All monsters of Redakai

ANTON RABIE

Co-CEO, Spin Master Ltd.

We transformed our company in 2008 when we expanded beyond classic toys into TV shows starring our toys. Instead of coming to market with a great innovative toy, we had a great innovative toy plus entertainment content.

Our entertainment division’s first show was Bakugan Battle Brawlers. It featured our card game Bakugan, which has little capsules that look like marbles and pop open to transform into action figures and other characters. Bringing entertainment to this toy increased Bakugan sales by three or four times—to more than $1 billion over four years. That put us on the map globally as a company that really understands how to connect with kids through entertainment.

We recognized that expanding into entertainment would be a game-changer. But we also knew that we didn’t have the competencies internally to do this. So we found the best partners around the world, such as TMS Entertainment, the greatest animation company in Japan.

Become a growth star! Enter the

We followed up Bakugan with a TV show Redakai: Conquer the Kairu, which unfortunately wasn’t successful. We developed translucent trading cards, so when you stacked the Redakai cards over each other that created another figure. It was incredibly innovative. But children didn’t respond the way we wanted, and we lost a significant amount of money.

One of the things we learned from Redakai included where we should focus in our consumer research. When we were developing Redakai, we focused on things like, “Is this the right colour?” or “Is this the right function?” In hindsight, we should have focused on viability testing, in which you have children come in facing a menu of toys and see whether they choose your toy. That’s a more realistic test, because then you see which toys children play with relative to the competition.