How I Built This with Guy Raz - Spin Master/PAW Patrol: Ronnen Harary

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

Ronnen Harary built a 4 billion dollar toy company without relying on market research or focus groups. Instead, he believed wholeheartedly in intuition: the "ah-hah" moment that comes from thinking like a 7-year old. Over a 25-year period, he and his Spin Master partners launched innumerable hit toys and amusements, including Air Hogs, Bakugan, and the smash hit franchise PAW Patrol. Spin Master's journey began in the mid-1990s, when Ronnen and his friend Anton Rabie began selling the Earth Buddy, a chia-pet-like novelty gift made of pantyhose, sawdust, and grass seed. Today, it's a publicly traded company with a portfolio that includes TV shows, video games, and toys ranging from puzzles to plush. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hey, really quick before we start the show, a lot of you have lots of questions about how I built this. Like, how do you pick guests or where do you record the show? Or how can I get in touch with Howard Schultz?

Spoiler alert on that one. We can't help you. But we can try and answer any questions you might have about the show, our work, or even me. If you'd like to submit a question, please visit gairaz.com and fill out the form. And we'll answer some of your questions right here on the show in the coming weeks. Again, that's g-u-I-R-A-Z.com. You'd basically been profitable every single year, and you've been growing every single year, and then all of a sudden you're not only unprofitable.

You're losing a lot of money. Were you worried about whether you guys would make it? I actually, personally myself, I rise in a crisis. That being said, I mean, the relationships definitely frayed. Even among the founders? Oh, yeah, yeah. Amongst the founders came out, some inefficiencies in business, the way we're organized. This is why older people have gray hair. You know, when people say they have gray hair from something.

Like, this was our seminal gray hair event. Yeah, and you have some gray hair. I have a lot of gray hair. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show of a innovator. entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, Harunen Harari started out making novelty gifts from panty hose and sawdust and spent 25 years building a toy company and launched the multi-billion-dollar children's franchise, Pop Patrol. Let me start out by saying, I love this episode, and I love it

not only because the toy category is a joyful one, but because this story, hits just about every single lesson you could possibly think of when it comes to building a business. Product market fit and failure. Intuition versus research. Patterns spotting. Solving a problem you have that others have. Smart bets and spectacular crashes. I could go on and on, but I don't need to because you'll hear it for yourself. So let me just mention how hard it is to build an enduring generational brand. It's really hard, especially when it comes to toys. There are just a handful, and you probably know them. Lego, Barbie, Hot Wheels, Monopoly, Mr. Potato Head, Etchishish, Super Soakers, and not many others. Kids are among the most fickle customers on earth. A hot toy

is likely to be hot for a very short period of time. Remember, pogs are cool. Bush balls are the Steve Urkel doll? Enough said. But here's the great insight that Ronen Harari and his co-founder as Spin Master had back in the late 1990s when they were just starting out. The specific toys kids like may change, but their patterns of play don't. Since the beginning of recorded history, kids around the world have played with balls, dolls, puzzles, and their imaginations. The key to figuring out what works. is to find something that fits into those play patterns. Since founding their upstart company in the mid-1990s, Renan and his co-founders, Anton Robbie, and Ben Verity were relying on their own intuition to figure out what makes a toy great. So they tried stuff, stuff they thought they'd want to play with as kids. And it meant that it would take them many, many years of trial and error

before they built a company that produced a truly intergeny, generational brand. If you were a kid or have known a kid over the past 20 years, then you know some of the iconic toys that these guys put out into the world. Bakugan, air hogs, flicks tricks, and most iconic of all, Paw Patrol. It's not an understatement to call Pop Patrol one of the most successful kids' brands in the past 20 years. And the remarkable thing about Paw Patrol is that Spinmaster built it very intense. Eventually, as a 360-degree brand from the beginning. First, as an animated cartoon, then as action figures, and now as a brand that is on everything from pajamas to lunchboxes to stuffed animals.

Renan Harari was born in South Africa, but his parents moved the family to Toronto when he was around five years old. His dad ran a carpet business in the city, and Renan grew up working at the shop. He remembers being an average student in part because of a learning disability. It's a learning disability called dysgraphia. So it's the inability for your hand to keep up with your writing. And then my handwriting is not very legible. And then I got to go back and I got to correct what I wrote. And then when you go back and you correct what you wrote, you know, you lose your stream of consciousness of what you're thinking.

And then you've got to stop. And then it's like rebooting. You have to reboot a bunch of times. So for me to write an essay would take me twice as long. Right. But the nice thing was, I actually, I call it learning gifts.

And the reason why I call it a learning gift is because your brain is wired slightly differently. And as a result of that, you get some extra benefits. My attention to visual detail is very high. Like when we were developing in toys or engineering, I could see little changes when we were debugging the toys and people would use rulers and I could just see it with my eyes. So I think that's the wonderful.

thing about having a learning gift. It's just the challenge is that the school systems are set up for the majority of people. It's not set up for individuals. And that's what makes it difficult. You know, it's interesting because you say you're an average student, but you went to the University of Western Ontario. And from what I gather, it's a pretty good university, right? It's not super easy to get into. Am I right about that? I think it's in the middle. It's in the middle. Okay. No, it's definitely a good school. Listen, I don't get me wrong. I mean, I worked hard, and my grades were decent, but I didn't get many A's. I can't remember any A's in my days.

It was mostly B's and some C's. Yeah. But I actually knew from a very young age that I wanted to go into business. Why did you know that? Well, I was average at sports, and academically I was average. So I figured that business was the right path for me. I saw it as something that had endless potential and not a lot of constraints. And I guess while you were in college, you actually launched a business, right?

It was with a friend of yours from childhood, a guy named Anton Robbie. And I think it was like a poster company. Tell me about it. Yeah, well, first after our first year of university, Anton and I actually sold fertilizer door-to-door because both of us had to pay for part of our education. Well, you worked for like a fertilizer company? Exactly. We worked for a fertilizer company. And then we started this poster business.

So the business was actually taking pictures of kids during Frosh week and then creating a collage of all the pictures. Frosh week is the first week for freshmen, presumably, right? Exactly, exactly. Okay. So we would take pictures of the kids during Frosh week. Okay. And then we cut all pictures out. We'd create a collage.

And then around the perimeter of the collage, we would sell advertising. And then we printed up 9,000 posters and then gave it to the students for free. Wow. That was a business. That was a business. That was a business, yeah. And then we ended up doing it in five universities across Ontario by the time we graduated. I think we grossed about $100,000. And then what happened when you graduated? Yeah, what actually happened was, so I graduated after three years. Anton was in a four-year program. And then just before Anton graduated, my mom was reading the Yiddiat Akronaut, which is the largest Israeli newspaper. And in there, there was an article about all these six different Israelis that were manufactured. manufacturing this product called the grasshead.

There was a small little potato head made out of grass seeds, nylon, sawdust, and had a little happy face on it, and you'd put it in water and grow grass for hair. So it's similar to like a chia pet. It's like a, I guess like a little ball. Imagine like a little like nylon, like panty hose, nylon ball, stuffed with sawdust or whatever and in seeds, grass seeds. And you would, like, drop water on it with a dropper and eventually would grow hair. No, you would, you would fully immerse it in water. Oh, you'd immerse it.

First the whole thing and then just let it sit. And because the sawdust held the water, the seeds were able to germinate. Got it. So she read about it. She translated the article for me. And in the article it said that there was all these six different people in Israel that were selling them. And that literally every person in Israel bought one.

And it was just like the biggest, the biggest craze in the country. And two weeks later, my late grandmother came to Canada for a visit. And she brought me and my sisters, one is a gift. And so I looked at it. like, no one's manufacturing and selling them here in Canada. Why don't we do it? And so I spoke to Anton and I was like, why don't we sell these Earth Buddies? We called it Earth Buddies.

And he looked at me, he thought that it was literally crazy. Yeah, I mean, it does sound crazy because why would you think that, I mean, the first thing is, why would your mom read that article and go, hey, I need to translate this article, like, out of all the articles, like, not the one on the peace process or, I don't know, some, like, I want to tell you guys about these grasshead things. something about that she thought was interesting. And I'm just trying to figure out why. Like, how did you see that and say, hey, this could be something? So my mom's credit, she's very entrepreneurial and she's very much a doer. Yeah. She's like, well, something's happening.

So I said to Anton, I was like, why don't we do it? And we literally went to Kmart and we bought panty hose and we bought sawdust and grass seeds and everything. We started prototyping the products. And we had a salarium in my house. and we were growing everything in the solarium. And they kind of look like nature's troll dolls a little bit. Yeah, that's a pretty good guy.

That's a fair description, right? Great description. All right, so you convince Anton to join you on this journey to make the Earthbuddy. And presumably you didn't need to license it, right? This was not like a patented technology. You were just making what was out there. Am I right? Yeah, that's correct.

You know, in the article, it said the original inventor or the product came from somewhere in Turkey, and no one really knew who it was. So you and Anton start to just stuff these little buddies, and this is 1994. And what was the plan? The plan was to make tons of them and then just sell them, I don't know, at a craft fair? Like, what would you, what was the next step? Yeah, basically, we said, let's make 5,000 pieces from Mother's Day and go from there. And that was the plan.

And so we got my sister and my brother-in-law involved. My sister designed the packaging. My brother-in-law, ex-brother-in-law, who's an incredible engineer, he designed the contraptions so we can manufacture these things at some sort of scale. What was a contraption, like a feed tube? Yeah, it was like a plumbing tube. You could take the nylons and wrap it around the tube, and then on the side there was a feeder where you can dump the seeds and the sawdust, and there was a way for you to tie it off.

It was actually really clever. We found in a small factory space, warehouse space. And did you finance this with the money that you had from your poster company? Pretty much. We started with $10,000. But before you started to, when you guys said, let's make $5,000 of these for Mother's Day, presumably you're thinking we're going to sell these. So where were you going to sell them? Well, we sold them on the street.

We set up tables at eight different corners all around Toronto. And we sold basically 800 out of the 5,000. And we came into the office Monday morning and we're like, okay, well, you've got to figure out some other distribution. And then we found a gift distributor who took on the product and started selling it to the gift channels. And then again, through my mom, she had a contact of a company that sold toys called Samco Sales and showed them the product. And I said to them, would you guys be interested in distributing the product for us? And they said, sure, no problem. And two weeks later, they called this with an order for 26,000 pieces.

From where? From Walmart, Canada. Amazing. Yeah. But now, you guys are renting a warehouse space to make these. And I guess at this point, you bring in your third founder, this guy, Ben Varadhi. Yep. And what did he know about manufacturing?

And, you know, was he an expert in, like, how to run a factory? He actually had no manufacturing experience. He came to our office and we literally made a deal within 45 minutes and then he went down and started running the factory. You know, Ben was, he's a smart guy. He went to business school and he just figured it out. But Ben would tell you that he wouldn't have gotten through the manufacturing if it wasn't for this gentleman by the name of Bob Wakelam. So Bob actually, when we started, the first place we actually went to look for people to work in the factory was we went to homeless shelter. It was just people that needed work, so that's where we went.

But there was two individuals. There was Bob and this other gentleman, Grenville, who ran shipping. Both of them were homeless. They were living in a homeless shelter. Correct. And so Bob walked into Ben's office one day and said, you know, Ben, like, I used to run a factory. Will you let me help you? And Ben said yes.

And literally within two days, he had all these, like, Gant charts up and this. And he started, like, balancing out the lines between the workers and the raw materials and all this type of stuff. So you get this order, this order for 26,000 Earth Buddies from Walmart, Canada, which is pretty great. And how did they do? They did great. They started selling like crazy. All right. So you would eventually get a massive order from Kmart, which would prove to be transformational.

How did you even get on their radar? You know, the universe works in funny ways. Anton was backpacking in Europe a couple summers before, and he met this guy. guy who came from a very well-connected family. And when we wanted to break into the United States, Anton called him. And he said, do you have any... He kept in touch with this guy. He kept in touch with them. Well, that's one of the things Anton does extremely well. He keeps in touch with everybody. And so he called him. He said, do you have any relationships at Kmart? And they said they did. So I don't know why, but I was the one that actually took the meeting. And so I drove down.

It was in Troy, Michigan. I pitched the buyer, do like a 30-minute pitch. I had a four full box of earth buddies, looks fun. And after 30 minutes, the buyer said to me, he goes, thank you very much for coming, but I'm not the buyer. And I'm like, and I'm like, this can't be true. I'm like, who are you? Why am I talking to you? Yeah, like, and then I'm like, okay, well, can you mind doing my favor? Can you find out who the buyer is? Because I drove all the way from Toronto. So he comes back with this name written on a piece of paper and said, Adrian Zax. So I said, thank you very much, and I took my box of Earth buddies, and I started walking around the office of Kmart looking for this buyer. She was sitting at her desk when I found her, and she said,

okay, I'll see you at 3.30. And then the guys that we came with, they're like, let's go for lunch, and I said, I'm not going to go anywhere because, like, maybe she'll call me early or something like that. Or maybe they won't let you back in the building. Or maybe they won't. Like, I just, yeah, that's true. So I waited there until 3.30. And the craziest thing is as I walked into her office, on the left-hand side of this counter, she had about eight other Earth buddies there. Eight other products that were pretty similar? Exactly the same under different names. Were these products from Israel?

No, no, no, no. They were other manufacturers. So you're thinking, I'm never going to make this. This is crazy. No. What went through my mind was we were going to charge $2.65 U.S. and I dropped the price to $165 in my mind right then and there. Because you knew that if you could get it,

if you could offer the most competitive price, then she wouldn't go with the others. I knew we could still make money, especially because the Canadian dollar was low at the time. I didn't want price to be a factor, and I figured she's got so many options here, so we better give her a compelling reason to go with us. And so I pitched her,

I showed her exactly what we were doing, and she gave me this big book, which was the vendor agreement. She said, okay, well, I'll give you an order for 48,000 pieces, and if it goes well,

I'll give you an order for half a million pieces. Wow. Yeah. All right, so she does 48,000 orders. Correct. For $1.65 a piece,

that's an almost $80,000 order, which is pretty great. You go back to Toronto. Were you guys able to scale up to 48,000 pieces quickly in your little facility in Toronto? We had to move again to another facility.

Every time we got more, more orders, we would move into bigger factory and built more machines and we just hired more workers. How did you finance that? Do you remember? Yeah, the product was selling very well. So we had money coming in from the other sales. And I mean, in our peak, we were producing 17,500 pieces a day.

And by the end of that year, I think EarthBuddy, your sales, from what I understand, hit $1.8 million. That's pretty great for a company that you started earlier that year. year. But at what point sort of did the three of you say, you know, we should focus on toys. Was it already in 1994 after EarthBuddy took off or not? Not quite yet. No, it was only in 95 when we started selling a product called Devil Sticks. Okay. That product did really well. And so it was after that, after the Devil Sticks. Okay. So Devil Sticks is your next product because, you know, as we know, the life cycle of novelty items can be short, right? And you probably saw that at that point.

You probably knew that you needed to go to the next thing. Because EarthBuddy wasn't going to – you couldn't build a sustainable company based on that product alone, I'm assuming. Yep, 100%. It was novelty. It was going to run its course and what else we were going to have. So the next thing that you come across are these things you call devil sticks. And they're like these batons. You can – it's like a baton and you can juggle this other baton in between them and do tricks.

And I remember this. This was like the mid-90s. I'm in college. And you had those kids who played hacky. sack and devil sticks. Am I right? Yeah. That's the demo, right?

Correct. Grateful Dead shows, exactly. So this was a product that existed. Tell me the story. You kind of renamed them devil sticks. How did you come across them? You know, I actually, I played with them when I was in high school. For some reason, in 94, we started noticing that a lot of kids in the schools were actually

playing with the devil sticks. So maybe there's a little bit of a trend going on. We had our factory. So we said, well, why don't we figure out how to mass produce the devil sticks and we'll sell them? So it was just based on this trend that we saw. And so we designed this packaging. And the same distributor that got us the sale at Walmart, Canada, they introduced us to their partner in the United States called UniWorld. And so suddenly we found ourselves a toy fair in 1995.

And toy fair was in New York? In New York, yes. And this is a convention where you'd go and you'd show your products. So let me understand what the devil. The devil sticks are these batons that you juggle. And there was no patent on them. Anybody can make them. You basically created a brand called devil sticks.

You gave it that name? No, devil sticks is the generic term. And so we called ours a spin master devil sticks. So that's the origin of the company name is from the devil sticks. At that toy fair, did you, who was doing the demo? Were you doing the demo? I did the demo myself. You did a demo.

So you know how to juggle the devil sticks. Yeah, I told you. I played with them in high school. So I did the demo. Okay. And as I understand it, pretty soon after that toy fair, you managed to get those devil sticks into like two of the biggest toy retailers in North America at the time. Toys R Us and KB Toys, which is huge.

I mean, there was one thing that was working in our favor, which was there was something in the zeitgeist at the time that made devil sticks appealing to young kids. It was like seven-year-olds, eight-year-olds, nine-year-olds, 10-year-olds. It was like analogous to like the yo-yo. So we did the marketing, but I think the marketing helped, but there was something in the zeitgeist that actually made the product pull. There's a documentary that Spin Master made, I think, on the anniversary of 20 years, and I watched it.

And at that time, you said, we weren't sleeping a lot. We were definitely stepping on each other's toes, and there were a lot of disagreements in fighting, which I think is very normal when you've got three, strong partners in a company. Were you stressed out about the disagreements between the three of you at the time? I don't know if it was stressed out, but I think that we would just fight. About like strategy, about product, about who to work with, about where to spend money, all those things. I think it was everything. But the one nice thing is that through the fighting, and it wasn't

like when I say fighting, it wasn't like you're angry at the person. It was just advocating for your opinion. But, you know, we were young guys and very excited. Everybody really wanted to win and everybody wanted the success. So maybe we were a little eager. Was it, I mean, and this is a question that's come up in a lot of episodes of the show with co-founders, which is everybody has a different perspective. How did you resolve disputes? We've always shot for unanimous consent. And we would keep on. debating until we actually got the consent. And then there was one other thing which was if we stepped over the line, everybody was able to say sorry, which I think is a huge, which is a huge thing.

Sometimes if you didn't say sorry, you asked for the sorry and you always got the sorry. It's actually my favorite word in Canadian. Yeah, that's a great Canadian word. At that time, right, okay, so you've got two hits now under your belt. You've got Earth Buddy, devil sticks, You know, you're probably doing four or five million dollars in revenue by year two. How big were your ambitions? Were the three of you already in year two of your business saying, we're going to be a huge toy company? Was that the ambition or was it just like, let's just get this thing, sell this, and we'll figure out the next thing? It was, let's just keep on going.

Let's find some other products to sell. We did make a couple of strategic, like, macro decisions, which were we didn't want to, after EarthBuddies and Devil Sticks, which were both, you know, call it public domain products. We said we want to design and develop our own products and we want to sell them globally around the world and we don't want to just be a Canadian distributor. And then we said, we're open to ideas wherever they come from and let's go search for these ideas. So in 96, we started meeting with toy inventors.

And so Ben was living with this girl by the name of Jen Irwin from the Irwin Toys family, which is a famous Canadian toy company. That's great. Wow, that was who you were living with. Yeah, very coincidental. Yeah. So between her and Austin's company called Canada Games, which was run by the Albert family, they told us that there's a whole network of toy inventors globally around the world that come up with ideas, but they don't commercialize them.

And so Ben started going around with our wares and meeting all these toy inventors and trying to solicit ideas from them. And by the way, was that hard to do because you were so small at that time? You know, they weren't, put it to you this way. They were not showing us their best products. They were basically dusting off the stuff in the back of the closet. That like Hasbro and Mattel wouldn't even look at. Correct. But they were showing us stuff and we were getting to look at stuff

and we were developing relationships and contacts. And so in 96, we actually came across this invention, which was an airplane that you pumped up and would fly for about 45 seconds. And it came from these two British inventors, John Dixon and Peter Manning. They actually came to Toronto, came to visit us, and we flew this airplane, and it was probably one of the most magical experiences seeing this plane fly. Describe what it was.

It was like a airplane with what, cyrofoam airplane that you pumped air into it? Yeah, so it's basically, it's a plastic bottle, foam wings on top, foam fuselage, and they had developed this pneumatic engine that literally the air would actually drive the piston up and down, spin the propeller and fly the plane. A hundred, 100 yards, right? Yeah, it was 100. It would fly 45, 50 seconds and fly in a circle.

Had they demoed this for other toy companies? Yes. We didn't realize, after we signed the product, we didn't realize that every toy company had turned it down. Wow. So you see it and you're like, this is amazing. Yeah, it's incredible. But they had not had any success getting anybody to bite.

Correct. I think they were trying to sell it for five years. All right. So you guys love it. And what did you do? You basically bought the license from them? Yeah. The way it works in the toy industry is you license the product in perpetuity and you pay a 5% royalty on your sales.

Got it. So you get the idea. But really what you're then doing is building a brand around it. Because I'm assuming it was a kind of crude, right? It wasn't like a fully developed toy. It was a plastic bottle and a body of an airplane with styrofoam, right? there was no branding or logos or shape to it. Yeah, exactly.

The difficult thing with the air hogs, which is what we called it, was how do you mass produce it? We ended up finding this company called K development, and they did all the design work in terms of how the engine is going to actually function and work, and we actually didn't have a lot of money to pay them at the time, so they agreed to do a back-end royalty deal.

And literally, we spent probably a year and a half, two years building the prototype, rebuilding the prototype, tested and see if it's flying and see if it was reliable and durable and all that type stuff. Got all the engineering done and then we went to China, found a factory which was called Kin Singh.

And so we sent all the plans there and they started actually building out the product for us. When you found that factory in China to make them, you were making a big commitment. You were putting a lot of eggs in this basket. Did you have orders already for the air hog? You know, we did everything in parallel. I would say this.

When we signed the product, we basically put all the money we'd made to date into the design and development. The design and development was very, very expensive. A million dollars, more or less? All I remember was it was pretty much all the profits that we had. Yeah, that you had. Yeah. Everything was going into this product. Everything's done in parallel.

So, you know, we had no orders at the beginning, but as we started designing and developing it, then you start the sales process. and we were going to the toy fair and at the toy fair, we were starting to sell it. And so before we actually got into production, we did have orders. So here's a question. This is a big commitment in money. And it was a two-year process, right, from 1996 when you got this license to when it actually debuted, I think, two years later. How did you know that it was going to work?

I mean, did you do market research? Did you test it on kids? did you, what kind of research did you do, if any? We did no research. Nothing. You did no market research. You went to no kids. You went to no schools, nothing.

You were just like, yeah, we love this. It's cool. Let's do it. Yep. So it could have been 100% wrong. Correct. And that would have been a disaster. Correct.

You just thought it was super cool, which it was. Yep, loved it. It was just so much fun to fly. When we come back in just a moment, how the team at Spinmaster began to realize that succeeding in the toy business means never staying still. If you have one hit idea, you'd better start thinking about your next one and the one after that. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz.

So it's 1998, and Spin Master starts selling the airhog at toy stores. And unlike the Earth Buddies or the devil sticks, the airhog is much more complex and requires a lot of engineering. We took so much care. That's why it took so long. It was like how to make the propeller save, put a foam nose coat on it, super light. The wings would pop off so they wouldn't break. And, you know, one of the biggest things was usually got stuck in a tree. So people.

Yeah, and that's it. You're done. Well, or you climb the tree or buy another one. You buy another one. So here's the thing. So you make this product, right? You get this Chinese company to make them. And do you remember how many did you initially intend to make?

Like a million, half a million? You know, I could just tell you that by the end of 1998, so we started marketing in that year, we had grossed $35 million in sales. Wow. I think we had sold over a million and a half piece or something like that. And I think our wholesale was about $20 at the time. and it cost you probably $10 to make them. Nope. It costs about $5.50.

How did, I mean, aside from the fact that it's super cool, I remember air hogs and they're still around, but how did you market it? Did you have to do anything at all to market it, or was it just a product that sold itself? No, we did a lot of, we did a TV commercial, we bought media against it. We found distributors around the world. We came up with these really creative point of sale displays where you could actually pump up the air hog and flick the propeller and hear the magical sound that came from the motor. And I think we had them at like Walmart and Kmart at a lot of places. So that was definitely in the

marketing budget. All right. So this comes out. And by the way, had you guys raised any money for the company? Are you entirely self-financed? Entirely self-financed. Other than the bank would actually let us borrow against our inventory and receivables. So we were able to use those monies, which weren't our monies, but at least they were up against the orders that were going to come, and, again, apply that to actually purchasing the goods and doing marketing and all that other type of stuff. So this product blows up. So you guys are growing really fast. Do you remember thinking to yourself, this is different. This is next level. Oh, yeah. I mean, the engineering development, it was a priceless education, designing and developing and marketing that product.

It was priceless. It was so difficult. We taught ourselves everything. We hadn't done anything close to that. It's not really even a toy. It's a mechanical flying object. So we really stretched herself to actually get that to market. But the nice part was all the inventors that we were visiting, they were like, wow, these guys can actually design, develop, and manufacture something. And so that really opened up the doors to future products for us. Here's what I wonder. I mean, the air hogs take off in 1998, at that point, can you just focus on that product and really build that out for the next few years? Or already do you have to start thinking about the next thing that's going to come out after that? You do both. And is that because kids are fickle and they just, the life cycle of a toy is short?

The toy business is all about fresh and new. Even if you have a brand within the brand, you still need to bring fresh and new. So we knew straight away after our first product, we were like, okay, what other innovation can we do in flying toys? So we came up with the V-wing, which was like a stealth flying plane. And then we were thinking about other types of flying toys. So, yes, you always have to be innovating within the brand. And then we also wanted to diversify as a company. So we were thinking about what other categories can we get ourselves into? To me, it just seems like, oh, my God, you guys were just playing with toys.

Like, how joyful, like how amazing, how fun. But this was a real serious business. You guys were heads down, like, really focused, or was it throwing Nerf balls around the office? I don't know. What was it like? No, it wasn't that much fun in games. It was serious. First of all, a toy business is very competitive, hyper-competitive business, and it's a very fast-paced.

And, you know, the three of us wanted to win. So we were actually quite serious. I think we were probably too serious. We didn't have the foosball tables, we didn't have the pool tables. It was more about when we're in the office, let's do the work, and then let's go enjoy our time afterwards. It's intense. The other thing about the toy industry is that you're dealing with kids and you're dealing with safety. And you've got to make sure that everything's – you've got to manufacture something at a low cost that's safe that has an innovation attached to it.

So 1998 really is a pivotal year for you guys because the air hogs just takes off. You've successfully manufactured a product now overseas. And now you've got a strategy. You are going to really begin to assess a bunch of inventions. I read, you grew up at 28 employees. You were assessing about 1,000 inventions a year at that time. So were people just coming to Toronto and showing you stuff? Or was it all happening at toy fairs?

Or were you actively tapping into this network of inventors? Or all three of those things? The majority was actually Ben Verity and Ben Dermer on the road. Ben Dermar was another person you hired at that time to help out. Yeah, he helped Ben with the inventor relationship. And so they would literally go from city to city to city and visit the inventors and go to their offices. And I'd say that was like 80% of the work was done that way on location. So you did zero research for the Air Hogs, but it really took off.

Yep. Did that make you, and I'm not trying to ask this in like a snarky way, but I just, I think that if I was in your shoes, I'd have been like, oh my God, look at my judgment. It's amazing. I can do no wrong. Like I might have become a bit arrogant at the time thinking we know how to pick hits. Did you guys have any of that at all? No, because we had some other products that alongside of the air hogs that failed. We had a product called Don't Free Freddy and it did not do well. What was that? It was basically a little friend. monster and his hands were handcuffed together and then you'd press a button and he the handcuffs would pop open and his arms would flip up and he would roar at you and we just thought it was funny but the kids didn't think it was that funny and how did you in those early days how would you give something in the green light did you have to have total consensus no sometimes there's certain

products that i loved and i would win ben over but it wouldn't come very easily but the one thing that we did find over the years is that when we did have universal consensus, the likelihood of success was much higher. All right. So you have air hogs and you're assessing like a thousand inventions a year at this time. And the next thing I think you come across is these little like miniature BMX bikes, which are called flick tricks. And I think the guy who pitched them to you was this inventor named Jeff Ray Kemper.

Yeah. And then the one thing you have to understand about inventors. Okay, and the reason why you want to go visit the inventors rather than them coming to you is like they're really the kids in the equation, okay? And when they invent something, they want to show it. They get so excited about it. So on one of my trips to Chicago when we were developing the air hogs, Jeff actually showed me the little flick tricks. And straight away, I was like, this is so much fun. Again, any market research, taking them to kids, just sitting behind two-way glass, watching them play it, anything like that,

Nope, no, nothing like that. Nothing. Other than the fact, kids were really into BMX bikes at the time. Yeah. Would you analyze, like, market data around that? Did you have statistics? Zero. Nothing.

Wouldn't even know where to get them. So you are literally just saying, yeah, I think this is cool. I'd play with this. It was so much fun. The key to being in the toy business is you've got to always think and feel like a seven-year-old. Is this common, by the way, in the toy industry? Or am I just complete? Because have I talked to too many McKinsey consultants?

You cannot consult yourself in the toy industry. It is one of the most intuitive, creative industries out there. It's a feel industry, but it's also a history industry. Like, you need to know what happened in the past, what did well, what didn't do well. And then it's very iterative. Like, everybody's adding on an innovation from the past and everybody's looking for, like, play patterns. Yeah. So it's all about the play patterns and stuff like that.

And so, you know, kids played with die cast cars. Sure, I did. I love them. Kids still play and collect Hot Wheels today. And so the association was, well, this is kind of similar to Hot Wheels. It's die cast. There's a collectible aspect to it. You know, we went out, we licensed all the BMX bike companies at the time like Hoffman and Red Line and all that type of stuff.

So you can collect them, you can play with them. So there was an association and a confidence in the play pattern. So this is so different from so many other industries. Essentially, what you're saying is it's very hard to create a toy for kids and a bowl. boardroom with all the market research and looking at kids or two-way glass. Like actually, that doesn't work that often? Not really. I mean, you can get some false positives too. I mean, kids get excited about a lot of stuff. Yeah. You can see if kids are really bored. You can probably see if they really don't like something. But then again, it's like what's valuable is more like,

is it too big for their hands? Is it too small for their hands? Can they hold it? That type of stuff. More functionality. But testing the magic, very difficult. The only way you're going to testes by putting it at retail. But this play pattern idea is really interesting. I mean, you know, like, when I was a kid, I used to build these elaborate Lincoln log houses or, you know, kids have played with Lego for a long time, had mechano. I loved action figures. And so what you're saying is elements of all those things they've always existed through time and memorial. When humans were in Neolithic villages, they played with, they played in the same patterns. Kids played in same patterns, but just with rocks or whatever. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting for you to go that far back in time. But I guess I would say like in the last 100 years, like the play patterns started to solidify. Like there's 11 categories in toys. So you got plush, which is stuffed animals. Like there's a way for kids to interact with plush.

And then like you say, action figures, how do you play? You know, action figures is all about, you know, fantasy and trying to become that character yourself. Yeah. So the toy companies creatively were able to create around. the way kids like to interact. And so now it's like, can you bring something new and different to the play pattern

to spark joy in the kids to get them excited? And that's what we look for all the time. So I guess, like around 2001, you guys had what I think was your first, like, large-scale failure, which was a product called Key Charm Cuties. And I guess you were competing

against like a Mattel product that, something like the Matal product, Tell was putting out. Yeah, against Polly Pocket. Right, right, right, Poly Pocket. So what was the thing you guys were making? It was these small fashion dolls, and you can change their clothes in a unique way, and they came

in these purses that you can carry them around with. And when it came to Key Charm Cuties, this really, we were up against Mattel and their marketing and their design, and our design couldn't compete. Like, our dolls didn't look as nice as theirs. Our packaging wasn't as good. our commercial wasn't as good. We didn't have the brand. We didn't have enough money to develop a brand.

So that was our first lesson against the big guys. Did you conclude that it wasn't worth it to go up against a Mattel or a Hasbro? No, because, I mean, the flick tricks were going right up against Mattel. It was going up against Hot Wheels. We have no problems competing with Hasbro and Mattel. We always respected them and learned from them. But we actually had no choice. If you wanted to be in the toy industry, those were the players that you were competing against.

All right. So from what I understand, you started to go to Japan in 2000. Yep. And I lived in Japan when I was a little kid from age four to six. My dad was there. And I still remember the toys were unbelievable, like years ahead. You started to go to Japan in 2000, presumably because Japan, I think, is still like when it comes to toy innovation, probably the center of the world, right? It's one of the most creative places you can go. But it is probably, it's very seminal to the journey the company has taken. We actually went there with a mission in hand, which was to try to find products in Japan that we could bring to North America. And what is it about, in your view, what is it about Japan? Why is Japan the sort of the Silicon Valley, let's say, of toys? I just think that their minds are very open, and I think they just look at the world.

world very differently and they look at things differently. And what would be strange to us is normal to them. Now, like, when you think about, like, the Tamagachi, like, what a unique toy to come up with? Yeah. Or you look at something like Ampaman. I don't know if you've ever seen the preschool show, Ampamon. It's the one of the strangest characters you've ever seen in your life, you know, so it's like... Or like Japanese candy. It's just amazing. Yeah. I haven't eaten a lot of candy. But I think They're just into doing different. They're good with different. One of the decisions you made in 2005, which I think is a pivotal decision.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it was, is you moved your director of global licensing to Japan. And you really kind of wanted to figure out how to bring something from Japan. Because I think 2005 would eventually a few years later lead to your biggest toy of all time up to that point, which was Bakugan. Am I right, that that story begins in 2005? Yeah, Baccagon 2006. And can you explain what Baccagana was? It was like marbles meets transformers. Yeah.

So there are these marbles and you roll on the table and you're aiming towards the card. A card, okay. And embedded in the card is a sheet of metal. But as soon as the ball hits the card, the magnet inside of the ball activates a spring and then it pops open and transforms the the character, the ball into a character. This idea came from some, like a kid, a 23-year-old named Aldrich or Aldrich Sassier, who submitted this idea to Spinmaster you had. Did you have like an open submissions, like a way to submit ideas?

He, no, it actually came, Aldrich invented the item. So his genius was the idea to put an action figure into a marble. Yeah. And we took it in. We did a whole bunch of development. And then what happened was we said, well, you know, in Japan, they're so good with these, like, micro-mechanisms. Maybe we can partner with someone in Japan. So we did a trip over there, and we took it to Sega Toys, and we presented it to Mr. Kokobun, who doesn't speak a stitch of English.

He's the founder or the CEO of Sega at the time. He's the president of Sega toys. Sega, like the video game company, too. Yeah, exactly. But his history was he was an incredible toy inventor and a real true blue toy guy. So he saw the magic and he saw the potential. He said, sure, we'll partner with you guys. And you knew because of play patterns, you knew that kids like marbles,

because of like marbles for a long time and they like to roll things on the ground and they like transformer things. And you knew all those elements suggested that this would take off. Yes. I mean, when we licensed a product that had two elements, It had the marble and it had an action figure in a marble. So those were the two play patterns with a really, really cool magical sensation. Like when it popped open, like you got excited.

And then your ability to close it was automatic. Like you just took your two fingers and it closed. So it was very fidgety in terms of opening and closing and opening and closing. All right. So you're developing this toy, this new toy Bakugan. And I guess you decided to do something that you'd sort of learned about in Japan. which is when you launch it, you also launch a cartoon about the characters.

Yeah. And I don't, hopefully this doesn't sound crass because it's not, I mean, this is a business show. I think that from a business perspective, this is absolutely a brilliant strategy, but, I mean, a cartoon is essentially a 22-minute advertisement for the product, right?

I would say it's a way to actually accentuate the magic of the toy, and it enhances the toy, because how are you going to know the characters of the Bacagun unless you can see them on the screen and hear them talk and see how they battle and how they work and all that type of stuff? So what happened when Bac Bac Bacchang was released? I mean, I remember through the 2010s seeing that toy in the hands of every kid between the age of 5 and 10, 12.

It became a billion-dollar franchise. Billion-dollar franchise. Yes, a billion dollar franchise. It aired in literally 150 countries around the world. We did four seasons, over 200 episodes. It just captured the hearts and minds of kids. And I think around 2008, you transitioned from being a toy company to a 360 media company, which I think is fair to describe you that way today, right?

Yeah, that was one of our goals was to have an entertainment division. And Bacagun was a genesis for it. And then after Bakugan, we launched a show called Redekai, which was based on this really innovative card system that we created. Everybody was excited about it. All the retailers bought into it. And it was a huge disaster. Like, you could not give the product away.

It probably took the retailers like two, three years to actually clear out the products. What happened with the recession of 2008, nine, and beyond? I mean, does that affect toys or are toys relatively inelastic? We actually had our best years in 2008, 2009 during the recession. So we didn't really feel anything. Parents are not going to cut on, they're going to cut on their kids last in terms of consumer expenses and stuff like that. It's quite recession proof. The flip side of the toy industry, it's not a high growth industry, but it's just very stable.

All right. So you've got the Bakugan. I think by 2010 it was driving almost half of your sales. It was over 45% of your income came from Bakugan, which is great, but also kind of scary, right? That one product is so dominant because if that revenue stream dries up, you're in trouble, which I think kind of started to happen around that time, right? That's exactly what happened. So basically in 2011, the sales started to go down. and so basically our sales went from 2010, I think we peaked at about 950 million.

Yep. And then by 2013, the sales were down to 500 million. Wow, that's a huge decrease. Yeah. And that's because you put too many, you rely too heavily on Bakugan. It was a combination of that and all the products that we had coming up behind Bakugan. those products didn't... They just didn't work?

They didn't connect with the consumer. Basically, the product line just wasn't robust that was following up Baccagon. We didn't think Baccagan would drop in sales as quickly as it did. Why did it happen now, by the way? What do you think happened? You know, I think it's actually natural, is that those types of toys have a certain life cycle to them. And they're usually a three-year, four-year lifecycle, and then they actually go down.

So by 2013, we actually retired Baccagon. So it went from like hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year in sales to zero. When we come back after the break, how Spin Master is airlifted out of its slump by a 10-year-old boy named Ryder and six search and rescue dogs, otherwise known as Paw Patrol. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012, and for the first time since the company's launch, Spin Master is not turning a profit. In fact, it's losing millions of dollars. And Renan understands that in order to keep going, the company needs to come up with another hit.

But until that happens, he has to make some hard decisions. We had to do two things. We had to lean into developing and really keep. being in on what are the right categories, what are the right products that we should be launching. I think we got to the point where we had a lot of hubris and we were like, whatever we're going to put out there, it's going to go. Because you had so many hits. We had so many hits and we had so much success and everybody gets excited.

So we had to become much more judicious in the product selection. And then on the flip side, we had to restructure the company. At that point in time, I think we had about 900 employees and we had to let go 350 people in a matter of 24 months. A third of the people. Wow. And we've never done it before. It was an excruciating process. And we did it four times, four restructurings, just because, you know, no one really wants to believe that the sales are going to go down. And so when we did the restructuring, everybody was like, you know, we don't need to let go of that many people. You know, the sales are going to pick up, et cetera, et cetera. And it just never happened. So it was like, it kept on jerking in the whole

company, you know, like every single time, you had to go out and make an announcement and make people feel comfortable and the company is okay. So when you do it four times, you know, you lose a lot of credibility and it's hard to keep the morale high. I'm sure. I mean, four rounds of layoffs, people must have been really worried and nervous about their jobs. And it has to affect the atmosphere. That was stressful. The other stuff wasn't stressful. This was stressful. Yeah. But I will say that we really, it was the time where we actually dug in and, and, and, We're like, we need to tighten our marketing. We need to reduce our skew counts.

We don't need to do as many things financially. We actually had no choice because in those two years, the company lost money and substantial amounts of money. So there really wasn't any options but to write the ship. And then in addition, you had to come up with a new magical product, the next Bakugan, the next airhogs. What did you do? We just got really focused. The one thing we didn't do is we didn't cut our own. budget. We kept that and we kept on spending and we kept on investing. And we were like, let's keep

on trying. Let's keep on trying with new television shows. Let's keep on trying with new toys. And we'll just be a smaller company, but let's just be a profitable company. Renan, did you, you'd basically been profitable every single year and you'd been growing every single year. And then all of a sudden, you're not only unprofitable. You're losing a lot of money. Were you worried about whether you guys are naked? No, I don't think, I wasn't, I wasn't nervous. I actually, personally myself, I rise in a crisis and I'm actually better in a crisis. That being said, I mean, the relationship's definitely frayed. We have a saying, you know, I'm sure you know, it's like growth hides a multitude of sins. Yes. And when you're not growing, all the sins come out. So everything came out.

Our relationships got challenged and tested, you know. Even among the founders? Oh yeah, yeah. Amongst the founders came out, some inefficiency. in business, the way we were organized. Everything came out, but I don't think that anybody was in a panic. It was more of like, this is not easy, and this is why older people have gray hair. You know, when people say they have gray hair from something, like this was our seminal gray hair event. Yeah, and you have some gray hair. I have a lot of gray hair. All right. So you restructure the company, but you're also trying to find the next thing. And from And what I understand, this concept, I mean, you knew that the concept of an animated show and products was successful.

And what? Like, you put out, like, a request for proposal from different creators you knew for, for, like, a new kind of animated show. Tell me, tell me the genesis of Paw Patrol. How did it start? So I think one of the things that dawned us is, like, it's very hard to get success in the same genre. Andra more than once. So why don't we take focus on the preschool category? And we were like, well, why don't we do a show for preschoolers?

And we said, what if we took the magical aspects of transformation the kids loved in Bakugan and they love in Transformers? And why don't we bring it to a preschool audience? And by the way, a preschool audience because that is, you know, is it a good demo for, I don't know, for toys? It's an incredible demo for toys, very steady demo. for toys. And no one had ever done anything with that play pattern for that demographic. So we put out this brief, can you come up with a conceit or a story around transformation for preschoolers? We sent to the five different creatives around the world. And we got back a whole

bunch of interesting proposals. And the one that we liked best came from the creator of Bob the Builder. His name is Keith Chapman, an incredible human being. And he came up with this great idea. What was this idea? What was his concept? So his idea was it was called Robbie and the Rescue Pups. And it was this idea of these five dogs that each had their own personality. One was a fire dog. One was another construction dog. Another one was a police dog. And they go out and they solve difficult situations that happen in the town.

So he sends you this concept. And it's not going to be called Robbie and the rescue dogs. Correct. Because Robbie becomes writer later on, I think, right? Correct. When you saw this concept, did you all say, this is it? This is the one? Yeah, that's what we landed on.

We were like, saw it as having incredible story potential, incredible character potential. And then we said, well, how do we figure out the transformation? And we said, well, it would be magical if we put backpacks on the pups and the backpacks transformed. and what if their dog houses transformed into vehicles, and that's how we married it up. So we had the transformation, plus great story, good character, all that stuff mixed together.

And we were like, let's move, let's try. And I think the show, Papa Troll debuted in 2013, is that right? 2013. And did it take off right away? It took off pretty quickly, but I will say this much is that the show got developed and refined over time. Awesome. And through that concept, right?

I mean, you can do, I remember the, I mean, no, the action figures. It's everything. It's toys. It's stuffed animals. It's pajamas. It's lunch boxes. It's, I mean, I'm just scratching the surface, right? It's endless what you can do with a character that sticks.

Yep. Yep, you're exactly right. I mean, that's the magic is when you have a character that kids love and trust and can relate to, then they'll want to spend time with them in different form factors. So it definitely helped turn around the business. It's hard to overstate how all those elements came together into this perfect match because I believe that Paw Patrol as a franchise is one of the biggest toy franchises since Mighty Morpherm, Power Rangers. Yes.

It is a once in a lifetime, once in a generation franchise that has exceeded. all expectations, and it's something that we've worked towards. You know, originally we had Paw for Five, and we had Paw for Ten. You know, we're coming on the 10th anniversary. And now we have a motto, which is Paul Forever. Our job is to just keep it fresh, exciting. You know, we just came up with the movie, came out this past August. The first time we did a feature-length film, animated film.

And so that was a milestone for Paw Patrol. We're going to do another film in 2023. You know, we want Paw Patrol to be around for, for a hundred years. You know, it's our Mickey Mouse. What is it about a character that makes it enduring? I mean, why does Mickey Mouse endure and, but not, you know, I don't know, Garfield, who I watched when I was a kid or the Smurfs even.

I mean, yeah, but the Smurfs aren't as big as they, I don't think they're as big as they were when I was a kid. I think a lot of it has to do with keeping them relevant. You know, if you look at, let's say, like, Francho's like Spider-Ban, they're always doing movies, and they're taking risks with their movies. You look at Transformers. They did films and they were really innovative with their films. They're so different from the cartoon that I watched as a kid.

Yeah. So they're relevant and they're timely. And I think that stuff, other franchises, they just didn't keep things fresh. And kids, they can sense it. So I think that we're following that model. What do you think the value of that franchise is today if you could put a price on? Priceless. It's a multi-billion dollar franchise.

Wow. You decided to go public in 2015, so 20 years after you launch. Imagine for a variety of reasons. One is to raise money, but two, you know, to reap some of the rewards of what you had built. Is that the decision behind why you went public? No, it really wasn't. The real decision why it went public was to actually set the company up for success in the future. we felt that for the company to outlive the founders,

it's best for the company to be in a public construct rather than a private company. It was like we knew we were getting a little bit older, who knows what happens in the future, and as an entity, it's not reliant on three shareholders at the end of the day. You had this challenge with Bakugan where it was accounting for 44% of your revenue,

and then when the sales went down, you took a hit. And presumably you learned a lesson from that. But I have to assume that the Pau Patrol is still the biggest driver of revenue for the company. Is that fair to say? You know, it's significant. That being said, after what happened in the downturn years, we became very conscious on diversifying our revenue. And so we went out and we bought a company called Swimways, which specializes in the pool. Swimtoes.

They're all floaties and it's counter seasonal. It's great in spring and summer. You've got Etch a Sketch. Etch sketch. We have a whole activity part of our business, which is Etch a Sketch. We also diversified into the games business. So that's very stable, recurring revenue. We bought a company called Cardinal in 2015. So we're the largest manufacturer of puzzles and chess sets and poker chips and all that type of stuff. It is, and I don't mean as a pun, head spinning. Spin Master's head spinning to me. The industry is head spinning to me. I have vertigo just thinking about all of the things that you're part of. 20,000 products, a media arm, games, digital products. It seems like in this industry, you just can't, you have to continue to move. You cannot stop or else you die.

I think that's entertainment. That's the essence of the entertainment business. I mean, the way you describe it, it sounds like exhausting. Yeah, it does. But I think at the same time, you know, the flip side is that it's exciting. It's exciting to work on new and fresh and to design stuff and to create stuff. I think the creation process is where the magic is. Sometimes I wish we were just like a one product company or one idea,

but I think it would actually be boring if we just, it was just one product and that was it. Now that you decided to step down, I can't believe you. I like to use the word step up, actually. Step up, okay, yeah. I can't believe you were in the leadership position with the company for 25 years, a long time. You're still young.

I mean, I think you're maybe close to 50 or just 50. That's great. You can still have a lot of time to enjoy your life. But, I mean, man, I imagine that that was your thinking. You're like, I'm done. I did it. I can play a different role in the company. No, that actually wasn't 100% the thing.

And it was the co-ceo model that Anton and I had and Ben. It traditionally is not a good model. So it's incredible that lasted this long. And one of our biggest goals is for this business to live beyond the founders. And so this was part of the transition plan to enable that to happen. So we're very much connected to the business and engaged and want to guide and shepherd it into the future. We'll just guide and shepherd it differently. Ronan, when you think about this trajectory, you know, you started this business with a panty hose stuffed with sawdust and grass seed.

and turned it into a $4 billion company. How much of that do you attribute to how hard the three of you worked and your intelligence and how much do you think has to do with getting lucky, with toys and products and ideas? I think we're lucky that we found each other. I think we're lucky the people that decided to join our company, the people that we've been able to attract and partner with and people that wanted to take the journey with us, whether it was Bakugan or Paw Patrol and these partnerships. I think that's where the luck came in.

And then, you know, we put in the time. You know, I have a saying, you know, you don't go, you don't get. And we went out a lot. You know, Anton, like, you know, he opened up all the offices in Europe. He, you know, he did all the sales with all the retailers, managed all those relationships. Ben was constantly going out, meeting with the inventors, going to their offices, doing inventor trips. We did all that stuff. And the last thing I'd say is that we never blamed anybody for failure because it's too complex in our business.

There's too many stakeholders. when you're doing creative things, that you can blame one single person. So for sure, listen, the universe works in strange ways, and a lot of it is out of our control, but we need to show up too at the same time. So it's a combination of both. That's Renan Harari, co-founder of Spin Master.

By the way, Bakugan was discontinued in 2013, but after a major rebranding, it was brought back in 2019 with upgraded characters, a card game, and a new anime series. Oh, and one other thing, next time you watch Paw Patrol, pay close attention to one pup in particular,

Rocky. He's a mixed-breed mutt with white paws and white tufts of hair. Rocky is resourceful and handy and despises water, especially baths, and he happens to be modeled on Ronan Harari. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please do follow us on your podcast. podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to contact us, our email address is H-I-B-T at npr.org. And if you want to follow us on Twitter, our account

is at How I Built This, and mine is at Guy Raz. Our Instagram is at How I Built This NPR, and mine is at guy.orgia. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Rumptine Arablewe. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Claire Murashima. Our production staff also includes Farah Safari, Liz Metzger, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Carrie Thompson, Elaine Coates, and Harrison, V.J. Choi. Our intern is Catherine Seifer. Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR.