Article by Tony Ellis. - Visit Tony’s website at www.conceptioneering.co.uk

To introduce myself, I have been a professional toy inventor now for around 8 years, and have so far licensed 43 toy, game and gift products. Some have become global brands like ‘Cube World’ (manufactured by Radica/Mattel) and which is currently on sale all over the World.

You can find out more about us via an interview we did for the BBC - Click here

Where and how did it all start?

Based in the UK, my background has always been in electronic engineering, having worked previously in avionics, security, car and truck alarms, biometrics and early GPS systems.

My hobby was robotics and, in the late 1990’s, I started developing a sophisticated robot that could almost think for itself. The robot became to be almost like a family pet – it had learning algorithms and was allowed free roaming around the house.

In early 2000, when a visitor saw it one day, he was insistent that I had to show it to a toy company he knew. I made the phone call and (unbelievably for this particular industry) got an appointment the very next day with a major UK toy company.

First Ever Pitch

This was my first ever ‘pitch’ in the toy industry, but fortunately the robot sold itself with it’s advanced abilities, and the company was hugely enthusiastic and there was talk of a £70,000 advance on going to deal.

I began mentally spending the advance money (thinking ‘what new car am I going to buy’, etc.) and even spent around £6000 on a licence agreement!

Unfortunately this turned out to be our first ‘baptism of fire’, when just two days before the contract was due to be signed, the toy company saw what they believed would be a serious competitor product at the New York Toy Fair and pulled the plug on the deal.

However, the company’s CEO, in consolation, insisted that I didn’t give up, as the toy industry needed this sort of technical flair, and now nearly 8 years later, that company has gone on to take 12 of our products under license.

Early Days

In the very early days starting out (where I had no royalty stream) the only way I could earn enough money to live by, was to take on toy contract development work.

I visited Taiwan & China to quickly learn how to program low cost soundcontrollers such as Winbond and Sonix (you can find these in any toy, game or gift product that has talking/sound effects).

Armed with this expertise, it then gave me a good revenue stream and I code released over 100 soundcontrollers in those early years before the royalties clicked in.

The further advantage of this is that, as I have all the development equipment and knowledge of how to use these chips, I could produce my own custom soundcontrollers for my ‘own’ concepts/inventions. If I had had to outsource this, then the cost would have been substantial. Also, with my background in high tech. design, I was in a niche position as there seemed to be a lack of high tech. designers in the toy sector at that time.

Article by Tony Ellis. - Visit Tony’s website at www.conceptioneering.co.uk

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