Article by Tony Ellis. - Visit Tony’s website at www.conceptioneering.co.uk
This article follows on from part one, if you haven’t read this yet go back and read that first.
Our inventions take off
When royalties started to come through, I quickly realised that I couldn’t do everything in the business myself, and my wife (Judie) agreed to join me to undertake the day to day running of company (Conceptioneering), which then freed me up to concentrate 100% on what I do best which is the development of new ideas/concepts.
In the beginning we quickly realised that the seasonal nature of the toys we were developing was causing a great unbalance in our revenue stream through the year. Royalties are paid in four quarters, and we were finding that Quarter 1 (Q1) (January-March) was very poor, Q2 got a little better, with Q3 (pre Christmas) things picking up a bit more, and Q4 being fantastic because of the Christmas sales.
In an attempt to balance the royalty stream, we decided to develop spring/summer products, and we had great success in a number of items, such as TalkPro Tennis & TalkPro Football
What We Do
Our days are long – we generally start very early in the morning as the Far East are on line and we tend to work late into the evenings (usually till around 10pm) so that we can keep in touch with our clients in the US.
At Conceptioneering we strive to conceive/develop at least 50 concepts a year and, in a good 12 months, we have been lucky enough to get 10 or more licensed.
We have also developed a number of fun gift items, including one of my favourites ‘Bottle Buddy‘, a little butler that sits on your wine bottle and talks to you when you pour a drink. He actually gets drunker and drunker as the evening progresses. This was Judie’s idea, which was conceived whilst she was enjoying a couple of glasses of wine on a Friday evening and thought ‘if that bottle could talk, what would it say?’ – this is a great example of how a product is born from just an initial idea.
We have also been lucky enough to invent a number of Simpsons gift items and, being a huge fan of the show, this has been great fun.
Cube World
Cube World is our most successful item to date. It was launched in the UK in late 2005 and is enjoying huge success in the US and Japan, as well as many other markets – from Mexico to Australia.
Each Cube World contains a little man who has a role – such as a fireman, who can put out fires in the other cubes, or a clean freak, who cleans up after his messy neighbours.
Roll a cube around in your hand and the stick man will soon be knocking on the glass in annoyance, roll him over a bit more and he’ll be sick! Stick the cubes together and the little men can move across 16 cubes. Each cube also has a unique high score game.
Cube World Series 4 has just launched (making 16 cubes in all) and there is also Cube World ‘Places’ – a bigger cube in two versions, ‘Block Bash’ and ‘Global Getaway’, in which our stickmen can do things like attend concerts or go on holiday – these were introduced in late 2007.
Cube World has won the ‘Max-it Award’ for Best UK Toy Design and was also nominated for a ‘Toy of the Year Award’ (in the Electronic Entertainment Sector) in 2007.
Article by Tony Ellis. - Visit Tony’s website at www.conceptioneering.co.uk
Make sure you check back for part three which will be up in a couple of days.
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