmates’ small research and development staff, who debated every attribute down to eye color and hair texture.
“The good toys are a collaboration,” Slate said.
Amazing Amy looks like a regular large doll but will interact with her owner, much as Playmates’ Nano line of virtual pets required feeding, grooming, play and an occasional spanking to thrive. “We got rid of the discipline feature with Amazing Amy,” Slate deadpanned.
Product drawings and models were produced by other freelancers, and after only eight months, the doll was introduced in July 1998. Amazing Amy was the industry’s best-selling large doll last year, Slate said. An even more sophisticated doll called Amazing Ally will debut this month.
“It’s tough sometimes managing the girls’ business because I was never a 5-year-old girl,” Slate said. “But it’s also good because I don’t bring any baggage. It doesn’t matter what I played with as a 5-year-old girl because I was never a 5-year-old girl.”
When Ellis sifts through 200 applications for 22 annual slots in FIT’s program, she said, she looks for students interested in producing responsible toys that recognize that “play is the essential joy of childhood.”
“Play is really about discovery, and it’s about seeing and touching,” Ellis said. “It’s not easy to design something that is really playable and fun.”
