Designers' Star Turn
TAGIE Awards honor top toy inventors
By Cliff Annicelli -- Gifts and Dec, 1/1/2010 12:00:00 AM
There's been much talk recently about efforts to turn toy and game inventors into stars. This year's TAGIE Awards, the second go round for a program started by Mary Couzin's Chicago Toy & Game Group as an adjunct to its Toy & Game Inventor Expo, lived up to that aspiration. It was the glitziest TAGIE gala yet; if having the cream of the industry's design talent on hand wasn't enough wattage to light up Chicago's already starry Adler Planetarium, there were stars of the Hollywood variety to lend a hand, with presentations by John Ratzenburger, Daryl Hannah and Hilary Shepard, all of whom, it turns out, are inventors in their own right.
More than 200 attendees from around the globe saw the awarding of honors for excellence in toy and game design to Cepia's Russell Hornsby and independent inventor Peggy Brown, respectively, a lifetime achievement award to industry icon Reuben Klamer, a humanitarian award to Bruce Lund, Rising Star honors to Jack Degnan, Young Inventor kudos to Seth Calvin, and a posthumous honor to former James Industries matriarch Betty James.
"I think the TAGIE Awards are progressing extremely well," Couzin told Playthings following the November 20 event. "It is recognized now as a major industry event."
The 2010 edition is scheduled for Nov. 19.
Game Design
Peggy Brown, winner of this year's TAGIE award for Excellence in Game Design, is what happens when you let a creative child stay that way into adulthood. The daughter of two elementary school teachers, Brown was raised in an environment where hands-on learning and exploration were fully encouraged.
"There was no such thing as making mistakes or ruining a piece of paper; it was all trying and all for something," Brown says. "No one ever tried to instill a fear of exploring things. Most people get that squelched early, but I'm still like that: I pick things up, I take them apart, I investigate them, I feed them not necessarily the way they were intended to be fed."
She grew up to receive a degree in industrial design—the only girl in her college class to do so—and basically, "just fell into" game design when Western Publishing offered her a job in its game division. "It turned out to be something I seem to be pretty good at," Brown admits. "I like the marriage of the designing and the writing and the branding and the fun. To me, it's more interesting than designing a nice swoop on an engine shroud."
Today, her resume includes not only her time at Western, where she had a hand in games like Outburst and Girl Talk, but running her own company, Alley Oop, which she started at the tender age of 23 with just "$100 and a pack of markers" and went on to do game board and packaging design for many of the majors; a six-year stint at Patch Products, where she was vice president of creative; and her current gig as an independent thinker who has worked with the likes of Disney, Nickelodeon, Warner Bros. and McDonald's, among many others. She has also published a half-dozen children's craft and activity books through Random House and Accord Publishing, and is currently working on a novel.
"I write poetry. I do glass blowing. I paint. I'm a photographer. I'm working on a novel. There's really no separate me from my work—it's all mixed together," Brown says. "I don't look at it like 'work,' I just look at it as how I spend my time. I used to call work 'paid activities' because it was the same stuff I'd be doing whether it was my work or not...I'm pretty lucky that way. I get to turn my creativity loose every day."
Her success in the game business, Brown believes, comes from persistence—the kind you get when parents let kids follow a path to wherever it takes them—and from understanding the way the industry works, thanks to having been on both sides of the product development divide.
"I've been fortunate enough to have been able to work inside companies and then work outside—the perspective I've gained from that is enormous and has given me an opportunity to really understand how the toy industry works," Brown says. "If I'd only been on the outside my entire career I can't imagine how hard it would be to really understand why it takes so long to get a decision, or how fickle companies can be. But being on the inside, I've seen how fast things can get shot down and for what reasons—they're all reasons that make good business sense, but they're usually reasons that don't make sense to inventors."
Toy Design
"I think since Russell was a child he always knew that he wanted to make toys," says Natalie Hornsby, director of marketing and brand development for Cepia, the toy company founded by Russell Hornsby, this year's winner of the TAGIE award for Excellence in Toy Design and the man most responsible for bringing to market this year's must have holiday toy, Zhu Zhu Pets.
"Today, he has an incredible team surrounding him, but Russell really has an uncanny ability to really feel out when something is going to be a hit and is really good at maintaining that sort of understanding of what sparks the imagination of kids," she says.
Prior to Cepia and its stunning success, Russell's preceding toy business, St. Louis-based Trendmasters, was known for innovative versions of classic playthings like Storm brand water guns, War Planets action figures (which spawned a short lived spin-off TV series), C Watch animated, talking watches, and Rumble Robots, a line of programmable robot toys that sold more than 2 million units between its 2001 introduction and late 2002.
Hornsby says that things could have turned out much differently for Russell: "The sort of interesting back story that some people haven't heard is that Russell's father was actually a lawyer and wanted him to become one too, but he chose to create his own destiny and went into toys instead."
Right about now, it's safe to say there are millions of children who are glad Russell Hornsby chose the career that he did.
Rising Star
Jack Degnan, winner of this year's TAGIE Rising Star Inventor award, is a game guy, but wouldn't necessarily know it from his day job.
The longtime San Diego resident works full-time for an HIV clinic. It's not exactly an environment with much in the way of play opportunities. These days, though, board games and ideas for new ones are taking up more of Degnan's time. In the past two years he's had three games come to market—It Fits (The Haywire Group), Funny Business (Gamewright) and Word On The Street (Out of the Box Publishing). What they all have in common is that they're primarily word games, and that playing them is usually pretty funny. And day job or no, that's something you'd pick up on pretty quickly if you knew Jack.
When asked about his penchant for word play, Degnan says: "I like puns. I'd noticed that a lot of jokes are based on puns, and that there weren't that many games out there about them, which is probably why Funny Business is my personal favorite of all my games."
One of his games, Word On The Street, has been successful enough that for 2010 Out of the Box will release a junior version. And, recently, a few more contracts have come his way, enough that Degnan thinks he may have at least three more games in the marketplace by 2011. It's the kind of growth that's got him contemplating the idea of becoming a full-time game designer after all.
"I'd like to [create games] full time, but I'm one of those lucky people who actually likes his day job," Degnan says. "Even if I invented a game that really took off, and I could do this full time, I'd probably still volunteer with the clinic."
Young Inventor
Look out, toy business, there's a new dynasty in the works. The latest prince of playthings is Seth Calvin, the 12-year-old son of Razor USA president Carlton Calvin and the first TAGIE Young Inventor honoree.
The young Calvin is the mind behind the Razor RipRider 360, the award-winning, adrenaline-inducing twist on the venerable Big Wheel that, as its name implies, lets riders do complete three-sixties thanks to the caster wheels on its rear axle.
The inspiration for the ride-on toy—the one that Calvin's received his first patent for—went like this: "My dad had just brought home a Rip Stick. I saw the wheels and thought about combining it with another product, the Scream Machine." From there, the rest of the project "was easy," Calvin says. "I pretty much let [Razor] do all the work after I came up with the idea."
Currently, Calvin's got his eyes set on a career in veterinary medicine, but he's pretty confident inventing things is something he'll continue to do for as long as he can.
"I still want to keep on inventing things," he says. "I like to take things apart and try to mix them up and put them together. I like experimenting with stuff. I like blowing things up."
In fact, he's working on a few things right now, he says, but being wise to the wily ways of the toy world, knows enough to not divulge them prematurely.
In the short term, Calvin hopes his TAGIE award will help "to inspire other kids to try to create new stuff." Winning the Young Inventor award, he says, "was really fun. It was a great experience."
Lifetime Achievement
Like World War II veterans, there aren't many icons left from the toy business' golden age. Fortunately for us, Reuben Klamer is both. Sixty-odd years in marketing and product creation under his belt, Klamer, this year's recipient of the TAGIE Lifetime Achievement Award, is a font of toy industry history, insight and advice.
He's played a key role in the development of more than 200 products (including 46 board games)—and an even bigger role in the materials today's toymakers take for granted. Because of his many achievements, he was inducted into Hasbro's Inventors Hall of Fame and the Toy Industry Hall of Fame. Yet none of it may have happened had a Japanese kamikaze pilot been a little more accurate as Klamer's ship sailed through the Surigao Strait. Fortunately, for the toy business—and the several US seamen Klamer saved that day—it all worked out for the best.
Today, Klamer is best known for creating The Game of Life, the 50th anniversary of which Hasbro will celebrate this year; for the Spin-a-Hoop, the main competion to Wham-O's Hula Hoop; for developing snap-together model kits; for introducing the toy business to polyethylene, the so-called "unbreakable" plastic; and for 1-2-3 Roller Skates, the first with a no-reverse feature to stop kids from rolling backwards.
It's a career that got its start like many in the toy biz: unintentionally. Klamer says: "I hadn't any specific training for it. Before I got into the toy business I had a small advertising agency; we specialized in television commercials when television was new. I'd been invited to dinner at a friend's house and at the dinner was an executive with the Ideal Toy Corporation. He talked about toys all throughout the dinner—he couldn't stop talking about them! By the time the dinner was over I'd gotten very excited about toys, too."
Today, Klamer is glad to see that same excitement in the eyes of newcomers to the toy business. He offers this advice to fledgling inventors: "Number one, don't sell the farm. I've had occasions when inventors have come to me with stories about how they've sold their house to pay for an idea, or how their wife divorced them, yet they're still plugging away at a product. It's important to be persistent and stick with an idea, but with moderation."
He's still active in thinking up new products. As an independent inventor, he's "free to do what I want to do with new ideas. I don't have to deal with committees" And he's excited by the rise of new toymakers that are giving Mattel and Hasbro a run for their money. "It's encouraging to see."
Humanitarian
For some people, becoming a toy designer is the culmination of a lifelong dream. For Bruce Lund it was an act of desperation.
A college graduate in 1979 with a background in botany and zoology that impressed few in the world of industrial design to which he'd become a late aspirant, Lund found himself with more ideas than money. Knocking on the door of legendary toy design studio Marvin Glass & Associates looked at the time to be his last shot at any sort of career in creating new products.
"I'd never even known there was such a thing as a studio that designed toys. That was a new concept to me," Lund remembers. "But they liked my ideas, and at that company the ideas were the thing, not how well you could draw or the finished execution, so I cut my hair, which was probably way too long, took out my earring, which was the act of a desperate man, and got the job."
From there, Lund's history is more well-known: five years at Marvin Glass, followed by his own design firm, Lund and Company Invention, and a string of popular and innovative playthings ranging from Fireball Island, a 3-D board game that still has a cult following today, to Baby Sip & Slurp, which reappeared recently in Hasbro's Baby Alive line; Kidpower's ground-breaking Luminator light-up play balls; Estes' hydrogen powered toy rocket—possibly the first hydrogen fueled consumer product; and Fisher-Price's TMX Elmo and Vivid Imaginations' AniMagic plush.
Yet when it was time for an industry award, it wasn't given to Lund for his long list of accomplishments in product innovation. It was to honor the guy who once had "maybe $200 to his name," went on to hit it big in toy design, and has made it a practice of passing that good fortune forward.
"There are a lot of organizations we support, but the one we've worked with for over 20 years now is Big Brothers-Big Sisters of Chicago," Lund says. "We've been providing all the toys and games for their annual holiday program. We've been doing it long enough that we've seen many of these kids grow up. Some of them are 17 or 18 years old now but they've been sitting on my knee since they were 5 or 6, so that's been pretty satisfying. It's been a lot of fun."
Other organizations that have benefited from Lund's largesse include the Children Affected by AIDS Foundation, The Path Recovery Center for Women, Meals on Wheels, Unicef, Special Olympics, and the Southwest Indian Foundation, among too many others to list here.
"I'm still trying to understand it," Lund says of his TAGIE Humanitarian Award. "But I feel pretty gosh darn good about it, to be honest with you. It was such a shock, but it felt good."
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