A Niche for Itself, Creatures
“Our toys interest the same kids who buy video games,” Steven Levine was saying, only the slightest bit defensively.
We were upstairs at the Westlake Village headquarters of Uncle Milton Industries Inc., a toy maker whose products -- Levine’s assessment of the overlapping market notwithstanding -- are as different from those of, say, Activision, as living things are from computer-generated monsters.
You won’t hear beeps and explosions coming from Uncle Milton toys, so much as skitterings and burblings. The company’s fame rests on the nearly 50-year success of Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm, and today much of its business comes from habitats designed not only for pet ants, but tadpoles, frogs and fish.
Science-and-nature toy makers like Uncle Milton, which was co-founded by and bears the name of Levine’s 91-year-old father, occupy a durable segment of the industry. The sector’s size is hard to gauge because most of the companies are private and don’t disclose revenue. But Levine says that at least in Uncle Milton’s case, sales have grown at a 20% pace in each of the last two years. Over its nearly 60-year life, the company has outlasted scores of toy fads, and the product line is still expanding.
“Next year will be our most aggressive year ever, with 12 new products,” says Levine, 52, an unassuming UCLA alumnus who joined the company in 1978 after his job as a health planner for a Los Angeles public agency fell victim to budget cuts.
In appropriately Darwinian fashion, Uncle Milton is careful about what it introduces into the marketplace.
“Our test in developing a new habitat is, can the creature do something?” explains Frank G. Adler, 41, the company’s marketing director. “Ants dig tunnels, tadpoles turn into frogs, triops hatch from eggs.” (The last of these are small freshwater crustaceans that the company sells as “Aquasaurs.”)
Next up are hermit crabs, which are known to periodically change shells. The company will launch its Hermit Crab Cove this spring, complete with decorating kits that kids can use to adorn shells as a way of enticing their crabs to trade up.
One way the company has survived -- and thrived -- is by branching further into the science and education market. Ant farms are not even Uncle Milton’s biggest sellers; that honor goes to its Star Theater, a home planetarium projector.
Although most of the company’s customers are parents and grandparents attracted by the educational flavor of animal habitats and space “exploratoriums,” Levine says the company’s overall target end-user market is boys ages 6 to 11. The real sweet spot is occupied by 8-year-olds -- kids just on the verge of moving up to the sort of video games whose chief lesson is which weapon is best for wasting platoons of marauding aliens.
The company grew up with the baby boom. Milton Levine sold furniture in Pittsburgh before going off to serve in George Patton’s World War II army. Returning home, he joined in 1946 with E. J. Cossman, his brother-in-law and a gifted pitchman, to sell mail-order novelties such as shrunken heads to hang on rear-view mirrors.
The partners developed the ant farm in 1956, after they had moved to Los Angeles. Cossman and Levine fashioned the first models out of converted plastic tissue dispensers and placed the now-familiar farm scene atop the layer of sand to provide a homey atmosphere.
The combination of low price and whimsical setting became a sort of company trademark. (The Aquasaur kit features a mock underwater volcano; the “Surf Frogs” habitat boasts a tiny floating surfboard as the pet amphibian’s perch.)
At $2.98, the Ant Farm was an instant hit. The line, which has sold more than 20 million units over the years, eventually expanded into six versions, including a “giant” model aimed at schoolrooms, kits of interlocking ant farm modules and the Xtreme Ant Farm, equipped with a tiny rock-climbing wall.
In 1965, Levine bought out Cossman, who launched a new career as a promoter of salesmanship guides, won renown as the inventor of the infomercial and died in 2002 at age 84.
Developing the market for live habitats presents obstacles that other toy makers don’t face.
“Every species is a challenge,” Adler says. Uncle Milton’s amphibian line, which includes two styles of frog terrarium, required a breakthrough in the mailing of live tadpoles; the key was an oxygenated tube of water that would reliably keep the creatures alive for several days of unsupervised travel.
Getting the critters to consumers, who typically return a coupon to Uncle Milton with a nominal handling fee to receive the animals, remains a delicate process. The company holds tadpoles for 60 of the 90 days of the metamorphosis cycle, for example, so that their new owners need to wait only a month to witness the transformation.
Another challenge is that, as parental buys, science-and-nature toys don’t lend themselves to the sort of TV commercial campaigns that blanket the children’s airwaves during the holiday season.
Right now, however, the company is experimenting with a product it thinks might be promotable on television. This is its “P-brains,” a quartet of whimsical figurines -- drill sergeant, infant, schoolmarm and skateboarder -- who spout wisecracks that undergo appropriate alterations when their plastic brains are swapped. (Each swappable part holds an inexpensive memory chip loaded with 18 suitable remarks.) Uncle Milton is also working with a Hollywood agency to develop a TV series featuring the characters.
Although the occasional marketable idea arrives from an outside inventor, most of Uncle Milton’s products are created internally by a small research and development team.
“People come in trying to sell us the ant farm again,” Adler says. “I tell them we’ve already thought of every possible iteration.”
Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.
