Life as a Toy Designer

(written years ago) I joined the toy industry around 1970 fresh from art school, albeit after six months unemployment and a previous degree in Maths and Physics. I was an Industrial Designer who’d failed to get ‘a proper job’ designing products for adults. In my case though it was a perfect match being high on inventiveness, and low on good taste. In fact in one interview the head of the prestigious design house fell asleep, overpowered by my abuse of yellow, purple and pink. So I started five glorious years in Matchbox Toy’s drawing office in Hackney. It was like having a minor part in ‘Only Fools and Horses’ with other cast members being Smole, Smello and Smutly and the Catford Cocker who was never fully forgiven for living south of the river but admired for his impressive tally of children. Back then it was all pencils, magic markers and drawing boards. Perhaps for the current crop of designers I should explain what a pencil is. It’s like dancing with a young size-zero model between your finger and thumb trailing lines of graceful physicality across white linen bed sheets. It’s glorious. They don’t crash, they auto-save continuously and aren’t protected by a frustrating oft-forgotten password.

There I slowly learned to be a designer, how to suggest to draughtsmen they need more than just a ruler and circle template and to listen to model makers because they deal with the physical reality, which is a very bendy place compared to the deceiving rigidity of a drawing. Also, when arguing over a costing with a project engineer one should first ask what the saving would be from taking a grommet out. Once you’ve established that this would be negligible then add the grommet for the same negligible amount.  I guess more importantly I learnt that work can be play and you still get paid for it!

I learnt that every department in the production process will suggest their failure was due to the ineptitude of the preceding department or the stupidity of later ones, and that the designer, which in industry was tantamount to being an openly gay ballet dancer, being the first in this chain of events is the font of all possible troubles. It is therefore paramount one foresees them before some unfortunate child manages to insert a miniature diecast forklift truck into a 13 amp socket. I learnt that being innovative is close to Buddhism, that by regarding the day-to-day obvious meaning of things as merely a distracting veil, one might see some deeper, more relevant reality beneath it; like looking for the really obvious in the apparently obvious, or a needle in a pin factory.

The general public have as much appreciation of manufacture as they do farming. They may purchase a Hitachi cordless drill from a shelf in B&Q but the process of it being created and arriving there may as well be due to the efforts of the Wizard of Oz. Being in manufacturing though gives a very different picture. Here there are pallets full of drills, drills being tested to destruction, drill being used to prop doors open and used as ash trays. There are moulding machines, material specialists, computer simulations, automated packaging machines, marketing experts and designers. Here again it’s down to Buddhism to absorb and absolve a thousands parochial worries whilst remaining true to the new idea. From this I learnt that marketing and sales are quaint souls. Their focus on what sold well gives them a historical perspective at odds with designers. Their view of the future is just a bit bigger, flashier or cheaper than the past. They are of course necessary but their imaginative view of next week only extends to, “couldn’t we make it 8 days?” and their grasp on technology is at best pre-school. (I enjoyed that)

Towards the end of my stint at Matchbox I invented a musical toy, probably the world’s first computer based keyboard, based on a then new Texas Instruments device called a microprocessor. Marketing’s response was enthusiastic but shrivelled like plumbs in ice when asked to commit to quantities. It was dropped and I was headhunted by a new company headed by an ex Texas Instruments guy planning to make the world’s first computer based keyboard. There’s a coincidence. That job lasted just long enough for us to buy a house in Northampton. Thus unemployed again and with a brand new mortgage to pay I called Corgi toys, also in Northampton, and they created a job for me, quite a change from six years earlier when I was lucky to get a rejection letter. In retrospect Corgi were lacking in direction at the time hoping to profit from far east manufacturing. Now the far east are very polite people and don’t have a word for no, so though it may be self satisfying to beat them down on price all you get in return is rubbish. So it was that we had a warehouse full of radio controlled cars that responded about as well as a baby in a temper tantrum. Though I didn’t know it at the time they were making losses and I didn’t do much to reverse that trend. I worked under Marcel Von Clemput a European used to driving on the right hand side of the road, a habit he didn’t lose after he moved to England. They produced the Dragon Computer, probably better than the similar BBC computer, but without the BBC clout it didn’t achieve sustainable sales. Retrenchment was necessary and I was offered redundancy or a job in Swansea. I have nothing against south Wales except I’m not a natural tenor or a lover of sheep. I also got offered jobs by Hornby and Wyman Associates, a toy invention company. With three jobs on offer I decided to go freelance. With the redundancy money and £2,000 from making fifty model National Express coaches to pay the bills for a few months we embarked on a diet of beans on toast. I often wonder about those coaches as the resin I built them from might well have melted in the strong sunshine of a shop window, but hay-ho that was thirty years ago and I haven’t heard anything. I began supplying Dennis Wyman, now my agent, with new toy ideas. I regularly got, “super” which I learnt meant OK and sometimes, “Super, super” which meant slightly better than OK. I think my maximum was three. I then showed him an idea that was met with, “Jesus!” which I took to mean we might even make some money out of this one. We showed it to Milton Bradley, a large American company, and got a tentative yes. They had a meeting in ten days time and would need a full working prototype. There followed ten days in which we achieved well over a month’s work. We got another yes. It was to be called Robotix. There then followed over a year of development that I was paid for on top of royalties. My diet oscillated between beans on toast at home and restaurant fair in London, Springfield Massachusetts and Nuremberg, culminating in my staying in Hitler’s suite in Nuremberg’s Grand Hotel from which he went to rallies and such like. I on the other hand walked the streets trying to figure out how to get a reduction of 1300 to 1 in a gearbox the size of a snuff tin. I succeeded, he didn’t. So much for world domination.

Being a construction toy each set needed pages of build instrutions that the States were doing by hand when it was a no-brainer to do them on computer. So I learnt CAD and CorelDraw and spent a year churning them out. I learnt that as a designer you need a product champion, in this case Roger Ford of MB, UK, to carry the belief forward against all odds. Without one you’re just a nice guy with ideas.

Robotix did well and provided a comfortable pension before it was dropped. After a due period of mourning Dennis set to work selling it again, this time to Learning Curve in Chicago run by a guy who, in negotiation, could steal your trousers without you noticing. He sent a limo to pick me up from the airport, usually a good move except that this one appeared to be an unwise purchase from Trotter Motors having seen better decades. I learnt that negotiating is best left to agents. By this time everything was done on computers, presentation graphics, draughting, model making and tool making.  Robotix made more money and was dropped again.

After brief career mistakes ferrying yachts from New England to Florida, which once involved being roped to the wheel for two days in a storm, and sheep farming in Australia Dennis has semi retired to Florida. I now spend my time doing psychotherapy training, dancing, gigging, mega DIY projects and motorcycle touring. As you can see if you never stop learning toy design equips you for just about anything. So if there’s anyone left stupid enough to offer you a job as a toy designer and you’re dumb enough to take on an ‘interesting’ ride then give it some consideration.Life as a Toy Designer