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Toys, Toycoons, and Toons
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18362 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1990 |
2,518 Words |
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Nina Mehta
Nina Mehta is a free-lance book reviewer and writer. She lives
in New York. |
TOYLAND
The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry
Sidney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus
Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990
39 pp., $19.95, hardcover
THE STORY OF AMERICAN TOYS
From the Puritans to the Present
Richard O'Brien
New York: Abbeville Press, 1990
252 pp., $49.95, illustrated, hardcover
Haply your eye shall light upon some toy
You have desire to purchase
---Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
“He who dies with the most toys wins.” This may be the battle cry of sparring children, despots, and an occasional financier, but not of the toy industry. Experienced hands in the toy world know that most new products in this $12 billion-a-year industry will not survive more than a season or two on the shelves of toy stores.
Yet incredibly enough, a new startup company recently provided the No. 1 hit toy two Christmas seasons in a row. In 1985, its first year of business, Worlds of Wonder (WOW) produced a talking bear named Teddy Ruxpin. WOW reaped $8 million in profits on sales of $93 million. Sales tripled in WOW's second year, led by the success of Lazer Tag, a game in which opponents shoot infrared beams of light at each other, a la Star Trek. The company generated $ 18 million in profits, but went on in the next three quarters to lose nearly $ 18 million in profits, but went on in the next three quarters to lose nearly $ 183 million on sales of $110 million. In December 1987, WOW declared bankruptcy. Such extreme volatility, while still rather unusual in the cyclical toy industry, no longer shocks veteran “toycoons.”
Toyland: The High-stakes Game of the Toy Industry, by Sydney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus, should be required reading for anyone currently employed in “toyland” or considering a career in the toy industry. For the rest of us, it is an astute, richly informative, and amply entertaining book. Securely grounded in thorough research, the authors of Toyland are at once shrewd, sensible, and humorous. The book's epigraph, an excerpt from the instructions of the
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