Kids companies set out to tell their own toy stories
A trend is emerging for children’s companies outside the content space to launch production and entertainment arms, especially as broadcasters and streamers seek shows based on known IP and existing brands.
Victoria Lozano
Last year, retailer and art supplies giant Crayola made the move into entertainment and content production with the launch of Crayola Studios, a division aimed at producing shows for kids and families.
At the time, Crayola’s executive VP of marketing, Victoria Lozano, who is leading the new production arm, said the launch was “a logical next step” for the company, whose ethos is to inspire and nurture creativity in kids.
“We’re not just an art supplies company. It is true that’s how we’re most well-known, but our purpose is around nurturing the inherent creativity of kids,” Lozano told C21 when Crayola Studios was launched.
Eight months on, the company has built a slate of programmes for production including podcast adaptation The Alien Adventures of Finn Caspian with MIMO Studios and 9 Story Media Group, animated series Crayola Crew with Moonbug Entertainment and family competition show The Great Crayola Showdown (working title) with Marwar Junction.
Branching into the content sector affords children’s companies the opportunity to take advantage of a place where kids spend much of their time, Lozano says, enabling them to reach more kids with their brands.
“It’s a necessity for any business to think about the media ecosystem holistically and ask the question, ‘How many people can you reach here? And how effective is that?’ It behoves any brand to think about that in a holistic way. I can’t blame companies for looking at this [launching content arms] because it is a very robust and compelling way to connect with kids and families,” she says.
Crayola isn’t the only kids’ retail company to have expanded into the world of production and content. Seven years ago, soft toy retailer Build-A-Bear Workshop in the US partnered with LA-based agency Foundation Media Partners to do the same thing via a new division called Build-A-Bear Entertainment.
Crayola has made the move into content production
In the years since, Build-A-Bear Entertainment has produced projects including live-action feature film The Honey Girls and animated movie Glisten & the Merry Mission, both of which are inspired by Build-A-Bear’s toy lines of the same names. Earlier this year, the company announced it was producing animated series Kabu, based on Build-A-Bear characters, with animation company Laughing Dragon Studios.
“Build-A-Bear has been around for 25 years and was founded under the construct of being ‘retailtainment’ – entertainment at the physical level,” says Build-A-Bear CEO Sharon Price John.
“[These days] if you haven’t figured out how to create some sort of value with an engaging experience, not just a transactional experience, it’s hard to stay in business anymore, and certainly hard to flourish,” says Price John.
“We needed to think about how we could explore different ways to extend into more traditional types of entertainment. We recognised that the creation of one soft toy at a time over that many years equated to 200 million furry friends and we had this opportunity to pivot from a company that was a retailer to an entertainment IP company that just happened to have vertical retail as one of its revenue streams.
“We had already started creating our own intellectual property inside Build-A-Bear, so we had character arcs and story arcs that we had launched in the form of plush animals, sometimes with music videos and sometimes with little storybooks, and then we created our Honey Girls and Merry Mission films.”
Jennifer Dodge
In addition to its children’s content based on existing characters, Build-A-Bear Entertainment has also produced two movies for Hallmark Channel. While Hallmark Channel may seem like an odd partner for what is seen as a kids’ company, Price John explains that 40% of Build-A-Bear’s retail sales are to teenagers and adults. Additionally, Hallmark’s typical audience is mothers with young children who may already be connected to the Build-A-Bear brand.
Partnering with Hallmark Channel for holiday movies therefore allowed Build-A-Bear to put the brand “top of mind among the primary purchasers during the most important season of the year” for the company, the exec says.
“They’re not teddy bear movies. They’re movies about friendship, love and feeling good, because that’s at the essence of what the brand is about. There may be a teddy bear sprinkled here or there, but they’re not teddy bear movies.”
“Build-A-Bear is bigger than just teddy bears. It’s a memory; it’s a feeling; it’s part of pop culture. It’s about feeling good, but that doesn’t mean Build-A-Bear can’t do a drama,” adds Patrick Hughes, founder and CEO of Foundation Media Partners, who notes that the company might even look at unscripted content.
Like Crayola’s Lozano, Price John says it’s “nearly irrefutable” that companies “have to participate in some sort of content creation to be relevant today among a certain generation,” at least in the shortform space, if not longform.
In Canada, Spin Master was one of the pioneers of the expansion of retail and toy firms into content production. The toy company, which launched in 1994, formed Spin Master Entertainment in 2008 after the 2007 debut of its Bakugan toy line and accompanying animated series Bakugan Battle Brawlers.
Since then, Spin Master Entertainment has made a name for itself in the kids’ content production sector, most notably for hit preschool series Paw Patrol – one of the most successful children’s shows of the last decade.
“Spin Master Entertainment’s launch was really about taking control of our own destiny when it came to the entertainment space,” says president Jennifer Dodge. “At that time, we already had Bakugan in the market and it took several partners to make the series to go with the toy. The idea around that was inspired by shows like Pokémon, which had done that before.
“Mattel had already started doing it and we thought, ‘Why would we rely on someone else to make content? We could do it ourselves.’”
Spin Master Entertainment’s Unicorn Academy was launched on Netflix last year
Unlike Spin Master’s competitors, such as Mattel and Hasbro, which already had lots of existing IP on which to base series and films, Dodge explains that Spin Master, which was still a young company in comparison, didn’t have the same volume of IP to expand into content.
“So we had to take a different approach, which was a traditional entertainment studio approach, to work with creators and develop ideas from the ground up. But we wanted to choose ideas that ultimately had a ‘toyetic’ feel to them or felt commercial in some way and had a play pattern that we could expand upon. That’s really how Paw Patrol and most of our series have come to be,” she says.
While Spin Master Entertainment does occasionally base series on Spin Master’s existing toys and digital games, Dodge explains that most of its IP starts with a series before expanding into toys and games. The idea with all new shows is to create a 360º franchise around them.
Among Spin Master Entertainment’s latest series are Unicorn Academy, which launched on Netflix last year and has a toy line in the works for this fall, and Vida the Vet, which recently premiered on CBeebies in the UK, Treehouse in Canada and Netflix in the US.
Dodge expects the trend for kids’ companies to move into the content production and entertainment sector to continue, especially as broadcasters and platforms are increasingly focusing on shows based on known IP with existing fanbases.
“What’s clear right now is that most studios and broadcasters are looking for IP that is a known entity and has brand equity, and I think that’s spurring on companies that have those type of brands to think about moving into the entertainment space. I certainly think, for a company like Crayola, which is built on creativity, that’s a move that makes sense,” the exec says.
“Toy companies and cartoons have gone together for a very long time. And the success in the theatres last summer with the Paw Patrol, Barbie and Super Mario Brothers movies shows that known IP done in an amazing way, with great storytelling and high-quality production, wins at the box office. A lot of studios are looking for that kind of entertainment so it wouldn’t surprise me to see more of that fare over the next few years.”
So when does it make sense for a kids’ company to expand into content production? According to Dodge, the move works best for brands that are based on characters or storytelling, or that have a creative background.
The exec says: “It’s difficult to just take any type of property and turn it into entertainment. But with an imaginative storyteller behind you, maybe anything is possible.”
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