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.”

--John Leverenz

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