Blog July 2009
|
Friday, 31 July 2009 06:44 |
|
Posted July 31, 2009
Yes, toy companies must find new ways to distribute their product, whether international, new retail outlets, direct, mall kiosks, or some other. Toy companies need to find new revenue streams, like Hasbro has Transformers and other movies, and the outlicensing of their brands in addition to toy sales, and Spinmaster has kids' furniture. Toys alone will not be enough. The Toy Industry needs to promote the impact and importance of toys in society. Make toys important, not just a luxury or a nice-to-have, but as essential as food and water in the nuturing of the child. Toy Companies and the industry as a whole need to learn how to deal with the next consumer safety crisis or other emergency in a way that makes them look like they truly regret their shortcomings. Toy Companies and the industry must act like responsible global corporate citizens in the way they clean up any future mess, and they will surely come along. The Tylenol poisoning scare of long ago is an example of how a company stood up and cleaned up the mess in a way that no one could fault them. Toy Companies need to innovate, invent, create and bring to market powerfully compelling product at a great value. We need to create toys people must have. Mechanical mysteries, as Fisher Price describes our TMX Elmo, electronic marvels that bewitch and entrance. And toy companies need to market these products in ways that the comsumer cannot ignore, again as Fisher Price marketed TMX Elmo only a few years ago. We need masterful marketing, not the mundane and humdrum, and we need incredible, wonderful products that kids and consumers cannot resist |
|
Thursday, 30 July 2009 08:21 |
|
Posted July 30, 2009
It is a scary retail landscape when the toy department of the 600 lb. gorilla retailer, Walmart by name, seems to be shrinking like an ice cube in the summer sun. Toy companies, in order to survive, are scrambling wildly to find new venues, new channels of distribution where their (and OUR) innovative, interesting, exciting, fun and even educational products may be sold. Auto parts, bookstores, hardware and home centers. No longer will the industry be so dependent on one retailer. If Walmart gets out of toys altogether, the toy industry shouldn’t even skip a beat. And at the current rate of shrinkage, Walmart will effectively be out of the toy business by this time next year. We should plan our business for this closest-to-worst case senario. If they don’t get out of toys altogether, Walmart will sell only the classics and the basics and the evergreens, as well as the most highly promoted new items each year. They will sell them at prices so low that no one else can make money on them. And the other retailers may well be driven out of toy retailing as a result. Walmart has way too much sway over the choice of toys that come to market and the over the health and future of the toy industry. What to do, what to do? |
|
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 08:05 |
|
Posted July 29, 2009
Good Grief!
Can it be true? Is Walmart cutting the toy department by 2/3? Whatever will become of the toy industry? Where will families, grandmothers, aunts and uncles, moms and dads, kids of all ages find toys and playthings? After the spate of safety issues and recalls, poorly managed at best by some of the companies involved, Walmart may have decided that selling groceries and diapers is safer and more profitable in the end. Earlier in the year at ToyCon, Walmart reported that they were cutting toy SKUs (stock keeping units) but ultimately selling more toys as a result. The rumored reduction was 30% of shelf space. Two months ago the rumored toy department reduction was 50%, and now I have heard from a smaller toy company that the number is up to 66% of the Walmart toy department. Target is reportedly reducing toy shelf space by 30% as well, and like Walmart, the reduction in shelf space might be even greater. To add insult to injury, or vice versa, Toys R Us is devoting less space to toys and more to bottled water and other non toy goods. |
|
Monday, 27 July 2009 06:33 |
|
Posted July 28, 2009
The toy business is an industry that operates at full tilt, a dead run, all the time. No other industry creates so many new products, embodying so much sophisticated mechanical and electronic technology, so rapidly and at such low cost and high value. Every year. It moves so fast that one Hasbro exec loved to say “a year in the toy industry is like 7 years in a dog's life.” When people say there is nothing new or interesting in the toy category, I don’t think they are looking very closely. The rate of innovation and the rate of new product introduction is astonishing. A good friend and CEO of a major Spanish toy company first helped me realize that no other industry can bring to market so fast, so many new products embodying so many new features and technologies, electronic, mechanical and otherwise, for such a great value for money, as the toy industry. If one were to take a close look at the toy industry, they might discover technologies never before used in a consumer product, like the electrolytic hydrogen generator in our Hydrogen Fuel Rocket, which has been on the market for years. Handheld games of the 70’s were among the first products to use microprocessors and synthesized speech. Take some toys apart and look at them closely and one will find elegant mechanical solutions that might be used by engineers designing machinery or even Mars-exploring roving robots, as a client suggested yesterday upon seeing TMX Elmo.
“Work makes life sweet.” “Laziness rots the bones.” |
|
Monday, 27 July 2009 06:19 |
|
Posted July 27, 2009
Work is a part of life. More for some than for others. My father-in-law John frequently said, “Work makes life sweet,” and I find that true for me, even if it’s not for everyone. From a classic Aesop fable, I always envision myself as the ant, and others I know are more like the grasshopper. A former classmate's life mantra is “Life’s too short for a full time job.” My work is one of the great joys in life. I often wish I had more time to work, more time to create, more time to invent. And like us all, I wish I had more time on the motorcycle, more time on the beach, more time traveling. So much to do. So little time. So many ideas to have, so many products to envision, so many prototypes to build, so many experiments to try, so many discoveries to make, so many people to meet, stories to hear, joys and sadnesses to experience, and leather to turn into to finished goods.
Gosh, I wish I had more time. |
|
Friday, 24 July 2009 06:05 |
|
Posted July 24, 2009
I still miss summer vacation. I can’t seem to adapt to the notion of having to work all year round. So I keep working, but thinking I am on summer vacation. Summer or not, I am determined to LIVE. Not just live, but while alive, to truly fully LIVE life . . . (Know what I mean, Vern?) to squeeze the juice from life 'til it runs down my chin. I visited my dear aunt Martha in Canada on way to my high school reunion recently. She is in her late 80’s, acutely aware of her own physical and mental deterioration and that she is nearing the end of her allotted days. We visited my uncle's grave, and later those of my parents. Somber moments, that put life in perspective. Life is to be lived - not just walked through, but savored; each flavor, the bitter and the sweet, the salty, meaty and the sour and all combinations. Each is a flavor of life. They are not all the same, just as each course of a meal is not a sweet dessert. And each flavor may be savored as a part of this meal put before us. On the subject of life and living it to its fullest, I just learned that the toy industry lost one of its great matriarchs Wednesday evening. Mrs. Lynn Pressman lived to be 97 and ran Pressman Toys for many years after the passing of her husband. She was honored at Toy Fair this year by the TIA and the toy industry as a whole. |
|
Tuesday, 21 July 2009 10:10 |
|
Posted July 21, 2009
I'm back from my high school reunion. I let the Vette breathe deep and stretch its legs out on the highway. It was a great success by all accounts, and it was a pleasure to have been a part of planning such an event that meant so much to so many.
Time passes, and we move inexorably though our allotted days, tick tock, tick tock. Not knowing about tomorrow, nor contemplating our inevitable conclusion. My hope is to live it fully, enjoy it immensely, and make a contribution that will enrich the lives of others.
I wrote about visualization some days back. When I was in the leather business long ago, first on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, NC, and later in San Antonio, TX, making and selling leather goods in cities across the entire great state of Texas, I dreamed, or imagined, or visualized my products being sold across the country and around the world. I didn’t know at the time what I was visualizing being available worldwide, but in fact the toys we invent, develop, and license are available in almost every country around the globe. Visualize the results you want, no matter how distant, no matter how far. Visualize your dreams, desires, and goals, and put out of mind all fears. I believe that my visualizing long ago has allowed me and my team to enrich the lives of others near and far. I know first hand from anecdotes that have been shared with me that TMX Elmo has stemmed tears and brought a smile to the face of a grief-stricken woman recently widowed and a special ed teacher who reported that one of her students who cries almost all the time laughed when playing with TMX Elmo. It was the first time she had seen that student laugh in three years. |
|
Thursday, 16 July 2009 07:20 |
|
Posted July 16, 2009
Simple truth: Everything men do is to impress women. With a degree in Botany and Zoology and as a lifelong naturalist, I view the world through the eyes of a biologist. My world view and understanding of human behavior, business, and all aspects of life is typically in terms of biological concepts. A business is an organism that must compete with like organisms as well as different in order to feed itself and survive. Each employee, associate, whatever the name used, is like the leg of a caterpillar and must work in concert to propel the business forward in the never-ending search for food, or revenues in this case. A friend once told me, “Everything men do is to impress women.” Male Birds court and sing, male insects display and blink their lights, gorillas beat their chests and battle rivals, all in the name of attracting the female of their species. We are just another creature in the greater scheme of things, not so unlike God’s other creatures who live only to reproduce and carry on the species. We are ruled by passions, instincts, not just intellect. One of the most powerful primitive instincts, second only to survival, is the need to mate and ultimately reproduce. While there are exceptions to every rule, they do not negate the rules to which they are exceptions. So yes, I do believe that men do everything they do, race cars, write books, go to work in their chosen field of endeavor, play sports, invent toys, create new technologies and write this blog, ultimately to impress women. No wonder women think men are such simple creatures. |
|
Wednesday, 15 July 2009 06:19 |
|
Posted July 15, 2009
In the jungles of the Yucatan, before the development began . . . The jungles of the Yucatan are hot, dry, scrub forest, full of bugs that bite, scorpions and snakes that bite, trees full of fire ants that will rain down on you if you chop one with your machete. No chainsaws here, strictly machete chopping, sweat dripping, bug swatting, dust and dirt in your eyes fun. I guess that is archaeology. Fortunately for me the 88th Mexican infantry showed up to put us under house arrest. Someone in Mexico City found out we were doing mapping near the Caribbean coast. This was a very sensitive area apparently, with gun running on those beaches, smugglers shot when caught - the jungle justice system at work. Mayans consider the Spanish to be invaders, and the man on the street can tell you to the year and month how long they have occupied their lands, and it is now 500+ years after the Spanish conquered the Mayans. They must still harbor some hope the Spanish will leave one day? Unfortunately, once under house arrest we were no longer allowed to go into the sweltering jungle to sweat buckets, chop scrub forest trees by machete with blistered hands, swat biting bugs, stinging bees, fire ants, posionous snakes, scorpions, oh my. We were confined to the Acumal compound, forced to lie in our hammocks under thatched roofs, on sugar sand beaches, looking out over the azure and turquoise waters of the Caribbean, witih little to do but walk the beaches or go snorkeling for hours on end, collecting creatures of the sea and shore, shells, chitons and more. Damn. Did I mention that Brent had said there would be girls on this expedition? He was right. |
|
Tuesday, 14 July 2009 06:15 |
|
Posted July 14, 2009
The summer after my freshman year in college I spent six weeks in the sweltering jungles of the Mayan Yucatan (well, almost, as we got deported before the summer's end). With the Fort Worth Museum of History, led by Senor Juan, we were tasked with excavating and mapping a small Mayan temple on the coast, not far from Tulum, in what had been a banana plantation and would soon become the birthplace of today’s Mayan Riviera. This place was Acumal, now a resort, but then a place of coconut trees and thatch huts with no walls in which we hung our hammocks under mosquito netting. When my friend Brent H., one of the scions of Ft. Worth society, asked me if I wanted to go with him on an archaeology expedition, I must have looked at him like he had three eyes. WTF? You must be kidding. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about archaeology. “There are going to be girls,” he said. I phoned up my Mom and asked if I could got to Mexico to study archaeology immediately. From Ft. Worth to the Yucatan we rode, slept, ate, monked around in some mutant type of sawed off school bus, for days and days, weeks maybe, through small town and large city. We rode through Monterrey, Villa Hermosa, Mexico City, Merida and countless others. It must be a million miles to the Yucatan from Ft. Worth, with not a four-lane road to be seen, back in the summer of 1970. |
|
Monday, 13 July 2009 06:20 |
|
Posted July 13, 2009
On summer memories - please indulge me, and feel free to recall your own. I am on a brief summer vacation from my regularly scheduled posts. Another memorable part of that summer I spent climbing the high steel towers of the switchyards was my Tuscarora Indian friend Bill, known for his lack of fear in the high steel structures, once saving a man who was knocked unconscious by a stray 222,000 volt arc of electricity that jumped up a paint drip. Bill climbed like a monkey with his tail on fire, ran at full tilt across a 25 foot long beam, only 4” wide and 60’ off the ground, (no safety nets or handholds here) pulled the man up and lifted him onto his shoulders, running back across the same beam, and climbing down to administer first aid. I couldn’t cross that same beam myself, even inching along at a snail’s pace, choosing instead to simply climb a much longer way around that offered hand and footholds. One misstep, and it would have been the end of my high steel painting career. Speaking of missteps, I have taken a lot of them in my life and survived to take a few more. I once wrote up a partnership agreement on the proverbial napkin. It turned out to be the key document, in fact the only document in a dispute later on. How dumb was that? I often tell people that I have made more mistakes in my life than they will ever have time to make in theirs. Much of what I know, I learned the indelible way, by error and its consequences. Dumb, careless, silly, stupid, and all the other types of mistakes and missteps, I have made them in spades. With friends, family, self, kids, business, etc, etc. Been there done that, seem to keep doing it. I hope to keep learning from my missteps. |
|
Friday, 10 July 2009 10:01 |
|
Posted July 10, 2009
I may love what I do every day, exploring, discovering, problem solving, inventing and deal making. But I still miss summer vacation, even the jobs that I had on summers during school seem like time off in retrospect. Who among us does not have sweet memories of summers past? Few sights surpass the magic of an open expanse of farm fields illuminated with a billion fireflies rising up like fairies in the darkness each July 4th weekend, like nature’s own fireworks display. I fondly remember working in the electrical switchyard of the Niagara hydroelectric plant, climbing the high steel towers, slipping and sliding, covered in paint as we cleaned and painted the towers, the goatheads, and the switches, amid high tension lines in the 110,000 volts, 220,000 volts, and 440,000 volt yards. We were carefully maneuvering tall ladders, recoiling from the big static sparks that jumped when you reached out to touch the steel, hot and sweaty in the protective rubber suits we wore, and each time a switch opened or closed a miniature arc of lighthing would snap and sizzle between the open switch bars, three or four feet long at times. |
|
Wednesday, 08 July 2009 14:43 |
|
Posted July 9, 2009
One day, while ventilating some solvent fumes out of the house, I was concerned about all the flies and dadgum mosquitos that might also get in the open doors. I was closing the garage door, and as it started down I was thinking, ”Perhaps I should leave the garage door open about 6 inches, to allow air movement and minimize the bugs." About 6 inches from the floor the automatic garage door stopped. Did it hit something? I looked and found nothing interfering with the door or the photo detector. I tried the controls again - nothing, dead. Whassup wit dat? After puzzling over this for a bit, I finally I got out a ladder and checked the garage-door-opener motor unit, only to find that the electric plug had loosened itself just enough from the ceiling outlet to stop 6 inches from the bottom, exactly as I had been visualizing. Hmmmm. That was curious. The plug had wiggled itself out of the outlet over the years of use, just enough to cut power to the unit at that precise moment I was thinking to stop the door at that precise spot. That is a trivial example of the power that visualization has to affect the world around us. Visualize what you want, put out of your mind what you fear. Visualize happiness, visualize success, visualize world peas. (Bad joke.) What you visualize will come to pass. Trust me on this. And if it doesn’t, then what have you lost, what has it cost, to visualize and imagine all that you seek, every dream you would have come true, and to avoid focusing on that which you do not wish to come to pass. Try it. You have nothing to lose, everything to gain, and I am a testament that I have seen it work in my life. |
|
Wednesday, 08 July 2009 06:05 |
|
Posted July 8, 2009
Ours was a great July 4th holiday celebration and a perfect summer weekend with all the trimmings: kids, lake, boat, swimming, rope swing over the swimming hole, cookout, good dog, pretty girls, etc. I hope yours was as well. I have had a number of cookouts in the past few weeks, manning the grill, feeding the family and friends, and friends of friends, and someone noted that I like to cook. I'm not sure about that, exactly. Some time back, an esteemed colleague and friend also once observed that I have the ‘gift of hospitality’. So, I have realized that for me it is a special joy to be instrumental in the happiness of others. I will call it Fungineering: the engineering of fun for family, friends and complete strangers, whether feast or play. We had a smashing graduation party a little over a year ago for my son and his graduating class of eight, with backyard tent, roast pig, magician, and a Michael Jackson (RIP) imitator. I loved having our backyard and house full of people eating, talking, playing, and having fun. Fungineering. For our 25th anniversary and the completion of construction of our new offices a year ago, we had a grand opening party to beat all grand opening parties. People in attendance will remember the event the rest of their lives. We had a magician with a live tiger, spotlights scanning the sky, fire eaters, stilt walkers, and a live scorpion doing magic tricks. Fungineering at its best. Wish you’d been there. It was a hell of a party. Hope you can make it to the next one. |
|
Thursday, 02 July 2009 08:46 |
|
Posted July 7, 2009
Did I mention in an earlier post about great friend Bill down in Hillsborough, NC? He was surely one of the strongest men on earth in his day (and without the benefit of steroids or weight training). He was a part-time farmer and in his younger days before we met he used a mule to plow his garden to supplement the family table. They were dirt poor. In fact they sometimes ate the rich red clay from the side of the road, a source of potassium. But that is another story. Well, that durn mule got into his garden just one too many times, and one day Bill spied him chewing happily on the garden vegetables and just snapped. He ran down the hill, hauled back his powerful right arm, punched that mule in the forehead, and dropped it to its knees, out cold. This was told to me by his kids who watched it happen when they were young. I wish I had been there to see it. But, back to the subject of positive visualization from my previous postings. Bill may have been positively visualizing that mule staying out of the garden, and that one blow between the eyes may have done just that. I continue to digress . . . sorry. |
|
Wednesday, 01 July 2009 14:44 |
|
Posted July 6, 2009
While working on my Masters thesis I needed to find work, as I was broke and not sure how I was going to survive. I interviewed at every industrial design studio in the Chicagoland area, with no luck. I was not so good an industrial designer. “Lund, you can’t draw a stick,” my favorite professor Jay Doblin (God rest his soul) might have said. I had moved to Chicago to study industrial design and become an inventor, but I end up broke, without the proper degree, with not even a clue as to where one might get a job as an inventor, and what happened? Whatever was I thinking? What kind of an incomplete, hare-brained plan for my life was that? Having exhausted all possibilities, someone suggested I try a toy invention studio and in sheer desperation I contacted them to get the interview, took out my earring and cut my long hair for the second interview, somehow got the job, and discovered within two weeks that this was exactly what I was looking for. The toy industry burns through new concepts so fast that they employ a cadre of inventors, and I had just become one. What other industry hires inventors and uses new inventions at such a prodigious clip? I don’t know of another. Jump and the net will appear. Visualize what you seek, and it will find you. I wanted to be an inventor and had no idea how or where to go, and instead it found me. Over thirty years later, I am still loving the process of innovation, invention, problem solving, and discovery each and every day. How lucky is that? So, I digress. Again. Where was I? Oh yes! Now about that solvent I mentioned earlier . . .
|
|
Wednesday, 01 July 2009 14:41 |
|
Posted July 3, 2009
That which we imagine and focus on will come to pass, good or bad. If we imagine success, we will experience success. If we imagine failure, we will experience failure. If we imagine happiness, we will experience happiness, and the opposite is true as well. Keep your mind’s eye trained on where you want to go, on the goals you want to achieve, and the mental state in which you want to exist. One day I was doing something in the house with a solvent and I wanted to air out the house so as not to have my kids be breathing it in. I was reminded that I was personally raised on solvent fumes from painting countless Estes model rockets in my room without any ventilation, and my lungs must be painted a rainbow of colors as a result. Even as a kid, I wanted to be an inventor, but somehow forgot about that as I pursued degrees in botany and zoology, a couple of my other loves. I rediscovered my passion for invention when I was in the leather business creating new designs and new ways of making things. To that end I plunged headfirst into pursuing a Masters degree in industrial design, as that seemed an avenue to becoming an inventor, never once stopping to think, “Where do inventors work?” "Is that a job description?" "Do companies even hire inventors?" |
|
Wednesday, 01 July 2009 14:28 |
|
Posted July 2, 2009
One of my favorite topics is the power of positive visualization. That which we imagine comes to pass, good or bad. Imagine what you fear, and it will come to pass. Imagine what you seek, and that too will come to you. You pick. Long ago I wanted a ‘rainbow’, multi-colored family. And that has come to pass. As a young man I wanted to adopt children, and so I have. When I started this business I imagined inventing tools and utilitarian product in addition to toys, and so we do. When you ride a motorcycle, where you are looking is where the bike will go. Life works that way, too. If you get distracted on the bike, wherever you are looking is where you will find the bike pointed. It is always best to keep your eyes, and therefore your bike, on the road. Your life is exactly the same. Get distracted from your goals, and what is important, and you drift off the road. Imagine what you seek, what you dream of and hope for, and it will come to pass as well. I cannot explain how this works, but work it does, and I have seen evidence of it time and again in my life over many decades, in small and large things. Please don’t misunderstand. I am not a new-age spiritualist, not big into free range chicken, vegetarianism or organic. I'm not given to believing in conspiracy theories or other damn-fool-nonsense. I am a meat-and-potatoes troglodyte at heart. I am speaking from personal observation. Imagine, dream, focus on what you want, and make it happen in your life. Put out of your mind fears or negative visualizations, as that too will happen just the same if you focus on it. Let me give you a couple more examples . . . |
|
Wednesday, 01 July 2009 06:50 |
|
Posted July 1, 2009
A team is like a family. Everyone on the team is a unique individual with their own goals, needs, agenda, ego, sensitivities and insecurities. Like a family, to create a positive environment for ourselves, we need to treat others with love, kindness, and courtesy. We do that so as to be treated that way in kind, yielding the greatest level of happiness for all and the greatest results from the team. We get what we put into it. Sorry, but it's true. Overused, trite? Maybe, but spot on. Give it your best, and you will get a lot of good back ‘atcha. Treat others with discourtesy, a lack of respect, and you yourself will suffer as a result. The way we behave comes back at us, and if we treat others badly we will not make ourselves happy, but create an unhappy environment in which we have continue to live or work. Trust me: been there, done that, got the bruises to show for it. So our behavior creates our environment. We are responsible for the environment in which we work because we are the creators of that environment. |
|
|
|
|
|
Bruce Lund, Founder
Lund and Company Invention, L.L.C.
Blog Archive
|
