ON THE CASE
Twenty One Toys has two options to escape startup status.
“First, we don’t have a physical presence in our two largest markets, education and corporate HR departments,” Ben-Ari said. “Second, I’d like to think through whether we should focus on training educators or facilitators in person, or on boosting toy sales through more strategic online marketing and training resources.”
Half of Twenty One Toys’ sales are outside Canada, and it had strong support in the U.S. and distributors on the ground in Europe. Sales were rising in both markets even though neither had a direct team in place. Indeed, the company only had two full-time contractors and one working half-time, part of Ben-Ari’s plan to
keep her burn rate as low as possible.
“To be in production, we need to pay 50% up front and 50% upon the order’s completion,” Ben-Ari said. “Between trying to coordinate our production runs with pre-orders and developing support materials for our toys, we’re tapped out.” Guidebooks and training resources were made available online and her team continually added new material to Twenty One Toys’ website. “All of our growth has been achieved through just word of mouth, and without spending anything on traditional marketing. We can continue on this path, but I’d like to know if we will need a more substantial, online marketing push, and if our in-person training will be enough to enter new markets.”
In a world entranced by the latest social media apps, Ben-Ari’s team was garnering attention by making and selling wooden toys that were being hailed as “shaping classrooms of the future” by publications such as Time. The name she chose for her firm was a nod to the 19th-century inventor of kindergarten, Friedrich Froebel, who designed 20 educational toys for children. “Twenty One Toys, for a 21st century world,” she noted. The Empathy Toy sold for $121 for an At-Home Set, $249 for Teacher and Facilitator Kits, and $799 for a bundle of three Teacher or Facilitator kits, which include a one-hour Skype consultation. Getting a strong handle on manufacturing — contracted to a top-tier factory overseas — and managing working capital had consumed the majority of her team’s time thus far.
One program that had been very successful for Twenty One Toys was its full-day training in Toronto, which it offers monthly to facilitators at its office at the Centre for Social Innovation. Ben-Ari’s team uses the full-day workshops to train professionals on the use of the Empathy toy, as well as the larger goal of how to use play-based learning to teach key 21st century skills in business. After they were trained, the intent was that these professional facilitators would use the Empathy toy as part of their consulting. “If I train one facilitator, this person has deep impact because he or she can carry out workshops in multiple organizations,” Ben-Ari said. “But I’d only sell about three toy sets per facilitator.” Twenty One Toys could launch a global online community as an extension of their training programs before setting up workshops in other locations, but Ben-Ari wondered what the commitment to building this community would cost.
On the other hand, Ben-Ari could spend a day at a high school, and sell up to 100 single sets in total. Ben-Ari and her team have already flown to Vancouver and Copenhagen to train educators. These, however, were much harder to coordinate, required a much longer timeline and attendance had turned out much lower than expected. “The net sales impact is much higher, that’s for sure. One option for us is to concentrate on visiting five to 10 schools in a district per trip,” she stated. “Is there a way for us to combine the facilitator/educator and school visit programs?”
Ben-Ari was preparing to launch her company’s second product, a Failure Toy, in 2016. “This is just the beginning,” she said. “We’re planning another eight toys in our pipeline. We have the opportunity to create a real positive social impact in the world, and possibly to bring on like-minded investors.” But first she needed to figure out her next strategic move.