How the Fingerling caught on as 2017’s hot toy
Montreal company’s concept follows in footsteps of Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmos
About two years ago, Sydney Wiseman had a challenging assignment for an engineer at her family toy company.
Could he design a small robotic toy that resembled a pygmy marmoset, a tiny Amazonian monkey that Wiseman had been obsessed with since she was a child growing up in Montreal.
Sure, the engineer told her. What do you want the little monkey to do?
Thus was born the Fingerling, a five-inch monkey that grips your finger with its legs and arms, as it babbles, blows kisses and blinks its eyes. Cradle a Fingerling in your hand and it drifts off to sleep. Press the Fingerling’s head and it passes gas.
Created by the Montreal-based company WowWee, the Fingerling has been anointed one of this year’s hot toys for the holidays, a designation most toymakers only dream of achieving.
For decades, there has always been a musthave holiday toy — Cabbage Patch Kids, Beanie Babies, a Tickle Me Elmo doll. Parents drive long distances to scour stores for the one item in short supply at exactly the moment when everyone wants it. Scalpers sell the toys at ridiculous markups, while counterfeiters dupe desperate families into buying knock-offs.
At stake are the tears — of joy or misery — of the children whose dearest wishes are fulfilled, or dashed.
How the Fingerling reached this tipping point — when suddenly millions of children cannot do without a $15 farting monkey — is the story of a promising idea’s going viral on social media, a large retailer’s savvy pricing strategy and the science of managing scarcity.
The monkey’s journey from Wiseman’s imagination to holiday sensation also shows how the making of a hot toy has evolved through the generations.
The $84 billion global toy industry is strug-
gling for the attention of children obsessed with smartphones and tablets. Global toy sales have been growing each year, but at a slower pace than video games.
The average lifespan of a toy fad is about eight months from its launch until it’s marked down, said Richard Gottlieb, an analyst and publisher of Global Toy News.
“The life of an item is a little rockier” than it used to be, said Anne Marie Kehoe, the Walmart vice-president who runs the retailer’s toy division in the United States. “We move as a country faster from one thing to the next.”
Cultivating the success of a hot toy carries its own risks, including managing supply. This past week, Fingerlings were out of stock on Walmart’s website, while parents complained that they had been snookered into buying counterfeits from sellers on Amazon and other sites. While the monkeys are the core of the Fingerlings brand, WowWee also sells sloth and unicorn versions — one of which was listed on eBay for $5,000.
WowWee says it did not intentionally create the shortage. But whether by design or happenstance, there is no question that scarcity fuels a toy’s mystique.
“The reality is that you are better off having some disappointed children this year in order to excite them next year,” said Chris Rogers, a research analyst at Panjiva, a supply-chain analytics firm.
But extended shortages can be perilous. Empty shelves can tantalize for only so long before wouldbe buyers might give up.
This fall, WowWee increased the number of Chinese factories producing Fingerlings to three, from two. Fingerlings started arriving by plane because it was taking too long for the toys to reach the United States from Asia on container ships.
“It’s like coming up with a hit movie or a hit song,” Richard Yanofsky, one of WowWee’s founders, said in an interview last month. “If you see signs of success, you pour gas on it.”
WowWee is owned by Wiseman’s uncles, Richard and Peter Yanofsky, with Richard living and working in Montreal and Peter in California. Her mother, a former veterinarian, also works at the company, as do two cousins. Wiseman is a brand manager at WowWee.
Their family has been making robots for decades. Its first big hit, in 2004, was Robosapien, a robot measuring more than a foot tall that could walk and talk and originally sold for about $100.
But pricey robots are more difficult to sell these days. The challenge for WowWee’s designers was developing a monkey with just enough sounds and movements to entertain children, but not so many sensors and circuitry that it would be prohibitively expensive to make.
The first prototype looked like a primordial creature that had crawled out of the jungle. “It was a little scary,” recalled Davin Sufer, the company’s chief technology officer.
Over time, the monkey’s face softened into something cuter. It developed a curly tail and plump arms and legs.
Wiseman reviewed dozens of monkey sounds until she settled on the right voice.
A Fingerling can snore, say hello and babble in monkey gibberish.
If one Fingerling starts singing, it triggers sensors in nearby Fingerling monkeys — the company hopes you’ll buy several — that get them to join in.
Wiseman and her team came up with the name Fingerling — not Finger monkey — so the brand could produce other miniature animals. (One of them, a sloth, moves, sings and, yes, farts about 10 per cent slower than the monkeys.)
“You know you can trust a toy company if its toys fart,” Wiseman said.
“It knows what kids want.”
Kehoe, Walmart’s high-ranking toy executive,
knew right away that the Fingerling would be a hit.
“This monkey creates an emotional connection right in front of your face,” Kehoe said in an interview this month.
But it is sales potential, not emotion, that drives her decisions. Kehoe views even a wacky toy like the Fingerling through the lens of a retailer with troves of data on what customers are willing to buy, and at what price.
“It’s such an art and a science,” she said.
WowWee’s wooing of Walmart began in June 2016 when Wiseman flew to Bentonville to pitch the Fingerlings.
Walmart was sold almost instantly on the toy’s appeal, but the price was a problem.
WowWee had originally planned on selling the Fingerling for $20, but the giant retailer was insistent: About $15 was the magic number. Drop $5 from the price and Walmart would buy as many as 10 times more Fingerlings.
Walmart had been doing this for decades — pushing down the price of paper towels, toothbrushes, avocados and now robotic monkeys in order to sell as many as possible.
Back in Montreal, the WowWee executives debated the price cut; it would mean sacrificing significant profit on each monkey.
“It was pure margin,” Sufer recalled.
Wiseman pleaded with the team.
In the past, WowWee had stood firm on keeping a higher price, only to mark down the toys later when they didn’t sell.
“I said, ‘I am telling you, I don’t want to fight this,’” Wiseman recalled. “They are saying it for a reason. They know.” The price was set at roughly $15. When Fingerlings hit stores across the United States in August, Maya Vallee-Wagner, 7, was overcome with emotion.
“Fingerlings,” Maya said, through sobs. “They’re in stores. I am so happy.”
Her father, Nathan Vallee, who owns a decorative concrete company in suburban Detroit, shot a video of his daughter’s reaction in the toy aisle of a local Target and sent it to WowWee.
Wiseman, enthralled by the video, posted it on the company’s Facebook page, and it went viral.
“This made my life,” Wiseman said of the video.
Not long after the social media push in August, the monkeys were basically sold out everywhere, and WowWee was able to pull back on its marketing.
WowWee executives are confident the Fingerling’s popularity will live on past Christmas, but the company’s designers are already pitching their next big toy for 2018.