Cheap Thrills
By Nancy Zwiers
In my first year in the toy industry—over 30 years ago(!)—I marveled to a friend: “Making a great toy is easy. Making a great toy at the right price is really hard. We literally count pennies!”
If you’re involved in product in the toy business, you are no stranger to cost reduction meetings. Getting cost-of-goods down to achieve a target gross margin at a strategic price point (e.g. $4.99, $7.99, $9.99, etc.) is half the game.
Working on Barbie and churning out dozens of advertised skus every year, we developed some solid conventional thinking on how to achieve what we called “cheap thrills.” Before I talk about these specific cheap thrills, however, I want to go on record with the following contention: Great design is one of the lowest cost ways to add value to your product—and especially with toys targeted primarily to girls. You only pay for great design once—it doesn’t show up in COGs so it adds nothing to this key metric. Bottom-line, never skimp on the quality of designers you work with—in product or packaging.
Beyond the “great designer” truism, we discovered some predictable ways to enhance product appeal without breaking the bank. Some are more applicable to girls and some are gender neutral. Here are a few:
Great design and cheap thrills are your friends in the quest for the right toy at the right price!
Nancy Zwiers, former senior executive at Mattel and Spin Master, now serves as a business advisor and executive coach through CMO Coaches.
Nancy writes a bi-weekly column for the Bloom Report covering topics related to play, professional success, and personal growth. Check out her other pithy thought-provoking columns of the past two years on her People of Play blog.
Follow Nancy on LinkedIn http://linkedin.com/in/nancy-zwiers-3167a or reach out to her at nzwiers@funosophy.com.
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