How to Get a Job Making Toys. How to Work in the Toy Industry. How to be a Toy Designer Toy Maker

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Spectra Creative Channel here on YouTube. This is Scott Toy Guru Knightlick and as a successful toy maker and survivor of the toy industry for 25 years I often get asked how does one get to work in the toy industry. I did do a video about my personal journey and how I got there which you can see in the link above but I don't know if it actually really brought people through the path to getting there and with more and more toy stores closing and the limited amount of retail distribution toys are getting these days it doesn't mean there's a lack of a need for toys and yes we all know screens are having a big chunk of this time from kids days as well but play is important play will always be important and the toy industry is one of those that actually really is thriving and continues to survive because play is an important part of life and it's important part of how children discover the world and understand this giant place they're a part of when they're a very small part of it and it's psychologically needed all right so with that out of the way how in the world do you find a job in the toy industry I mean obviously there's networking and there's looking on job boards but let me give you a few more direct routes so the most important thing I would say is know what you want to do in the toy industry I can't tell you how important this is almost every year when I was at San Diego comic-con or one of the other large consumer shows I would get people coming up to the booth and finding me and saying hey Scott I want to work in toys how do I get a job in the toy industry and I would say well what do you want to do and they would nine times out of ten say I want to work in toys and it's like great but what do you want to do in toys there are literally hundreds and hundreds of different jobs so having a specific goal of what exactly you want to do helps it's also important to know that walking into a toy company and I don't want to say thinking but you know being under the I guess hope that you're going to go right to working on you know a flagship brand and especially a brand that you're personally into yes I got the opportunity to do this but it was not my first job in the toy industry I worked my way up to this the toy industry is made up of lots of different categories not just of toys but of types of jobs and very few of these jobs actually work on product the vast majority work on things like logistics accounting shipping and as far as toy categories the largest category out there is toddler and preschool toys so expecting you know to go right in working on something like adult collector product that's a very very small slice of the pie most likely your first job in the toy industry is if it is working on direct toy product it's going to be one of the larger categories and if it's in the toy industry as a whole it's not necessarily going to be working on toys like I said there are so many different jobs I mean everything from you know middle manager to reception to accounting to payroll to shipping logistics you know controllers everything I mean the schedule managers there are so many things that any consumer product business has that is also in the toy industry so let's talk about the four roles that do handle toys so the first one if you actually want to be hands-on touching toys making toys is the obvious one a toy designer so how does one become a toy designer the person who actually comes up with and physically makes the toys out of nothing then the second one is a graphic designer again someone who would actually physically work on the product and have interaction with it although it's a bit more with this job with the packaging then there's going to be toy copywriters again a bit of more packaging uh focused position but still working on toys and then finally there's the brand manager and this is the person who sort of leads the overall direction of a toy line but also understands the analytics so let's go one by one first let's talk about a toy designer how does one become a toy designer well besides having passion and absolutely artistic talent which by the way I do not I cannot design a toy on a piece of paper well you have to have artistic talent the ability to paint the ability to sculpt the ability to visualize things in 3d and you have to really have a knack for engineering a lot of well 95 percent plus of toy designers have gone to an official course they have a degree in toy design and there are many many schools throughout the country and throughout the world that offer degrees in toy design and interactive toy design which one to go to that's up to you there are many based on where you live based on what type of toys you might want to design and in a program like this you'll learn things like sculpting how to sculpt on model so it actually looks like the character you're trying to make as well as important engineering concepts like how consumer product goes together and with toys you've got a lot of working parts and you have to understand all of that and how toys break up into different parts how they'll be manufactured how the joints are going to work it's a lot more than just you know deciding you want to make a certain character you actually have to understand the engineering aspect most of all of how a toy functions which means having a degree in engineering is also great graphic design all right so again this means going to graphic design school and usually having a degree in graphic design or five to ten years experience as a professional graphic designer most of the graphic designers i worked with in the toy industry at both large and small toy companies all had years of work and years of experience very talented with a pen very talented with graphic design software everything from photoshop to adobe to some of the more advanced 3d software but what you're making in the toy industry are packages is what the graphic designer is doing and most of the graphic designers hired by the toy industry have experience in consumer product packaging design already for anything from cereal to cookies to tires and they'll just take that skill set and bring it to the toy industry all right next up is a copywriter and this one is near and dear to my heart because this is how i got my entrance in the toy industry as a copywriter so so what in the world is a copywriter while you might think of it as somebody sitting around smoking a sherlock holmes pipe and typing out on a typewriter it's more than just being able to write a copywriter especially in something like consumer products and the toy industry balances a lot they tend to be the go-between between graphic design product design marketing finance making sure everything actually lines up because they have to make sure the product being designed is actually reflected as the product on the package and when features change in the product they also have to change on the package and then the copywriter is in charge of writing all that copy everything from the name of the toy to the bullets to the call outs as well as registering them legally making sure you own the right trademarks the right names how many call outs are there going to be what are you going to draw attention to you're basically using the packaging to advertise to mom dad gift giver or adult collector what's inside the package and one of the other things a copywriter has to navigate is the many many different warnings fine print legal marks trademarks license remarks ip marks that have to appear on a toy and where they appear the reason i was able to get my job in the toy industry as a copywriter is i had spent four years as a professional copywriter in the medical industry i had done copy in ads and medical material for a large pharmaceutical manufacturer and being able to navigate all of the legalese and all of the data that went with this was very transferable into the toy industry i actually wasn't even expecting that but when i showed my portfolio to the people interviewing me they really were like oh you know how to do legalese this is great and that actually brings me up to another important point having a portfolio so having a professional portfolio if you want to be a toy designer a graphic designer or a copywriter of the what you've done professionally is essentially your visual resume yeah you could have a resume saying you worked here or there but most companies most toy companies hiring want to see visually what you can do and it definitely helps to have some toyetic concepts in your portfolio even if you have to make them up yourself i had one in my portfolio of an ip i just created and stuck in there to show that i could do toy type copywriting not just medical so hey you know fake it till you make it the other final toy hands-on position in the industry is your marketing manager and this is what i became after i was a copywriter i went from being a copywriter to a senior brand analyst to eventually promoted to a marketing manager i had a very unorthodox path to this 99 of the people who become marketing have an mba and this degree is basically what helps you understand being the center of the wheel the spokes of of all of the different areas of toy and product design as well as understanding all of the analytics and it took me a long time to learn this part because i didn't have my mba at that time and now you know i'm actually getting mine now at uncg greensboro but that's not important right now the point is is the the marketing manager is the one who decides the direction of the line and that's why most major companies want to hire someone who has an mba and usually has an mba from a top university and most of the people with an mba who are looking to get into the toy industry tend to be people just interested in consumer products you don't necessarily get people who are actively collecting transformers or star wars or he-man toys mattel and hasbro both have very vast intern programs where they essentially recruit people directly out of top mba programs into internships and then the top 20 of those interns are given jobs and it's essentially a direct route like you're flushed right through a tube right into your job after graduation so if you can get into an internship with hasbro or mattel or jack's one of those big companies that really is a fast track at the end of the day it's all about following your passion i mean this was my unorthodox way of getting in the industry where i went from having actual experience and knowledge of being a copywriter and being able to negotiate all the legalese in medical writing that got me my foot in the door as a copywriter because i had that experience and that experience professionally translated into something the toy industry could use but my passion is what got me moved from being a copywriter into being a marketing manager even though i didn't have an mba i was very rare the number of marketing managers that don't have nbas are you know like one percent so the last thing to leave you with is expectation versus reality which i touched on in the very beginning there are very few jobs in the toy industry that actually physically touch the toys most of the jobs are you know people doing clerical work and you know moving paper the idea that you're going to go in and just you know work on a transformers collector toy that's not necessarily how it works there are many many paths into a toy company but if you have passion knowledge and interest you will be able to navigate it that's what i did i started as a copywriter on hot wheels and eventually i became the brand manager on masters of the universe it took several years there was no opening for a brand manager for masters of the universe when i started it was honestly a job that was sort of created based around the pitch i made about starting maddie collector and so you're probably going to start off working on toys that you may not be the most passionate about but being passionate about toys does help and that comes through so much in an interview i've interviewed a lot of people and the ones that have the most success are the ones that are passionate about toys because most people in the toy industry aren't so having that really helps i hope this helped i hope this gave you a clear idea of what kind of degrees will lead to what type of jobs in the toy industry good luck leave comments below a subscription always helps because it tells youtube to share this with more people thanks for watching and i'll see you guys next time