TO REALITY How Toy Inventors Turn Their Ideas Into Real Products by MADELEINE BUCKLEY, assistant editor ALEX MACKEY WASN’T PLANNING ON starting a game company. Back in September 2017, he was volunteering for Hurricane Irma cleanup in Fort Myers, Florida, where he shared a tent with a man named Mike Szalajko. The two couldn’t sleep one night and began chatting about their shared interests: games and movies. By the early morning hours, they had invented their first game, What The Film?! Now, more than two years later, the duo founded a company called Lethal Chicken Games (LCG), earned a Toy of the Year award nomination, and developed a second card game, Camping with Sasquach. What The Film?! is also on shelves at Target, a goal Mackey achieved by cold-emailing an employee he found on LinkedIn. Mackey’s path isn’t exactly a typical one toy inventors take. But then again, there is no such thing as a “typical” path when it comes to toy inventing. There are endless possibilities for transforming a toy idea from a dream into a reality, but there are some common steps and opportunities for aspiring inventors. LET’S GET IT [KICK]STARTED Kickstarter, a site inventors can use to obtain crowdsourced funding for a project or product, first launched back in 2009. It is a popular starting point for toy inventors who use the site to get the funding they need to start production. While Kickstarter doesn’t have a specific “toys” category, the site’s self-published data lists games as the category with the highest dollar amount pledged — more than $1 billion in total. The category 28
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also has the highest number of campaigns that have raised more than $1 million. As their first step, Mackey and Szalajko put What The Film?! on Kickstarter and ran a campaign for about 35 days. Despite returning to Kickstarter for LCG’s second and upcoming third games, Mackey advises caution when using the platform: Remember to take shipping and other fees into consideration when setting goals, and make the product price high enough to cover costs. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to get eaten alive [on Kickstarter],” he says. “And that happened to us both times. Our numbers just weren’t quite high enough.” Matthew Damman, the co-creator of Walkie Chalk — a tool that kids and parents can use to draw with chalk while standing up — also launched his product on the site. He says the campaign went well, but it didn’t pick up as much traction as he’d hoped. He later learned this is because he limited his campaign to the U.S. due to toy testing regulations. “Kickstarter really didn’t like that,” he says. “They want global projects.” A major upside of using Kickstarter for Damman was the resulting media attention. “It did kind of give us a platform to get it out there,” he says. “People saw it, some media contacted us, it gave me something to reference.”
STAY SMALL OR GO BIG? After a successful or semi-successful start, toy inventors have to choose whether to become a new company or become part of an established toy company. Mackey and Szalajko chose the former, while Damman and his wife, Shauna, chose the latter. After finding a production company and getting Walkie Chalk placed in multiple retailers, the Dammans decided to lease Walkie Chalk to PlayMonster for three years, starting last February. When deciding between keeping, leasing, or selling your idea, Damman says the best path will vary based on what you want out of the experience. “I would say if somebody’s very curious about how to build the product, how to bring it to market themselves, and really want to learn and figure it out, you can do it,” he says. “If they’re more an idea person that’s like, ‘Hey, I have this idea, but I don’t have the time, energy, or