#242: How Wow Moments Became The Foundation Of This Toy Business with Richard North
Want to know how to ‘wow’ your way into the competitive toy industry?
In this episode of Making It In The Toy Industry, host Azhelle Wade looks into Richard North's life, sharing how he went from a determined 19-year-old to a multi-award-winning entrepreneur and the founder of Wow! Stuff. You will learn about his career’s turning points, such as being featured in Channel 4's Secret Millionaire TV Show, including the emotional inspirations behind the creation of Wow! Stuff and groundbreaking ideas that keep the company pushing forward.
Find out the importance of mentorship, early business ventures, and how innovation can stem from unexpected places like the novelty 'Butt Face' towel. Get ready to be inspired by Richard’s stories from personal heartbreaks to meeting scientists, forging a path toward tech-infused toys and revolutionary 'puppetronics.' Listen to this episode for expert insights and fascinating anecdotes that captivate and educate aspiring toy creators like you!
Listen For These Important Moments
01:17 Early Challenges in the Toy Industry
04:01 Building a Resilient Team
07:35 The Importance of Recruitment
09:40 Richard's Entrepreneurial Journey
21:20 The Psychology of Consumer Behavior
27:04 Why Richard Started Wow! Stuff
33:53 From Novelties to Toys
36:17 Innovating with Wow! Stuff
39:36 Collaborations and Future Plans
49:20 A Heartfelt Business Story
52:44 Childhood Toys and Final Thoughts
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This episode is brought to you by www.thetoycoach.com
Discover the magic of creativity and innovation at Wow! Stuff. Don't miss out on the fun—check it out today! -
[00:00:00] Hey there, toy people! Azhelle Wade here and welcome back to another episode of Making It In The Toy Industry. This is a weekly podcast brought to you by thetoycoach.com. Today's guest is Richard North. With zero qualifications,
[00:00:35] Richard's hunger to succeed was driven by family circumstances and a need to provide for his handicapped brother. After leaving school at 19, Richard began his entrepreneurial journey that saw him founding and exiting several companies and winning multiple business awards and appearance on Channel 4's Secret Millionaire TV Show followed as he launched Wow! Stuff and became a toypreneur.
[00:00:57] So today we're going to just dive into Richard's journey. Richard, welcome to the show.
[00:01:02] Richard North: Hello, Azhelle, and how are you?
[00:01:05] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: I'm doing fantastic. It's perfect that we actually got to meet again in person like a week or two before recording this.
[00:01:13] To kick things off, I'd love you to finish this sentence for me. The thing that surprised me most about the toy industry was...
[00:01:20] Richard North: That I hadn't realized how huge it is. And if I cast my mind back when we first entered it, I hadn't realized how aggressive it could be. And I found that out within the first 24 months.
[00:01:38] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Oh, what a story is in there. Okay. Tell me more about that. What happened in the first 24 months?
[00:01:45] Richard North: I suppose, the first part of what I said in that sentence was to do with the size of the market and how competitive it was, you know, thousands and thousands of companies competing for shelf space at retail. The second part of the sentence was If you launch a product, you know, we came into the toy industry, not having come from the toy industry before.
[00:02:07] So, we were a small business. Probably 10 of us when we started, maybe less, none of us apart from one, I think, had any experience in the industry. So we didn't know what to expect. And then when we launched our first toy, it got traction very quickly, and it seemed to irk some other companies who, I suppose for want of a better expression, thought they owned that space in the toy aisle.
[00:02:36] That's what I've not been expecting, I hadn't realized. But, you know, it's kind of in the past. We get on with most people. Now, you have to establish yourself over a long period of time and get to know everybody and get them to understand that you're not going to give up and go away. For us, we're in it forever.
[00:02:57] We're driven by creating those wow moments. I'm sure we'll talk more about that later, but we're very much as a team driven by the wow moments that kids and older kids, adults get when they play or see or interact with our toys rather than the money. And I suppose you could say that's probably a good thing in the toy industry because it's hard to make money.
[00:03:16] But yeah, we're driven by the toys themselves, by creating stuff that makes those kids go wild.
[00:03:21] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: You triggered something in me because when I first started The Toy Coach and my podcast, I experienced the same thing. I felt like people were like, who is this person trying to come in? And teach people that's what we do. And maybe you kind of answered it a little bit, you kind of established that you're not going anywhere and you're not meaning to, you know, take anything from anybody, but you're just here doing your thing, but how did you not just crawl into a hole and hide, because that's how I felt, because that's how I would, I felt and sometimes still feel when I feel like I'm rubbing people the wrong way. So how do you not feel that?
[00:04:01] Richard North: Well, I mean, it's going to come down to you as an individual, if it's you doing what you do so well yourself. So you're looking to only yourself to protect yourself. I think as a team, a problem shared is a problem halved. And I've always had businesses, you know, this is the longest serving and this is my forever business now. I'm not going to do anything else after toys. I want to stay in the industry. I want to stay with WOW. And I want to stay doing what I do. But when I entered my first industry, so as an entrepreneur with my own company, I'd had my five or six years grounding, working with a publicly listed company for six years and had some wonderful training and wonderful mentors and those that was walking into a business that was well established.
[00:04:51] So I haven't got this experience of being a newcomer to an industry. So when I set up my first company, I had the same experience. At first, people want to help you, they're very supportive, and you find that actually that's the majority of people, so that's the 80- 90%, that's great. Then get the 10%, 20% who feel you're in their territory. Because the companies I've had before have come from kind of nowhere, gone into an industry, I've done it with a team. I've done it with a team and so broad shoulders with these other people. And that problem halved because I share it, is so true. So you get together and you say, you know, look, it's only a small percentage of people that are trying to harm us or put us out of business.
[00:05:36] We can rise above that. Let's just do our thing. So you're constantly supporting each other to get through. I think very brave, if you're doing what you do, you know, coming into an area where there's already very established people, but there is only you.
[00:05:51] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: But there has been a theme in my, what I should do next of I should be doing more collaboration and hiring a team. So what you're kind of saying is supporting that. I love that statement of
[00:06:01] Richard North: A problem shared is a problem halved. Yeah, that's an old saying. But yeah, you've been there, whether it's with a partner, whether it's with friends. And some issue has come up and when your first feelings are, maybe being scared or wondering how you're going to get through this.
[00:06:19] And as soon as you start talking to others, you can kind of almost think it out loud, that helps you solve it. And other people come up with ideas or support, make you feel so much better. That teamwork. That's what I've been looking always for when I've been in business, it's a team thing, so might be a little bit out there on say LinkedIn. Or in the toy trade magazines, you know, certainly in the older days, talking about what we're up to next. It's more of other people now as our teams got bigger, but I still do it kind of on LinkedIn and you find support and you find the team that takes on the burden of lots of different areas within your business.
[00:07:04] You know, as an entrepreneur, you set up a business, you'd largely doing most of the stuff yourself, you grow the team, you're then delegating different areas and finding actually that there are many more people who are much better at individual things than you are.
[00:07:19] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Yes. Yeah. I'm still looking for them, but I believe they exist, and I will find them.
[00:07:25] Richard North: Yeah. Yeah, you will. And you know, that, that's the objective of any entrepreneur in building a business. It has to be, you know, looking for great people. had a friend in the toy industry some years ago, had a business. I always remember looking at his business as he went from one person setting up to five to 10 to 15 to 20 people.
[00:07:50] And then he would get back down to 10 people. His turnover would seem to drop. He'd have a few issues. He'd then start after two or three years, he'd start to build back up again. And when I looked at his business, I remember the stark, the thing that hit me most was his, how he recruited. He didn't have a lengthy recruitment process.
[00:08:12] He didn't take his time over it. He didn't employ recruitment specialists. I remember one occasion he was telling me where he met somebody in a bar and within a week he'd hired them as a sales person and they worked from the industry. Yeah. And I just thought, okay, that is the root of your problems.
[00:08:30] You're not recruiting the best possible people that, you know, are going to be brilliant at those tasks, you're just filling gaps, you're filling holes that you see in your business, but you're not understanding the incoming employee and whether they really are right for that role.
[00:08:47] So what I've done over the years is hopefully got much better at that and building a team. So that nowadays, you know, I don't spend as much time in the business. I probably do about three to four days in the business and I get involved in more specific areas
[00:09:07] And it's wonderful, you know, they lead on product development that the team does on product ideation.
[00:09:14] I, being a little bit ADHD, I look at sort of minute detail on things on product and packaging and stuff like that, which might sound weird. I know a lot of people won't know me for that, and then, you know, the guys do the rest. That's really how you build a probably a sustainable business that, you know, if you go on holiday,
[00:09:34] nothing's going to happen, it's going to be good and strong. You'll get there. Absolutely. You'll get there.
[00:09:40] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: and I have something in common where you've been an entrepreneur since a young age. You started a little later than me. You started at 19
[00:09:47] Richard North: Ah, okay.
[00:09:48] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:09:50] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: First business?
[00:09:51] Richard North: how old were you when you started?
[00:09:54] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Oh, I was like 10. I was hardcore.
[00:09:59] Richard North: need to hear that. I need to hear what that was at 10.
[00:10:02] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: My first official business, I had bought this Lisa Frank box of jewelry creation, like a jewelry making kit. And I brought it to school and I was selling jewelry to my classmates. they were so interested in this one piece that was just a plastic jump ring and they would all put it on their nose.
[00:10:18] And at first I had so many of them, I was selling it for like 10 cents. And then when I realized I had created a fad, everyone was wearing it. It was like what the cool kids did. I was like, a quarter. And then I hired my friends as employees. My friends were like making deals and then I was paying them.
[00:10:34] But a true fact of what still to this day is something I'm fighting with my money mindset is I will pay everyone else before I pay myself. And something, one of my mentors taught me, she's you're not building your business to take care of other people. You're building your business to take care of yourself.
[00:10:49] And I'm like...
[00:10:50] Richard North: Yeah, there's truth in both. I wonder, you know, because if you don't look after your team. you won't have a team and the team can look after the business, you know?
[00:10:59] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: That's very true.
[00:11:00] Richard North: You build a team to look after the business and so you are looking after the team and then you hope that they are inspired, motivated, and then will build you a great business. So I think there's a load of truth in what you, in, in your mentality and stick with that. I think there's some truth as well in understanding that at the end of the day. The business, if you're the main shareholder is there for the shareholders as well but I don't think one works without the other, you know, if it's very shareholder driven and it's just all about the shareholders and not about the people, you haven't got a very nice company I want people to come to work and love what they do.
[00:11:38] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Yes. And love who they work for and why they do what they do. But what did you start at 19?
[00:11:44] Richard North: I wouldn't say I was an entrepreneur at 19. So when I was at school, maybe when I was eight or nine, if I go back really young, I bumped into a friend in a bar two weeks ago, a lifelong friend. I hadn't seen him for two, three years, but we'll always be a friend forever. So we were kids growing up and he, out of the blue, reminded me of something that I haven't remembered from that day, eight, nine years old to now in my mid fifties, I had nobody ever reminded me of it. Nobody ever mentioned it.
[00:12:16] And this friend said to me, he's an Italian friend, although born in the UK, and he said, "Richard, do you remember when we were kids? You used to sell right back when you were like eight years old, nine years old." I said, "What do you mean Giuseppe, I can't, what are you talking about?"
[00:12:35] He said, "Don't you remember on the street, you know, I bring out, I would go to my nan's, get a load of stuff that she was going to throw away, all sorts of trinkets and different things, put it outside the house. With a sale sign, you know, selling it and then people will drum up business.
[00:12:52] And then you saw me doing this. So you went to your house and you got a load of stuff and you brought it to me and you then said to me, I want this much for this. I want this much for this. And I want this much for this. And you can have this much of the money that you get, and then they give it."
[00:13:09] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Wow. You were employing people,
[00:13:12] Richard North: yeah,
[00:13:12] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: You weren't just starting a business. You were like, I'm an employer.
[00:13:17] Richard North: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, and then that's the first time anybody's could have recalled that because it's probably really only me and him that knew that happened.
[00:13:25] And it was lovely to be reminded. I thought, "Wow, I hadn't recalled it." So probably a few things, bits and pieces happened, but nothing that I can say, yeah, I was an entrepreneur at 15. At 19, I left school with no qualifications. I hadn't realized I was dyslexic. And in those days it wasn't really something that they checked you for.
[00:13:46] Leaving school without any qualifications, but I enjoyed school and I got on well with the teachers and I think they couldn't really figure me out because I wasn't a disruptive kid. I just loved socialising and talking with the teachers and with other, you know, other pupils. I wasn't The kid that everybody loved or liked or anything.
[00:14:05] I was quite niche in my little friendship group as well. Anyway, I left school and the first job I walked into a manufacturing business with a friend of mine who was going there to go purchase a part for a catapult,
[00:14:22] you know, slingshot. I think you Americans might call it. He was into slingshots and while we were there, I asked the lady behind the counter, if they had any jobs, cause I was due to leave school in the next couple of months or so, and my mum had been pushing me. You need to go out and get a job. And, she took my details and called me a few days later and asked me a few things about my hobbies and background and different things like that.
[00:14:48] And this is going to sound a bit strange. I was a world champion shooter. So I was a target shooter.
[00:14:55] I shot, yeah, I shot target, shooting, rifles, and I was a world champion. And and she knew, maybe I'd have mentioned it as time was in there, but she dug a bit more and said, I think we've got a role for you.
[00:15:08] And this company manufactured crossbows, would you believe? They were the world's biggest crossbow manufacturer and they were based in my hometown. I knew nothing about crossbows. And what they wanted to do was take crossbows into the target shooting market and try and train me up to be a champion crossbow shooter, or that was the promise.
[00:15:33] Then what happened? I turned up for work . They put me in a sales office and they left me on my own. And I had no idea what to do. Yeah. And so this secretary realizing I'd been kind of abandoned. They've given me a kind of job on the lowest possible pay. But nobody grabbed hold of this concept, this idea to train me up or anything.
[00:15:53] And they just said, "Oh, this guy, I don't know what he's here for and just left me. Then the secretary came in and she said, do you know how to use a computer?" I didn't really, you know, so she, she showed me and I started processing orders. And then I thought to myself, maybe to make myself I was going to say, make myself more valuable, but what I would actually say is so that I didn't get fired.
[00:16:15] So that I could add value. So they think, okay, he's adding value. Let's not get rid of it. I got on the phone and started phoning up their customers. And actually doing proactive sales out. And I started getting orders in and the orders built and built. One thing led to another, I got one of the people I was selling to offered me a bigger role in a new company.
[00:16:37] That's how my career started. The next six years, from the age of 20 to 26, I worked for a publicly listed company and had fantastic mentors, met some most amazing sales people at the most, at the highest level in selling as part of this big group that I worked for. And they took me under their wing a little bit.
[00:16:58] And I ended up running a small company at 26 or 25 within this big group. They just gave me a chance and it worked and for two years, the business went from very small to quite substantial. and then they decided to sell everything off. They were good to me, to be fair, and they supported me as they fired me and made me redundant. Yeah.So that was my early career.
[00:17:25] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Wow. So that was like a job turned a little entrepreneurial. You know, I always am unsure if I like kids getting into an entrepreneurial space, very young and then young adults, because it's great to go through these hoops of making mistakes and learning different ways to work with people and hire people and changing paths.
[00:17:47] But what I guess I don't like is when kids get stuck in one toy company, like there's a brand I'm thinking of right now where the young girl launched this toy line, that's doing pretty well, but I feel like it gets them stuck there. It's like you're stuck in one business when what helped you become the millionaire you became, right? Is doing a bunch of different things, right?
[00:18:08] Richard North: It's so right. Now, why did that happen? I wonder. That's an interesting observation. I also, my heart bleeds when I see young kids going into work and doing exactly what you just described. They might come up with something good, but they get stuck in a rut because nobody nurtures them or mentors them.
[00:18:27] And so they stay there and it's so sad and they're not developed. Oh, that breaks my heart to think about that. And I suppose then, so why did it happen with me that I was given opportunities? I suppose when I was a sales rep to start with, when I first joined that new company and I had a great boss.
[00:18:49] Fabulous boss and he built a sales team over the next two or three years he mentored me personally. So I was young and naive and not trained at all. And he came from an FMCG corporate big business like Kellogg's. And so he took me through the processes and they built into their business, the processes for mentoring and training people up.
[00:19:12] So I got some really good grounding. And as we got a bigger company and different people came in I got to a point in selling where they wanted to promote me because I was the top sales person at 23, they wanted to promote me because they didn't want to lose me. So it was by chance this bit, so they promoted me to sales manager.
[00:19:32] I, at the time thought, "Oh, sales manager sounds great." Now I've got a sales manager. So I kind of knew what the role was managing a team and then maybe looking after one or two major accounts. But on the whole, sales management was about managing your team.
[00:19:49] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Yeah.
[00:19:49] Richard North: I hadn't really grasped that as much as I should have done. So when I dive in there, I'm now managing a team of eight sales people whose average age is 40.
[00:20:00] I'm 23.
[00:20:02] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Oh my gosh.
[00:20:03] Richard North: It didn't work out.
[00:20:04] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Really?
[00:20:05] Richard North: I mean, I walked into the sales meeting, my first sales meeting. And I remember one guy at the end of the table. His nickname was Shaq, David Shackleton.
[00:20:13] And he had his feet on the table. And he was making a point, who's this 23 year old upstart gonna try and be the boss of me at 40 years old, who's been there, done it all already.
[00:20:24] uh, it was testing, it was really difficult. And I didn't like the job. I did it for 12 months just over and then they let me do key accounts.
[00:20:37] So back to sales, but bigger customers, really some of the bigger customers. I thoroughly enjoyed that. And at the same time, 24 now probably, they gave me this small company to run. So it was probably actually 24 years old. I got hold of this. And over the next two years, I built it. I found what I really loved.
[00:20:58] I found through that opportunity, I started to buy a load of books because I've got no formal education. I bought a load of books on marketing, specifically advertising. And within that specifically why people buy things, I started to study what is it about a product, you know, features, benefits, the AIDA principle, all these different things.
[00:21:20] And then how they applied print advertising, which was prolific in those days, you know, how people put a product on a page and make itself, you know, the Ogilvy and Mather, famous advertising agency, read books by David Ogilvy and started buying. And I've got to this day, I've still got all those books.
[00:21:38] So I've got a library full of books that then moved more into the psychology of why people buy stuff.
[00:21:45] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: I remember Paco Underhill.
[00:21:47] Richard North: Yes, fantastic.
[00:21:49] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: was one of the ones that was the first why we buy a book that really struck me because I think it was a line where he said, when people pick something up on the shelf, I think the likelihood of them buying it goes to up like to 80 percent or something. Just so then for me, for years, I was like, how can I get someone to pick this up?
[00:22:04] What do I have to do to make them just touch it?
[00:22:09] Richard North: we did in the early days of Wow! Stuff using some of those principles, we had cameras installed in a retailer that no longer exists in the UK.
[00:22:21] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Huh.
[00:22:21] Richard North: And I got friendly with the CEO. It was a company called Debenhams. They were a billion pounds retail store group yeah, a department store group like a Macy's. And we had cameras installed in their gifting and toy department, and we had to get through their firewall. And it was a really complex process but the guy was convinced that what I wanted to do could be really innovative. So put these cameras dotted around and we had video screens of our products in action, and there were touch screens.
[00:22:54] So you could look at a product on a shelf, and if you wanted to know more about it, you would touch the button on the screen that related to the product. It would play a 32nd sizzle, a video, TVC. Then the cameras were observing the consumer's interaction with the screen. And then would they pick the product up?
[00:23:12] and what we learn was if they pick the product up and looked at it, if they picked it up with one hand. The chances of them actually purchasing it was, you couldn't, you know, it could have been zero. They held it in both hands. There was a feeling more of that. Yeah. There's a feeling more of ownership because you saw the propensity to purchase went up by 50%.
[00:23:34] Yeah. If they then held it down by their side, by their waist, by the buckle piece, that was another form of ownership. "I'm having this, this is mine." There's another step actually I missed. If they turn it over. And read more information about it. That actually was sometimes high risk. You would then, quite often, see them put the product back.
[00:23:56] It was as if they weren't convinced off the front of the box. So we studied all of this, and we had loads of data, and people used to call me, what was the, it was like a James Bond villain, because my office at the time had screens all around of this consumer observation stuff.
[00:24:16] We really made such a difference to the sales per square foot that Michael Sharp, he was the CEO, he came to see me with his executive team, and we were this startup company, we're only two years old as Wow! Stuff and he came up to our small offices in the midlands middle of the country and spent a whole afternoon with us.
[00:24:35] And at the end of it, he said, "I'd like you to run my whole gifting and toy. It's all yours, you stock it, you source, you do everything." So he would outsource it, the whole thing. It was wonderful and it was a privilege to have been asked, but there's no way we could have pulled that off.
[00:24:54] And I obviously had to turn that down. I knew we were miles out of our depth in going that far at that time in our business life. But yeah, so we've seen some interesting things happen, but I love the observation of why people buy stuff.
[00:25:07] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Yeah. there must be a study in the works or out now of why people buy like on TikTok. I mean, I know there's data that those sites have, but an external party literally having a video of people on their phone to see how that plays
[00:25:21] Richard North: Somebody somewhere will now take that idea and they're going to do it and then they're going to say, "Thanks, Azhelle. That's wonderful. Thanks for the idea. And I've now made my million on selling book about it.
[00:25:33] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Oh my, all right, maybe I'll cut this out. I'll cut this out it and I'll do it.
[00:25:38] Richard North: Nobody's going to hear this piece of the podcast. Yeah.
[00:25:42] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: That would be great. cause you know from data why people click on things, but you don't know. And I analyze this in myself when I'm online and I'm like, why did I buy that? What pushed me? There's actually a hair bonnet for black people that is now being marketed to white people.
[00:25:58] And they're literally having videos of black people telling white it's okay for you to wear a bonnet too. You can wear the bonnet. It's not just for us. And I bought it. And I'm like, I got this bonnet and I'm like, this bonnet is no better quality than the bonnets I already buy. But some reason it got me that video that it got me. I don't know why.
[00:26:20] Richard North: Yeah, and the psychology of it, trying to study that. You know, got cameras built into phones so we can look at the people and do probably eye tracking, you know, obviously, if was, you know, protection and stuff, but, you know, with people's authorization, there'll be groups that sign up to say, yeah, I'm happy for you to eye track me and so you can see where perhaps on the screen they're looking what they do next.
[00:26:44] You know, that kind of stuff, but they've got to do it in as an unbiased or an unprejudiced situation as possible. But as people forget that the camera's there and carry on scrolling and then purchasing and like that, you'd get some pretty good data.
[00:26:58] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Oh my gosh. All right. We got to move on. This is a great sidebar, but I do want to talk about your company. Why did you start Wow! Stuff? What inspired you to come into the world of toys?
[00:27:09] Richard North: I mean, as you alluded to at the very beginning, the reason I came to business was more because my brother was handicapped and he'd had a stroke. So this was my motivator for wanting to make enough money so I could look after him because I knew that at some point in the future he wouldn't be able to look after himself.
[00:27:29] My mum and dad wouldn't be able to look after him. He was three years older than me as well. So that was my big driver originally. And then he's very sadly passed away at 28. So he was a couple of years older, three years older than me. And that was just horrific. When I reached 28, three years later, a story hit me right between the eyes.
[00:27:52] It was a Christmas. And he had this toy for Christmas, he opened it up and it was a toy he wanted, it was a, an Airfix kit, in the UK, it's a British brand, it's got a lot of heritage, and it's a model kit, and you assemble an aeroplane with glue and bits and pieces and you assemble this most fantastic structure into a plane.
[00:28:12] So he had this and I remember looking on with absolute jealousy. That he'd got this most fantastic plan and my mum dad saw this, they saw my kind of, you know, my sad looking face and, downtrodden and not having something as grand, grandiose as he got.
[00:28:28] So they looked at me and they said, don't worry, when you're his age, you can have one of those Airfix kits. And as a kid. So this would be, I would probably be about 8 or 9 and he'd be 11 or so. And I remember thinking to myself immediately when they said that, I'll never be as old as my brother.
[00:28:46] Because he'll always be 3 years older. But the irony of it all, of course, the sad irony, the terrible irony, is that as I got older, and when he passed away, when I hit the age that he passed away, that story came to mind. And I thought, wow. I am now as old as my brother, but that he was my motivator and, you know, so that I could look after him then I got inspired by their entrepreneurs that I saw that, that first company I worked at, that the one where they put me in the office and left me to it, there was a fabulous entrepreneur that owned that company.
[00:29:16] And I remember him driving into work in his Bentley. He pulled to the side of the road. And he offered me a lift and I was this new boy working in the office. He knew that I worked there. He didn't know what I did, but he pulled over and it was a horrific, horrible snow slush on the ground, very cold winter's day, winter's morning.
[00:29:38] And I'd got off the bus on the way into work and I had to walk the final 400 yards into work through this slush. Anyway, I accepted the ride and got in and then I looked down at his really plush sheepskin carpets and saw all this black slush off my shoes and the bottoms of my trousers dripping onto this pure white lambswool carpet. And I thought, I've only worked here a few weeks and I'm going to get fired just because of that.
[00:30:06] You know, But, I was in awe of, you know, this entrepreneur that seemed to have it all and was so happy. And that was a big driver. I thought, okay, I want to touch that lifestyle. So that then kind of inspired me to want my own business in later in life.
[00:30:19] But toys, back to your question, toys, why did I get into toys? By luck, not by design. So I've always loved working with people. Who can create innovative things. So the different businesses I've been involved with, they've I've always built up a team that I think, yeah, you're really great at pushing boundaries and you are as well and so on.
[00:30:44] So I've dumped into a couple of guys. When I was on a a bit of a sabbatical, I'd sold a company and I was looking for something to do because I'll never ever stop working. I love business and I, you know, and then it would be toys forever. But in those days, I've sold a technology company actually.
[00:31:01] And I was looking for something to do and bumped into a couple of guys at a gift fair who'd created a bathroom towel. But it was a novelty bathroom towel and they were at this exhibition selling it and I walked up to them and it was an unusual, it was a very basic stand, they hadn't got a penny to rub together, they were in ripped jeans and t shirts before that was a fashionable thing, you know, so it was because they got no money.
[00:31:26] And they were both scientists, I got talking to them, I was gobsmacked and they were super clever guys, with PhDs. And I asked them what they were selling. And they showed me this towel and I said, how many of you sold? And they said, Oh, a couple of hundred, which I thought was fantastic at the show, because the show wasn't really made to sell stuff like that.
[00:31:46] You know, it wasn't designed for selling that type of product. And then I found out. They haven't sold that at the show, they'd actually sold none at the show. That was what they'd sold since they'd started their business a year ago, a year before.
[00:31:58] And so it was a disaster basically. And they were going to go, they were going to go bust. But I looked at this product and it was a comical novelty item. So on one half, of the towel, which was white. I'm going to grab it. I don't know whether people will be able to see this, but whether you're going to actually show this
[00:32:18] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: I can on YouTube. We will put it on YouTube.
[00:32:21] Richard North: So one half of the towel was white, one half of the towel was brown. On the white side of the towel, it had the word face on the brown side of the towel. It had the word ass and in the U S we called it the buck face tells it had the word butt there.
[00:32:40] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Yeah, I was gonna say butt.
[00:32:42] Richard North: Yeah. So it's the butt face of America. And this is, you know, 19 years ago, 18 years ago. And then we launched this product.
[00:32:49] I said, look, I love it. It's edgy. I love it. You know, they told me to buy, you know, there was sharing a flat together and one in the bathroom had one towel, so they came up with this ingenious idea to So that there was much more hygienic because they're both sharing a towel. So that was that. That's why they came up with the idea.
[00:33:05] We ended up selling millions of them.
[00:33:08] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Millions.
[00:33:09] Richard North: Yeah, five million. Yeah. So we sold them in America. We sold them in Europe. We sold them around the world. There was a film done on my co founder. An indie film that had a cameo part from Matthew McConaughey called Made in China. And it was about my business partners now that went off to China to set up this business and produce this towel.
[00:33:30] And then Matthew McConaughey comes into this film. But yeah, we launched it. They ended up decorating the Museum of Contemporary Art in Australia. One of the rooms there, a huge room, they decorated it. From floor to ceiling in these towns. It was on a chat show. It's been on
[00:33:47] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Wow.
[00:33:48] Richard North: TV series, comedy series. It's been everywhere. Yeah, simple thing. So we started doing more novelties and after three or four years. We migrated into toys, we met a couple of other toy people, real toy people, weirdly, scientists again, very clever guys, and we acquired their business, their small business, that was 2009, probably, then 2010, we launch this was, I think our second toy, our first toy, this is touch sensitive. I don't know whether I've got any batches in this.
[00:34:23] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: He's showing, it looks like a rubber ducky on a black pedestal and it will be on the YouTube channel, but wait, what does he do?
[00:34:30] Richard North: So it looks like, yeah, he looks like it. He's two yellow tennis balls stuck one on top of another with two dots for eyes and a dot for a nose, but it's full of some real clever tech stuff. So if you pat its head, it reacts. It'll bounce up and down depending on how many times you pat its head.
[00:34:46] If you pat it five times, it'll bounce up and down five times. It'll look left and right. It will swivel. On the podium that you can see below it. It'll react to music and sound. So if you played your favorite music, it will cock its head to one side. It will listen. It will pick up the beat and within five seconds, it will dance perfectly in time to
[00:35:08] the beat of that music.
[00:35:10] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Wow. So this was five years after you. Wow.
[00:35:15] Richard North: Yeah, about four, four, five years after we set the company up, that was our second product. The first product was a robotic monkey. We called 'Dave'.
[00:35:22] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Wait, what did it do? Was it on like a branch or something?
[00:35:25] Richard North: It was on your shoulder. You sat it on your shoulder. It was remote control. He had the remote control handset with the little buttons and you press the buttons and it would react. It would giggle. It would move it, wave its arms. It would speak. that was our first toy. We launched it with no market research.
[00:35:40] And we sold over 200, 000 pieces in the UK. And we thought we're not in the novelty gifts anymore. We're in the toy business. We That's how we started.
[00:35:50] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Was that called Wow! Stuff at the time?
[00:35:54] Richard North: Yes.
[00:35:55] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: It was.
[00:35:56] Richard North: It was called Wow! Stuff and it was selling novelty gifts and then that monkey, that capuchin monkey we launched it and that made us say, look, let's pivot. Look how much bigger the toy industry is than the gifts industry. How difficult can that pivot be and, you know, and I bet the toy industry is going to be really easy.
[00:36:13] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Walk in the park.
[00:36:15] Richard North: Yeah. How hard can it be?
[00:36:17] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: How do you foster the sense of innovation within your company? Before we started recording, I mentioned one of your product developers, Jim, and felt like when I met him before I knew he worked for Wow! Stuff, he had like a wow presence himself, you know, with his mohawk, I think it was lighting up at the time.
[00:36:35] So how do you foster that culture of 'wow' at Wow! Stuff?
[00:36:39] Richard North: Yeah. And you know, that goes back to what I think we were talking about earlier about hiring. It's first of all, understanding what you stand for and what you want to be. Between myself and my original two colleagues, we wanted to create products that were wow for the children. That that the kids would really interact with them and their first reaction should be 'wow'.
[00:37:02] Yeah. So that set us on a kind of a mission. We wanted those toys to be things that, you and I will still remember from our childhood, we wanted that to be the case. That 'wow' was so strong, that it imprinted indelibly in your mind, what that product was, what it did.
[00:37:19] So that when you're in your forties, your fifties, you remember it. So creating those toys that may be, you know, we're going through this now, aren't we? You know, the fastest growing part of the toy business is this sort of adult collector and kid all to some people call it section of the market and a lot is to do with nostalgia because they remember those toys that for them, they may have been almost inanimate, may not have been robotics or sort of interactive stuff, but they certainly for you at the time when you were a kid made you feel, 'Wow, I love this.'
[00:37:48] Yeah. 'This is amazing.' You know, it imprinted something indelibly in your brain that you carry forward into adulthood. And that's really what we wanted. And then from there, we look for people that were like minded. So when we met Jim, after three or four years he brought the idea of the monkey of Dave.
[00:38:06] Yeah. And then the next product, this was a scientist working at a Carnegie Mellon University. He had created a research robot, this I'm now referring to this, the yellow keep on robot, which looks like two tennis balls stuck one on top of another. So a giant version of that and he created this robot to study children with autism.
[00:38:28] We'd seen it online and we wanted to do a toy version. The people that then took that on was one of Jim's business partner, Mark, and one of his colleagues. So they set about recreating that as a toy. Then as we went into three, four years of the business, we spot an inventor item and the inventor couldn't get it to work properly.
[00:38:50] And now we've got these clever people in our own business. That loved 'wow', saw this product could be a 'wow'. And so they developed it further. And then I started just to find, because in the early days, it was really kind of my main role was recruitment. So I just started to look for other people like that in that mold that were good.
[00:39:09] You know, so you go with the basic values. They've got to be good, honest people, high integrity.
[00:39:14] A bit of a sense of humor. Generally, it's not compulsory, but it's a nice to have and something we wanted. And most of all, they've got to want to produce things that push the boundaries.
[00:39:24] And so over the years, we've built that team that creates these wonderful things where they all automatically kind of know what it is we're about, what we need to
[00:39:36] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Do you work with outside inventors regularly? And if so, how do they connect with you?
[00:39:43] Richard North: In that 15 or 16 years in toys, I think we've worked with four outside inventors ever. Yeah. And I think, or we all believe, we kind of know with these things, it's a timing thing as we've built the business, there will be the right time to work with inventors. That right time is coming. It's going to be in this next 12 months.
[00:40:07] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Okay. Hold on. Now we got to follow up for inventors listening. What is something inventors should keep in mind? When inventing for Wow! Stuff? Is there something that you would recommend like a mindset you would recommend them get into?
[00:40:22] Is there anything beyond just the 'wow', guidance you can give for what to invent for and present to Wow! Stuff?
[00:40:30] Richard North: We have looked at this. So over the years when we've considered inventors and then we've dabbled but then gone back to just doing things ourselves, you know, and said to people, "Thanks, but no, thanks. We're not ready. Typically, we would let them down, you know, if we try to open it up to inventor relations and stuff like that.
[00:40:48] So that's not what we do. That said, so going forward, we're going to be, you know, certainly in the next 12 months, what would that look like? I think it will be we're quite clear now as a business. In terms of finding our own space, we know we wear, we know we want to produce wear, but within that, what categories do we really want to, you know, work in, uh, play in as, you know, the cliche goes.
[00:41:11] And for us, we love tech and what tech can bring. We are always wanting to find, we believe that small companies are where the next big thing will come from.
[00:41:24] We know that you're going to need to collaborate with those inventors that are out there combined. I think there's going to be a beautiful mix, a real magical mix.
[00:41:33] Going forward, if we get our Inventor Relations team or get an Inventor Relations team writing this business combined, working with our internal team, I think that's where the magic will happen. Strategically, we'll look at four or five pillars. For example, you know, Stitch the Real FX Disney Stitch puppetronic, and it wasn't a puppetronic, we didn't call it a puppetronic before, but the term has just stuck.
[00:42:00] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: He has his stitch on the screen and it's just so cute. Love it. Huh.
[00:42:04] Richard North: So you've got your blinking eyes, moving ears, and sounds and touch sensors and so on. But it's a puppet with animatronics. And so the term puppetronic just stuck. And then the retailers now are saying to us, What else have you got coming in that puppetronics? So we, at that point, And I've seen this with other companies, they find their space and they find something magical.
[00:42:28] And you can build out a category or subcategory. And that's been correct for industry from day one, isn't it? From the hundreds of years ago, toys, you know, categories develop. And I think we found this subcategory, whether you want to call it a subcategory of youth electronics. So we would be saying to the inventors, okay, puppetronics, mixing puppets with animatronics.
[00:42:49] It's an area we've developed. It's, you know, we've created, we've got other stuff coming down the line. You're gonna see some amazing things. You know, we've got the sort of high price points. We've got mid price points, and now we're looking at low price points. So the mid price points and the high price points, it's all coming through all in 2025, 2026.
[00:43:09] Even some already now being designed for 2027. But the low price points is where there's some also big volume, and we do big volumes with these items but there's big volumes at the bottom end. So that would be part of a brief, perhaps.
[00:43:23] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: That's great.
[00:43:24] Richard North: And then there is other areas, other categories that we are looking at.
[00:43:28] So we've gone into collectibles, and a lot of the people in our team love collectibles, but we don't want to do the same as anybody else. You know, so we're always coming up with some very clever things internally. We love working with big brands. We love working with Disney, Universal, Warner Brothers, these emerging brands that have, you know, perhaps built, you know, through social media. We're really fascinated about working with those guys and what we've done over the years and that's something we don't talk about very often, but we have worked with some of the big toy companies. We've worked with Hasbro created a toy of the year for those guys. When Brian Goldner, God bless his soul, was CEO and chairman, we were building a fantastic relationship there. Very sadly passed away.
[00:44:18] And yeah, as I say, had a toy of the year. We did some fantastic things with Mattel wonderful to work with, fantastic people there. So behind the scenes, we've done stuff. But we're now wanting to do stuff under our own guys. Our biggest challenge is always going to be the US market because we know our products work in the US market, but we don't have boots on the ground.
[00:44:40] We don't have sales marketing. You know, we don't have that infrastructure over there.
[00:44:44] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Yet. Yet.
[00:44:46] Richard North: Yet. That's right. Yeah.
[00:44:50] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: We should definitely talk about the inventor relations management when you're ready, because obviously we have a huge, huge community of that to tap into. But then you're bringing up this topic of the toy industry is definitely entering an era of collaboration. We've seen Hasbro collaborate with a number of companies. We've seen them like license out some of their core brands to other companies. It seems like to create co create products, but also I feel there's all this collaboration and combination of categories. Like you did puppets and animatronics.
[00:45:24] We saw Ty did kind of like outdoor play plus plush with their bouncers. So, that's where I think the next wave of innovation is going to come in that combination of categories.
[00:45:34] Richard North: I was talking to somebody this morning, a friend of mine. I'm mentoring my son and daughter in a games business, something kind of close to your other half's life. My son and daughter, Gen Z, 25 and 26 years old. Very smart kids, lovely kids.
[00:45:54] And, I wanted them to be, to follow in dad's footsteps, be entrepreneurs, go out there and set up a business. So they've done exactly that. And they've gone into the adult party games type business because they know Gen Z, they know the kids at universities and what the games they play and all that type of stuff.
[00:46:11] And in turn, we've teamed up or they've teamed up with the world's biggest content creator group. So collective, so combined, they've got the biggest 240 million followers. So as a collective, so they're not as big as Mr. Beast as individuals, but as a collective.
[00:46:27] And they're called the Sidemen, and they're a most wonderful bunch of guys.
[00:46:32] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Yes. I saw this announcement. It's huge.
[00:46:35] Richard North: Yeah, yeah. And so just launching the first two games, but what I've learned talking to one of the guys there this morning, listening in on a conversation, actually, that my son and daughter were having with them. And the collab thing has been going on in their world for many years, and it's a kind of a standard everyday thing.
[00:46:57] You know, they will collaborate with brands. And those brands are usually emerging brands as well that are built by young entrepreneurs who get it and they collab with other social media groups. So for example, the Sidemen hold the world's biggest annual social media content creator event this year, March next year, it's going to be in Wembley.
[00:47:24] And it's a football match and it's going to be crazy. You'll get Mr. Beast and all these guys, they'll fly in from all over the world. They're the biggest social media content creators have come in and it's the most spectacular event. I'd honestly say as daft as this might sound at my age, it was the best event out of pop concerts and everything else I've ever been to in my life.
[00:47:46] I had the most enjoyable time, the most seeing these young people and seeing a world, I kind of almost didn't know existed and how big that world was. That was a year ago. And it's going to be bigger this year. It's going to be giant, but you know, they're collaborating with each other.
[00:48:04] One plus one equaling three. Is their view on life, you know, so although they're very successful as individuals together, they're stronger. And then as a group of seven guys, they're stronger than as individuals. And then on top of that, when they then mix with other content creator groups and do things together, they're stronger again, as they're bringing in the fans that they've got with the fans that the other guys have got, and they pull them together.
[00:48:29] There's a bit of overlap, but on the whole it's accredited, you know, keeps increasing. And that's what fascinates me about collabs now and, and where this is all going. So I totally agree with what you've just said in the build up to that, collabs are happening and it's going to happen more in our industry.
[00:48:46] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Finally, we can all stop butting heads and hiding our every secret. For our closing questions we actually have a question that was submitted by someone who I recently interviewed. It's a new thing we're doing on this podcast where we're having the interviewee leave a question for the next interviewee.
[00:49:03] So yes, the question that you were given by our previous
[00:49:07] Richard North: Oh, good question. in my whole
[00:49:11] career.
[00:49:12] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: in your career so far. Yes. Well, yeah, for you, it's a quite a career.
[00:49:15] Richard North: Ooh. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:49:18] okay. Okay. Okay. The most surprising was probably the most delightful thing that happened to me. And it's nice to be able to talk about this on this podcast, because the only other time I've spoken about it was on a TikTok I did a few weeks ago. And it happened to me 30 plus years ago. but I was setting up my first company and I got stabbed in the back by somebody else. So I was in a pretty bad place. Metaphorically stabbed in the back in business. Somebody tried to stop me starting my business. They had an inkling of what I was going to do.
[00:49:54] And they sort of put the knife in and bad mouth me to somebody, an American company. I flew out to see this American company, not knowing that they'd you know, given me a bad rep already. And I was in a boardroom. And there was about a dozen of these these executives from this quite big American business.
[00:50:13] And my pitch was to try and represent their business in the UK. So I wanted to take up distribution rights for the UK market. And I did my pitch. And I got the rights from them that followed shortly afterwards, which was fantastic. About three years in, my business was growing very strongly and I called up to speak to the CEO, the chairman and CEO and founder of that business to talk to him.
[00:50:42] I spoke to him about once every six months at that point. I dealt with all of his team, but I wanted to call him. And I spoke to his secretary, and she said, Richard, I've got some terrible news. Fred Cosper's name. Fred Cosper is dying. He's going to pass away in the next few days. But he wants to speak to you, and he's not accepting any other calls from anybody.
[00:51:06] But he wants to speak to you. And so first of all, I was shocked, upset and privileged, felt very privileged. He would want to speak to me. So the call was set up and he was literally on his deathbed. And I was in tears talking to him. And then he said, Richard, I want to tell you something that I don't think, you know, but when he came out to pitch to me, I'd had contact from your competitor and they badmouthed you.
[00:51:34] They said you're a terrible person and you were not to be trusted. And during your pitch, I actually mentioned it to you and you carried on talking and I mentioned it again. And probably with your nerves, yeah, probably with your nerves, you didn't hear what I said. And And I said Fred, that's amazing.
[00:51:57] I didn't, I don't recall it. And my goodness, man, I'd have probably wanted to dig a hole and bury myself if you, if I hadn't heard it. And he said, don't worry. He said, because. At that time, you're about halfway through the pitch, and even before I said it, I'd already made my mind up.
[00:52:13] I wanted to back you.
[00:52:15] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Oh,
[00:52:16] Richard North: I just couldn't stop crying and that was the most wonderful thing. He's from Tallahassee in Florida and that's how my first business started. So a long winded answer to a very short, but very good question that I hope but it's something that's very close to me.
[00:52:33] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Great everything. Wow. Now the next question is just going to ruin the vibe, but what toy, the closing question. What toy or game blew your mind as a kid?
[00:52:46] Richard North: Oh, so many great toys, so many great toys. I mean, the one that absolutely I indulged in, as we all did at that time of Star Wars, and the toys, the Kenner figures. I can remember Darth Vader, orange lightsaber, the little bit, the thinner bit at the end with, you know, I remember it bending easily and I remember that breaking off, I can picture as if it was yesterday.
[00:53:05] Collecting them all. It's an obvious easy one, isn't it? Star Wars. But there was another toy that probably nobody would remember. And this is a weird one, and it was called Thunder Rocket. Just come to me in this instant. Called Thunder rocket.
[00:53:19] I bet you won't find it. I reckon it was a British toy. It was a TV commercial. I was about eight years old, and it showed these kids in a park pushing down a tube on top of a tube to compress air. So you'd have this sort of almost telescopic tube and it had a rocket on the top of the tube, a plastic rocket. And inside the head of the rocket was a parachute.
[00:53:41] As you push down the tube, it compressed the air and it pushed the top of the rocket off the top and threw it skywards. And according to the advert. Over, I think, over a hundred feet and then it would, and then it would come back down with a parachute and it was called Thunder Rocket.
[00:54:00] there's the
[00:54:01] sizzle and the jingle,
[00:54:03] Thunder Rocket.
[00:54:04] And I fell in love with this product. It was coming up to Christmas. I asked my mum and dad for it. It was the toy I wanted most. Took it out in the garden as an eight year old kid and there was a skinny little thing. I didn't have the strength to push it down, and the rocket would just, it wouldn't even go, it wouldn't even go a foot off the top, and it would just fall on the floor, the most disappointing, heartbreaking, you know, as a kid, hey, you cry. You cry for a long time and that toy doesn't do what you hoped it would.
[00:54:36] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Oh my gosh. So sad. Did someone get it to work for you?
[00:54:40] Richard North: No.
[00:54:41] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: No.
[00:54:41] Richard North: It, you know, it would have been great, wouldn't it, if I'd have said, Oh, my dad then spent weeks playing with me and making sure he could do it. No, he couldn't get it to work. No. It was rubbish.
[00:54:53] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: the days before product reviews, right?
[00:54:56] Richard North: Yeah, and testing, and yeah. Did somebody forget to ask, will this work? Yeah, let alone will it work with an eight-year-old.
[00:55:04] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: Wow, Richard, thank you so much for this conversation. It was emotional. We had ups, we had downs, we had introspection, we had trend predictions. It was really fantastic. Thank you so much for your advice that you gave me and the other entrepreneurs and inventors listening to this podcast.
[00:55:21] Thank you.
[00:55:22] Richard North: Thank you for being such a wonderful host and indulging me in my career.
[00:55:28] Azhelle Wade | The Toy Coach: My pleasure. Now, if you love this podcast and you haven't already left a review, what are you waiting for? Your reviews keep me and amazing guests like Richard coming back week after week. So every time a new review comes in, I get a huge smile on my face and I forward it to my husband.
[00:55:43] So please send in those reviews wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave us a review. As always, thank you so much for spending this time with me today. I know your time is super valuable and that there are a ton of podcasts out there, so it truly means the world to me that you tune into this one. Until next week, I'll see you later, toy people.
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