How a Simple Plan Can Go So Wrong, and So Right.

Design > Product

I know I say this a lot, but making things is hard. There are lots of moving parts to get right, no matter what it is. If you’re a small business, you’re likely struggling to bring it in for a manufacturing cost you can afford, and with a retail price your customer can afford. Not to mention, I’ve had a lot of things come from the factory damaged (it happens) which is a double whammy because you have lost capital plus lost sales opportunity. Because of that, I’m always looking for a way to make things that would eliminate the likelihood of disaster, or to roll with it (like Mysterio did).

I decided on a plush project. It would be one form factor; two different sizes. It would have a flat front, a flat continuous side panel, and a flat back. It’d be made of canvas, filled with fluff and a layer of beans at the bottom so the doll would stand on its own. Easy, right? The fun part would be designing characters on this plush blank canvas. I’ve always been a big fan of art toys. Take Frank Kosik’s Labbit series or the Dunny characters, for example. So smart and simple, and endlessly fun. I’d call my art plush project, Stuf.

FINAL: This is the plush line I created called Stuf. Simple dolls with bean bases (so they stand on their own). Art toys that kids could use as playthings, puppets, or pals. Simple, clean, bright, and fun.

EARLY: I hit on the shape I wanted for all the Stuf dolls to share and here’s a little peek at some of the sketch work. I made paper models (complete with fill) to see if they had the physical presenceI wanted them to have. Yeah, I’m weird that way. I started off thinking I just wanted to make really graphic little characters, but it soon grew to all kinds o possibilities.

EARLY: OMFG. I designed the simplest thing ever so I’d avoid any production disasters. What I got was the exact opposite. Look, I’m good at specing out product for factories (US and overseas).. I was thorough with the instructions for what I wanted (lower right corner). But if it could go wrong it did. The shape, fabric, color, structure…UGH. With my detailed instructions I even included the paper doll shot from above. They assumed I wanted puffy faces sewn on. < sigh >

I didn’t have a lot of money to invest in Stuf. And this plush wasn’t even something that fit with everything else I was designing for Wrybaby. So it was a creative experiment, for sure. I had to begin by getting manufacturing costs, and then from there, work out what I could do. For example, I’d initially wanted to make every doll different. Just create a lot of fun art pieces that would live under a brand story. Once the costs came in, Kelly and I figured we’d be better off creating a handful of Stuf “families” instead. That way each family could be a story, and the likelihood of success was higher overall. Why? Because if I created, say, 20 of one-off Stuf characters, what if people LOVED three and they sold out? I’d be stuck with 17 slow sellers and no way of re-investing in the three that worked. Get it? If you group families, there’s an incentive for people to buy multiple pieces in a family they’re drawn to. I’ll come back to this later.

Anyhoo, it worked out that we’d make 4 Stuf families. Each made up of 4 small dolls and one big Stuf doll. You should see all the preliminary sketches I did (so many!). It was a blast, but I really wanted to make them all. The two deciding factors for the themes we went with were: current trends; and our instinct for what we knew would be attractive to Wrybaby’s wholesale clients. Pirate Stuf, Bird Stuf, and Robot Stuf were an easy leap for stores. We went with Developmental Stuf because it was a link to Wrybaby’s parenting wheelhouse. Think of it as a safety move. If the others didn’t work, at least there was a solid baby offering.

FINAL: A closer look at Pirate Stuf. I gave each pirate his (or her) own little character attributes for kids to build on. A parent once called me to say her son, who’s afraid of the water, found great comfort in his Shaggy Dan. Honestly, that alone made all the Stuf headaches worth it to me. Oh, and Pirate Sue really IS nothin’ but trouble! Hahaha

FINAL: Some Stuf dolls shared pattern on the back, but had extra credit on the side panels, like Circus and Robot Stuf. I especially like how the rosy=cheeked lion sits on a little performance pedestal.

FINAL: We pulled everything along with Stuf’s clean “European art toy” aesthetic through to it’s website and retail packaging. We made plaques for each Stuf family that made them look so special on retail shelving. And later we’d even build wood and canvas backdrops for each Stuf family.

FINAL: Yep! I made Stuf backpacks! The funnest part was the side water bottle pockets. The Owl’s pocket said SEEDS, and the Circus Elephant’s pocket said…wait for it…PEANUTS! Of course. :-)

We’d thought of every little thing except one. That the factory would fuck us. Oh boy, did they ever. We were working with a liason in the states who touted Gap experience and pull with a factory who was rich with Disney experience. As simple as this project was, it was a complete shock when the complete Stuf shipment arrived and only 25% of it could be sold. Yeah. While the samples they sent for approval were great, the final dolls were misprinted, sewn terribly, and…grimy. It looked like they ran the fabric over with a greasy forklift before sewing them. Not to ruin the story, but it’s important to expect the best and plan for the worst. No matter how much you try to avoid trouble, it’s inevitable in one way or another. 

But as they say, the show must go on. We had to really make sure our sellable 25% s-o-l-d. So we kept to our plan and did something you’d think we would have rethought considering the circumstances. I’ve written about how we built a snooty art brand for Stuf to live under. It was like a high-end art gallery that was only open by appointment and never answered the phone or returned calls. Hilarious and, as it turned out, hilariously effective. Stuf would soon be sold in major art museums across the country from SF MOMA to NY MOMA (you can see the complete list here).

Stuf sold through that first terrible shipment and we were able to find a new factory to make a disaster-free second round. Encouraged by Stuf’s success, we designed Stuf backpacks and we added hand-made wood and canvas backdrops for playtime with each Stuf family. OMG, the trade show booth that I designed for Stuf is still one of the best booths I’ve ever done. But that’s a whole other story.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

---

How to Break Into Modern Art Museums.

Strategy > Product Development

I’d designed and manufactured all kinds of products – baby clothing, children’s hooded towels, toys, stacking blocks, board books, even pacifier cases. OMG it was all so HARD. I had always wanted to make a line of plush (normal people call them stuffed animals), but was intimidated by the potential for it to go wrong. Hahaha. I’m such a chicken, but being gun-shy DID bring me success in our Mysterio line. So, I put that kind of thinking against the plush problem.

First of all, and if you know me you already know this, it couldn’t be like any plush. I didn’t want to make furry lions, or sweet teddy bears out of recycled sweaters. It had to be different. I was super intrigued by blind box art toys. Especially the artists who were sculpting one simple form, and then re-skinning that form in different ways. It seemed so simple and yet so endless what you could do within those confines. So I started noodling forms and experimenting with what could be done with them.

Where I ended up was certainly really different. Canvas forms filled with beans at the base so they stood on their own. Easy surface to print on, simple shape to sew. Manufacturing would be easy since I’d only be held to a printing minimum rather than a per piece construction minimum. I could make a lot of different dolls without a lot of expense. But it wasn’t “fluffy expected” and it wasn’t particularly “baby”. I didn’t think it mattered. I was going for something beyond expectation.

FINAL: This is Robot Stuf. Because we were funding this line ourselves we had to do it as economically as possible. Can you guess one of our methods? Right. Limited colors on each doll (notice the ON switch on the back isn’t green). But it made it a challenge. So what do you do when you’re limited on colors? Double down and make it work to distinguish each dolls individuality and character.

FINAL: All along It was always this simple. The form on the left was Big Stuf, 12” tall. On the right, Small Stuf, 6” tall. These were the blank factory samples we approved.

FINAL: While some Stuf families had the same patterns on the back of each doll (Robot Stuf all had ON and OFF buttons, Circus Stuf all had a shared graphic pattern), Pirate Stuf all had a bit about each pirate’s personality on the back. My favorite, I think, was the orange Shaggy Dan who was “only a little afraid of the water”.

FINAL: Circus Stuf was probably my favorite family and it was an honor to have them for sale at the Ringling (as in Ringling Brothers) Museum of Art Florida. Pictured with the Circus Stuf family is the Big Top-themed wood and canvas backdrop I later added to the line.

FINAL: Bird Stuf and Developmental Stuf.

I always tell my clients that they need to design their audience before they design their product. I knew I wanted this line to appeal to art-types, and that because of it’s plush category nature, they’d likely be parents. So why not make collectible art plush for children? And that’s when I started working on themes. I went EVERYWHERE and it was SO fun. I eventually landed on five different sets – Circus, Bird, Robot, Pirate, and Developmental. Developmental Stuf was interesting because developmental research shows that babies respond positively to high contrast items. It stimulates their brains like crazy (in a good way).

Side note: No matter how simple you try to make things, it always gets complicated. We had hired a freelance production manager who’d worked for the likes of the Gap and we found a factory who’d manufactured for Disney, yet 75% of our container shipment arrived practically destroyed. Badly sewn, misprinted, stained and unsellable. The 25% we could use was exactly to specification, thank goodness. Entrepreneurs, know this: no matter how much you try to prevent this situation, it’s ALWAYS a possibility. Which ALWAYS sucks. 

I’d always planned to market Stuf in a special way. Like, exclusive special. So I developed a line presentation that would set it up to be museum quality from the beginning. Even the name, Stuf, gave a simplistic European flavor without the fancy umlauts. Each line of Stuf would be a limited series, and a percentage of proceeds would be donated to a specific charity related to each theme. Bird Stuf, for example, would donate to the American Bird Conservatory. Developmental Stuf would contribute to Plan. The idea was for stores to display each line of Stuf alongside an engraved plaque we had made with the charity information. When a customer brought a Stuf doll to the register, the shopkeep would retrieve a fresh product from the back for purchase. It was special art you could buy. And this is an important part of the strategy – perceived value. We set this up to look like each piece (with its charitable contributions and lack of back stock) would retail for $40 each. No. Each of the small dolls retailed for just $12.95. The big ones for just $24.95.

FINAL: Our online retail packaging was clean, simple and graphic, like the brand.

FINAL: Developmental Stuf in NY MOMA.

Finally I get to the REAL strategy part. We didn’t cop to being the creators of Stuf. We were just the DISTRIBUTERS. We never told our stores or any interested parties where Stuf came from. And this is important to building mystique. We build a whole separate website for Stuf and only offered a single Stuf email as contact info. No order forms. No list of stores that we sold to. No wholesale reps to contact to buy it. Nothing. This all lived in the background before we launched at the big NY International Gift Fair.

When Wrybaby did bring it to market, we played dumb. We found this line and we’re the distributors. It was so different from anything else in the Wrybaby booth, it was totally plausible. And we gave it wide berth to attract stores we’d never been in before. Those store were museum stores. Modern art museums. And we got their attention. Before too long Stuf was available in:

MOMA NY
MOMA SF
Contemporary Arts Center - Cinncinati
Walker Art Center - Minneapolis
The Art Gallery of new South Wales
Arkansas Arts Center
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Delaware Art Museum
Portland Art Museum
Tacoma Art Museum
Dallas Museum of Art
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Ringling Museum of Art Florida
The Getty Museum
The Ackland Museum NC
The Autry Museum
The Bremam Museum
Bay Area Discovery Museum

FINAL: Once the concept proved itself, Stuf got to have it’s own booth at NYIGF. So clean! I wish I had a better camera to document it. :-P

But here’s the best part. Museums liked Stuf, but we pulled the whole third-party distributorship act through to the end. Emails to the Stuf website went unanswered, or a Stuf Staffer replied vaguely. There was no phone number to call. It was like those Stuf people weren’t really interested in selling their plush dolls at all. Stuf’s website was hilariously smug. It was set up like a modern art gallery site. It only listed the products, the museums they were in (which expanded by the week), the charities it funded, and the trade shows it would be presented at. I’ll tell you, I sat on the one museums PO for months until they were calling me every day to fill our their new vendor form and ship them. Why? Sometimes the more you make people want something and the more they have to work for it, the more valuable it becomes to them. It’s the law of exclusivity. Availability works the same way.

Stuf was successful enough to warrant an INCREDIBLE trade show booth dedicated to it. Very artsy. We added cool canvas backdrops to the product line so kids could put on plays using characters from each Stuf theme. Stuf went through another reorder with another factory (much better) and we retired the line to focus on other projects. But I’ve still have the bragging rights to having my art featured in most of America’s major art museums (even if it was in the gift shops).

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

---

How to Expand a Magical World.

Design > Product

I’ve said before that your packaging is as much the product as the product is. This is another example of how true that is. If you don’t know, Mysterio makes a baby t-shirt that can predict your child’s future. Kelly and I had just published a children’s picture book about Mysterio and we were looking to expand his product line. Mysterio was always more of a gift for parents than a gift for baby. Sure, the baby got a shirt. But the parents, the baby shower guests and the gift-giver, all got a fun, memorable experience. So why not develop more experiences for them

FINAL: BEHOLD! Mysterio’s Deluxe Keepsake Chest! An expansion of the Mysterio infant t-shirts that predict your baby’s future. It was so fun to play in this sandbox from a design and illustration standpoint. Almost too fun. In the end I made way too much stuff for it. Made it a little hard to explain all the contents!

That’s where Mysterio’s Keepsake Chest came from. It was a deluxe collection of Mysterio’s baby shirt, his book, two fun games, a wooden top, and a paper craft. Over the years, customer feedback told us that people really did keep Mysterio’s shirts once their baby’s grew out of them. How fun to see if the future would eventually come true! So one of the games we developed predicted more specific events – Milestones. At the bottom of the box lies the game board and a heavy card filled with milestones. Spin the top and name a milestone. When it stops, it will point to the age at which the child will reach that milestone. Write it down on the card. Easy! The fun part is discovering that your child’s first haircut will happen at 58 years of age. Yes, all silly, good fun at a baby shower. Flip the game board over, and you’ll find that Mysterio will answer any YES or NO questions you have. Again, ask the question, spin the top, get Mysterio’s answer.

FINAL: SEE?! TOO MUCH STUFF! The tag on the outside had a list of contents (as brief as I could make it), but it still read like a novella. The game board that’s flipping up? That’s two games on one board. Of course it comes with a one of Mysterio’s signature baby t-shirts and his new picture book.

FINAL: A close up look at the Ask-O-Meter! Think of it as a flat, paper, much sassier Magic 8-Ball. I’ve got one of these in our living room and we use it all the time to make YES or NO decisions for us. I like how a lot of the answers end up being sort of confusingly ambiguous/

FINAL: The flip side to the Ask-O-Meter is a fun way to record when your baby will meet their major development milestones. What’s so funny is how horribly wrong Mysterio’s predictions get. First Tooth could be at 51 years, for example. Hilarious.

FINAL: There’s even a little papercraft Mysterio that you can pop on a shelf to keep a mystical eye out for baby. I like the extra credit (which I always say is for chumps) of printing a back to the paper Mysterio complete with all the instructions reversed as well. And here’s a shot of me tying up a box to ship out. I’d do 100 of these at a go and it KILLED my fingers. The things you do for art.

I think my favorite part of the whole thing was the clever packaging. We stuffed the box with wood excelsior so it looked all wild and exotic. We even slid the lid closed to leave some of the curly fill sticking out because it looked so cool. And just like we did on his baby shirt packaging, we let the lid be pretty simple and straightforward. We used a paper tag to really detail all the info. But even the tag was cool because, as the gift-giver, you could clip off the contents part and be left with a nice gift tag to fill out. Then, the giftee could discover the contents on their own. Also, it looked WAY not-commercial that way, too. Oh, and to keep people from getting into the box in stores (I already learned they would try), I wrapped each one with heavy rope and fastened it tight with heavy black wire. It killed my hands (yes, I wrapped them all myself), but it was totally worth it.

When baby was too big for Mysterio things, the whole kit and kaboodle could be stored away in Mysterio’s handsome wooden chest. Someday, far in the future, the child would find it, and have a good chuckle.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

---

How to Turn Iffy QC into an Asset.

Strategy > Mysterio Predicts

Making things sucks. There. I said it. Kelly and I had been manufacturing goods for Wrybaby for years and whether it was done domestically or overseas, it always sucked. It’s just a lot of moving parts that can go wrong. And we weren’t even making complicated stuff! We had our share of screen printing problems in the US and we once had our inventory held for ransom in India WHILE WE WERE THERE VISITING THE FACTORY. Understandably, when it came time to think up a new product in 2005 we were feeling pretty sour. So we gave ourselves this challenge: Can we design a product that, if it arrived all messed up, would still be ok to sell, if not improved, by its defect?

FINAL: This is how consumers meet Mysterio for the first time. Curb appeal for days and all the result of outsmarting a quality control problem. I specified using rough-sawn wood for the crate box knowing it wouldn’t print very well on the front. That way I’d never be disappointed with how badly AND it sets the stage so well for the product.

That’s when Mysterio was born. Honestly. As exotic and fun and popular as Mysterio’s baby tees are, it’s totally one of those really disappointing “How I met my spouse” stories, like, “Oh, we were drunk in Vancouver and hooked up and got pregnant, so...”. Mysterio was a child of past failure. See, maybe you know this, but manufacturing overseas sucks for small orders. The sewing, for example, can be kinda janky even if it’s something the factory specializes in. Like onesies. You’ve got QC, but still some crap sewing sneaks through. Sometimes a lot. The printing is even more iffy: It’s off center, faded or too dark; or smudged because it’s done across town with someone your factory contracted with. Get it? Good luck getting anyone to take responsibility for anything when you see it come back all messed up. And again, that’s on stuff they all specialize in.

So given our challenge, we went rustic. We went old world. Exotic. Mystic. We started with the aesthetic. What could you make that, if it arrived messed up, looked like that was intentional to reflect being handmade, or primitive, or of exotic origins? And how would that product relate to a new baby (which Wrybaby specialized in)? 

At this point in our own parenting adventure, we were past the “how will we keep it alive” phase and entering the “what will it be someday” phase. So, I don’t know, it became sort of a no-brainer to make the connection. What if we created a garment that told the baby’s future? It could come in a printed bag that was sealed, so you didn’t know the future until your opened it? What if we built it up to make people think the futures would be amazing and then they weren’t? What if they were kind of hilariously odd? Like, how you can wonder sometimes how anyone grows up to find their passion as a Shrimp Boat Captain? Or a Romance Novelist?

FINAL: The current product packaging, front and back. We’d added the grommet to give our stores more display opportunities. You can see how the printing on the front is a bit off-center (a bit too far to the left). If it was on an envelope or a box, I’d be pissed. But because we used a sewn bag, you totally forgive it.

FINAL: Clip the bag open and VOILA! Your baby’s future. Boom.

It all unfolded from there. We didn’t even test it. We just went all in. We developed a wood crate display for stores with tons of curb appeal. It’s made by a US company who is AMAZING, but still, their shipper dropped our palette and half of the crates splintered, cracked or flat out broke. DIDN’T MATTER! In fact it made them better. They looked like they were just thrown off a boat from Cambodia.

The product itself is a little complicated to explain, being so unique. It makes a bit of heavy lifting for the little muslin packaging, but here it is: Mysterio predicts your child’s future on a t-shirt. There are 12 possible futures (which, btw, we change up every year) and each future is sealed in a muslin bag. Clip open the bag to reveal your baby’s future. 

In 2005 people weren’t very trusting that the futures wouldn’t be something stupid, dirty or terrible. So, we listed all 12 futures on the lid of the display crate so customers knew what they were in for. Eventually, we put the futures on the back of the bag (for reasons I mention in another article.) We succeeded in creating an amazing baby shower gift that was memorable because of great suspense and theater it created at parties. And talk about having a keepsake for that child to discover decades later when they really achieve their career goals! Creative moms-to-be have even used Mysterio Tees to let their husbands know they’re pregnant. Boutiques around the world found that Mysterio customers became steady customers, as Mysterio became the proven go-to baby gift. One boutique told us that Puff Daddy sent his personal chef (why the chef we’ll never know) to open all the Mysterio’s in the shop until he found Criminal Mastermind. He paid for everything he opened and left with his prize.

FINAL: Mysterio’s money-back guarantee along with some product extensions. His deluxe Keepsake Chest, his picture book, and even little freebie goodies like a papercraft Mysterio you can consult in times of indecision.

Over the years we’ve tinkered with Mysterio here and there. In the beginning all you had to do was pull the string to open it, but too many people just opened them in stores until they found one they liked. So now you have to cut it open. We added a silly guarantee the your future will be accurate by the time they’re 70 (and even still there’s a ton of impossible legal stipulations). We even released a limited keepsake box full of games, an inspirational book about Mysterio, his t-shirt and even a paper craft doll Mysterio doll to guard your child’s aura. Mysterio continues to delight, and I’ll be sure to update this post soon. He’s got some new, amazing products in the works as I write.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

---