How Adaptive Toys Shape Lives: A Deep Dive with Seth Kanor

EP045_10-15-24_Seth Kanor

Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Toy Business Unboxed, your gateway to the secrets of the toy industry. Here, Jason Hsieh, a toy entrepreneur and expert in the field. “Every product we develop is really inspired by some of the real life experience that we have with our son.” “60 percent of all toys last year were sold on Amazon.”

“Be passionate about it. Because it’s a road. It’s a journey.” “Like when you have an idea that you think is gonna somewhat change the world, make things better, I’d say go for it.“

Jason Hsieh: Welcome to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed. Today, we’re thrilled to have Seth, the President and CEO of Enabling Devices, joining us. Founded by his father in 1978, Enabling Devices has spent over four decades designing innovative toys and tools for people with disabilities. From its humble [00:01:00] beginning as a small family business to becoming a leader in an adaptive product, the company remains in its commitment to unlock potential and bring joy to those with special needs. Which is also a topic that is really deep in my heart with all the different business ventures I’m part of. So thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Seth Kanor: Jason, thank you for having me. I really appreciate the time.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah, so can you first of all start out telling our audience a little bit about how it all begun many years ago?

Seth Kanor: Yeah my father had been a medical engineer. He’d been doing some cancer research and he was looking for work and a friend said, listen, why don’t you go to United Cerebral Palsy? out on Long Island. We were living in Hastings, New York at the time, and he had no experience with the special needs community. But his father had been a toy train bridge builder, and so they did. So they tell him, Why don’t you just go out to United Cerebral Palsy and see if you can do some engineering for them, some medical engineering, see if they need something. And so he went [00:02:00] out To UCP in Long Island, and he walked into a room, and it was an empty room, and there was a child sitting there young child. And he was sitting in an empty room. And my father said to the therapist where are the toys? And the therapist said to him he has cerebral palsy, so he can’t play with toys. And my dad said that was unacceptable. So he came home to Hastings, to our basement, and he had an old toy train set. And this particular child had his head at an angle. He wasn’t able to hold his head up straight. And my father, now there’s a big focus in this world on positioning. It’s much easier to see the world if you’re able to be head on rather than an angle. It’s easier to negotiate, to walk, to communicate with people.

My father just intuitively felt that it would be easier for this child. His head were straight. So he made a mercury switch, which of course would now be illegal, probably. And which meant that when this switch was positioned like this, it would make a connection and the train would go around. They [00:03:00] placed this mercury switch in this young boys ear and showed him, lifted head up to this position, go around. And the bo the toy that within a week he completely changed his positioning a to a level that the thera possible. And you kno into medical engineering to help people. Suddenly realized that this was a field that could bring his talents together, both as an engineer, a medical engineer, an electrical engineer, and he’d even done a little mechanical engineering. And he just had a deep love for Children. Started making things one by one for each child in his basement. And that’s how it started.

Jason Hsieh: What year do you took over the company?

Seth Kanor: This is when I was a very young boy, this happened, and I worked in his shop, doing some work when I was a teenager, and then I left and did lots of other things, and around 2014 or 15 he was sick and I was involved in his day to day care, and I began Checking in with the [00:04:00] company just to make sure that everything was okay and they were looking to make a leadership change. And I just I came here thinking I would do some blogging or some writing for the company.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Seth Kanor: I just I fell in love with what was happening here because it’s so meaningful. And the staff here are so committed to helping people that it’s it’s just a very special place. And I immediately I knew that I wanted to be a deeper part of it. I took over around Thanksgiving of 2015.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, okay. So almost nine years ago today’s recording. So I think it’s always interesting when you have generational business, because each generation have, a different idea sometimes and personally, my dad also have a different type of business that before he sold the company, he was really want me to take over Uhhuh, that for me, there, there was some hesitation and I decided not to take over the business at the end. But I think coming from you, from your perspective, when your father asked you to take over the business, was there any hesitation on taking it over? [00:05:00] Or what was your perspective?

Seth Kanor: I think I probably had some of the same reservations that you have, which is I certainly didn’t think I could fill his shoes. I think and I thought it would be difficult to take it over just because he was a big personality and a brilliant inventor and a brilliant builder. And the way I was able to make it work for myself is I really see myself as a as a caretaker of what he started. It’s my job to nurture what he started, not to take it over and make it into something. It’s not him. There’s certain principles that he set down that I’m happy to follow it, when people can’t afford stuff, we find a way to work with them. If something is a is only needed by a few people, but those people need it, we do everything we can to keep it in the catalog. And I think you don’t work with special needs people or as a teacher even. or as a doctor or as a nurse or as a fireman, policeman, unless you’re really [00:06:00] interested in service.

So I think the hard lesson for me is that the company is not about me. It’s about certain. And once I realized that my job was to serve other people and serve the vision he had, which is how do we help the most people in the best way we can, then it became easy. But in the beginning it was tough. And I can see why you would have. It can be a tricky transition, so I appreciate it.

Jason Hsieh: For me, because I grew up watching my dad build his business as a kid and the employee that worked for him all watching me growing up. So it’s difficult to say, okay, now I’m going to take over and all the employee that’s reporting to me watch me grow up like my uncles and aunts and stuff. It’s just very awkward.

Seth Kanor: What did your dad do, Jason? Or what does he do? Or what did he do?

Jason Hsieh: At the end decide, we decided, he sold it at the end. So he sold the business. I didn’t take it over and continue its legacy,

Seth Kanor: it’s very, it’s very tricky. I was [00:07:00] aware of all the pitfalls, all the and when you’re coming to a leadership position I really, I’m not here to impose myself on people. I’m here to support them in any way that I can and I’m not. And so as I, if I approach it from support service, how can I help? How can I help the people who work here do what they do? How can I empower them? Then it becomes easier. So I’m not, in competition with.

Jason Hsieh: I want to transition to the next part of our interview.

Your company has been focusing, creating a lot of very adaptive toys and tool. And I think you have one that you can demo with the audience? And show them all the different creativity that your team put into creating the product.

Seth Kanor: Yeah. So we make a lot of toys. We do a lot of children’s toys that we adapt for kids who have cerebral palsy or any other neurological issues because sometimes they may not be able to use their hands, so we have eye blink switches and we have a sip and puff switch if they can control their for late stage [00:08:00] people with ALS, they may only be able to twitch or move a part of their face. So we have a twitch switch. I think I was telling you a grip and puff switch. Here’s a simple capability switch. You could hit it like this or we could position it near your knee or near your elbow. We have head switches. So with whatever device we do, we’re looking for a way to get you involved. And we’re doing lots of toys, typical toys that kids five or six might have. But people said to us what about when kids are teenagers? They want stuff that doesn’t look like toys. They might want something that looks like something a sibling might have. So we designed this amplifier. This is 3d printed and it’s an amplifier that is volume and some reverb and delay. And it’s got a headphone jack so we don’t drive parents crazy. I know how that can be. And there’s a company that has these Berklee School of Music guys doing their programming, and they developed this beautiful musical program that plays a series of notes [00:09:00] randomly, but each note works with the next.

So the idea of using the capability switch with their program was that a child could Use an eye blink switch, say, to activate these different tones. And we recently were dealing with this young girl and her family and her mother and she wanted a musical toy and she has full body myopathy. I was telling you, she only, she can use, I think it’s her ring finger has a little bit of She has a little bit of control over that left. And so we designed this very colorful keyboard for her that we just made as a one off for her so that no matter where her hand is placed, wherever she hits it, she can activate it. And use this to make music and her mother sent us a video of her using this with a big smile on her face. And so I was thrilled that we were able to do something a little more sophisticated musically.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. Thank you for doing that. And I think your team had put a lot of time and energy.

How long does it take to design a product like that with your team?

Seth Kanor: That’s a great question. In this case Bill Peterson’s our [00:10:00] lead. Designer, but there are lots of people helping him. So he was able to draw this up fairly quickly basing this off of a classic Fender amplifier. The program, we rarely do this. This was a program that was open sourced, but we still call the the guy who had done the program and said, listen, we know it’s open source, but we want to put this in a product for people with special needs. And he said, please do whatever you want with it. But then we had to take that off of the software on the board they’ve been using it on and translate it to the boards we use. And so that this one came together pretty quickly because we were able to take some different elements and put it together. And then once we knew where we wanted the board to sit in the speakers and which speaker we wanted to use then Bill went back into the design and design the, the inner parts of it.

So it all fit together. But let me not say this one was easy. This one probably start to finish was a couple of months. Sometimes on a simpler toy, we’re just getting into the circuitry and interrupting the circuit so that we can use our capability switches and those can happen quite quickly.

Jason Hsieh: I see.

Seth Kanor: [00:11:00] And sometimes we’re building a toy from the ground up. Because of 3D printing. We have occasionally designed a toy and gone from an idea to a prototype in two days.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, whoa. Okay. That’s really fast.

Seth Kanor: That’s really been a, and we still do some, we do a lot of thermoforming, which is an older form of molding for parts. But 3D printing has been a game changer for us because we can get prototypes very quickly. And this every part on this, except for these the knobs and the switches. This is all 3D printed.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, nice.

Seth Kanor: Including the handle and the back. So I think this and the internal parts were printed, within 24 hours.

Jason Hsieh: I see. Usually, annually, how much new product is your team usually work on?

Seth Kanor: We’re normally they’re always, anytime a toy becomes popular we try to grab it and adapt it. We there’s certain standbys we have that seemed to really work. And they’ve been in the catalog for a long time. And if you’re browsing through our catalog, they tend to have. lower product numbers. You 72, then you know [00:12:00] it’s, i a while. Whereas if you s there’s some products that designed and they just re kids with special needs a to make them. But we’re e printing, we are, I’ve en I’m going to go ahead and grab this if it’s okay. This is a 3D car. This is printed.

Jason Hsieh: Oh. Okay.

Seth Kanor: And I said, look we’ll learn something from printing it. We’ll learn something from putting it together. This is an open source file. Sorry, the wheel’s not working. We’ll learn something about printing wheels, about putting it together. Maybe we’ll motorize it and figure out how to adapt it for someone with a special need. The mandate. we have over there is just anything you think of creatively. It’s Halloween. So they made these scary penguins. We’ll learn something from making it. So we just, they’re just, it is toys. And the point is and this is something my dad felt really strongly about that we’ve continued is this has to be joyful.

And if you go into a center where there People are working with [00:13:00] special needs. I think for someone who’s not in this world, the first thing that will strike somebody who hasn’t been there before is the joy. The joy of reaching a kid who Maybe it was withdrawn and can’t use his or her body and can’t play in the world and be in the world is suddenly speaking with a communicator or playing with a toy. So we want to bring that same spirit into our shop. We’re having fun in the office, we’re having fun in the shop. We’re building stuff that we think will make us laugh or could that our kids might like to play with. And then we, okay, our kids love this. How do we get this to everybody’s kids? We’re constantly building stuff.

Jason Hsieh: I see. And I think we share a similar mission. Of course our company design a little bit simpler product. Doesn’t have all the feel and whistle, the one that you have. Ours is a little bit simpler. And I think one of the things I deal with is when we design product, we also do a lot of kind of play testing. Is that also part of your process? When it comes to play testing?

Seth Kanor: We do, we have to, there [00:14:00] are two ways we do it. One is I have a six year old and a two year old, if they like it. But we also work there’s Elizabeth Seton, which is near us. Both C’s there’s a, both C’s near us that we go to and we take these products and we put it in the hands of the kids will be using them and then we get notes back from the occupational therapist might be a child might, this might be the switch and we’ve built it up here. And so they’re not hitting it like this. They’re rolling up onto it. So the teacher may say, Hey, can you angle this here? So that are, so they’ll, we’ll watch how the child is using it.

And then we’ll take notes from the occupational therapist and saying, what do you need? And it all comes back to service. Tell us what you need. What is this child like? What do their siblings like? This other girl I was telling you about before with full body myopathy, she wants to play games with her brothers. So we have a spinner that she can just hit a switch with and it spins on dice numbers that monopoly with we have a thing where you can just, we have a device that you press on and it rolls real [00:15:00] dice. You can play games with your siblings. We have silly things like just again, toys that kids might play with in their one or two, and we’re just trying to get them engaged. One of the big buzzwords in our field is cause and effect.

I’m sure people have seen this with their Children. Your child wants to press the button on the elevator or the light switch and what they’re learning is When I press this button, the light goes on. When I turn this lock, the door, when I press this button, the elevator comes, and so we want these children to have the same learning experience, when I press this switch music comes out of this box, when I press this button, the message plays that says. I’m hungry or I’d like to nap now for we have a communicators for children who can’t speak, so they might start with a simple yes and a no. So when I press this side, it means yes. And when I press this side, it says no, they’re also having agency in the world, some control over what, so all the stuff that kids are struggling with, we want and learning from, we want these kids having the same experience.

Jason Hsieh: I think you might face a [00:16:00] similar challenge when you come to, I know for your company, you also sell internationally to other global marketplaces, but unfortunately, some of the special needs awareness in some part of the world is just not quite there compared to the United States. And I personally experienced that firsthand, like I mentioned to you before the interview that kind of forced us to move away from Japan where we originally lived because there wasn’t enough awareness, there wasn’t enough support, there wasn’t enough therapy in Japan back in 2013 when we used to live there.

Do you also face some of the challenges when you’re trying to expand into other global markets for your brands and line of products?

Seth Kanor: Yeah, even in Europe where you would think, I feel like they’re so ahead of us in so many aspects of health care and we’re getting certified in Europe right now. And it’s a very arduous process, but we didn’t, when we looked at different companies in Europe, we were surprised that weren’t a lot of adapted toys or they’re pretty good. There are a lot of communicators for kids and adults who can’t speak, but [00:17:00] really just adapted toys that encourage play and learning adapted therapeutic learning toys, capability switches like this one.

We’re not seeing a lot of, so we’re in the process right now. We’re working with the dealer and we’re in the process of getting things certified. But the roadblock there is also that it’s the certification in Europe is there’s a lot of paperwork and a lot of testing that has to happen. But we’re always trying to believe it or not just in Japan, there are parts of this country where people haven’t heard of us and. We get a call and we’ll say, Hey, we didn’t. We wish we had known that you exist because there’s so many underserved parts of this country to my dream is just is for us to be able to expand even more. For two reasons. One, we want to reach everybody that we can to we’d love to, we’d love to keep our pricing down by having more volume because it’s very expensive to do these things and we know that families who have special needs kids are under an additional pressure. Okay. So we’re working hard to expand wherever we can.

Jason Hsieh: Do you have any special product for sensory needs as well?

Seth Kanor: We do have lots of sensory [00:18:00] products. In Europe, sensory products, there’s a big company, they’re called Esalen and they’re very good. I’m sorry. Esalen. Esalen is, I just. I’m sorry, I’m a little sleepless. It’s called Snoozlin.

Jason Hsieh: Snoozlin, okay.

Seth Kanor: And they’re very high end, very good sensory products, but they’re very expensive. There’s more government subsidy there. We’ve been able to really make some less expensive sensory stuff that I think is really good. We do some reselling, but we’ve done we do sensory products and actually we just put in a sensory room at Yankee Stadium.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, nice. Okay.

Seth Kanor: They were great to work with, wonderful people. We’re hoping to do more of that. Kids on the spectrum, if they’re in a big stadium, it’s noisy. There’s light all over the place. It’s nice for them to have a place where they can, Where they can calm themselves and we also did one at I forget. It’s the Sesame street theme park in Pennsylvania. I think it’s called,

Jason Hsieh: yeah, I think it’s called autism certified or something like that, right?

Seth Kanor: I’m not [00:19:00] sure we did it a while ago, but we need to do more, theme parks and stadiums and and that’s a, an area where I think awareness is really being raised. It seems like people are doing more spaces, especially because the world is so There’s so many overstimulating places in the world, and I think it’s tough on kids.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah, for sure. That’s also something my son struggled with when he was much younger. I think he outgrew some of that. Yeah. Now he’s already 14. And one of our partner Culture City, they also have a program called Sensory Inclusive Initiative, which they go into the stadiums and zoos and aquariums to try to help create a more sensory inclusive environment for the family that’s It’s great attending and going to those venues.

So I think that’s a very important mission as far as creating more of an inclusive environment and kind of situation for the family because you can imagine sometimes really hard for the family to take their kids to those kind of [00:20:00] location.

Seth Kanor: It’s tough to be a parent. Anyway, and then, yeah, my wife works at the Atlantic theater. She does theater for children and they do special performances where they bring the volume down and they make the lights a little softer. So I think this is an area where there’ve really been great strides made towards neurodiversity and trying to work with kids who are and adults who are struggling with that.

Jason Hsieh: And I think you mentioned your company’s mission go beyond just making devices. Obviously. Can you also expand on how are you also supporting the special need community in different ways?

Seth Kanor: We’re constantly doing we’re visiting special needs centers and we’re, COVID set us back a little bit, but the key for us is to get out into these centers so that we’re actually working with the kids because we may have an idea that this is fun and it looks cool and we love it, but until we see a kid’s hand on it. It’s hard for us to know in terms of pushing did you mean a political level or at a community level pushing

Jason Hsieh: community level? Yeah,

Seth Kanor: yeah. I would love to find a [00:21:00] way to do that. One thing I’ve discovered in the last nine years is that we actually manufacture in the United States and actually right behind me is our warehouse where we’re making stuff. And we found that it’s, especially as a small business, the challenges of just making stuff in this country are great. And with supply chain issues in COVID, we really it was, We were doing everything we could just to stay afloat and I feel like we haven’t, I don’t think we’re not leaders in that area. And it would probably be hard for us of our size to do that. So we try to stay what we try to do, and this was something my dad did is, if somebody calls here, they will get a direct response from us. And if they ask to speak to me, they will get a direct response from me.

If we can come to where you are, we’ll. We’ll go if you’re within traveling distance, we’ll get on the phone with you. We will if it doesn’t work, give you a UPS label to get it back. We are one by one just [00:22:00] trying to make ourselves available to as many people as possible. And I’ve been looking for, hoping to partner with some children’s book writers because I thought that’d be a great way, some popular children’s book writers and see if we could, either make products based on some of their characters or do some stuff with their books.

Jason Hsieh: Also a side project I’m working on. I also started a foundation called Sensory Inclusive Classroom Foundation.

Seth Kanor: Great.

Jason Hsieh: The mission of our foundation is to put more sensory item into the school district and create more awareness. Right now it’s starting off in the Phoenix area, but that’s something maybe we can also potentially partner on.

Seth Kanor: We just want to support and we want to be involved in any way that we can. And we’d love to do that.

Jason Hsieh: Lastly, looking ahead, what are your hope for the company enabling device in the future? And how do you see the company continue to innovate in 2025 and beyond?

Seth Kanor: I think, when I first got on board the [00:23:00] technology. Sometimes I know people complain about technology and we’re all smartphone addicted and our Children are smartphone addicted and video game addicted. And that’s a real danger, I think and a real and a reasonable fear that, we social media is not good for our kids. Twitter is not good for us or X or whatever it’s called. But the plus side of technology is I better not show this board, but I have some boards. I’ll just flash this quickly. Wonderful programmer named Richard Hirsch in Scotland, and he is. He started with our company years ago, and he’s gone on to do much more sophisticated things, and he’s just incredibly brilliant.

So we are reprogramming all of our communicators. I haven’t touched on those. They I know our time is probably limited. These are communicators for kids who can’t speak for people who have a voice. And we start with simple two message communicators, and then we, yes, communicators grow as your capability grows. So these boards are very tricky to design and we would have five second messages or two second messages and 32, five second [00:24:00] messages. As I. S. D. S. Information storage devices and other components get much more capable, suddenly we have a device where we thought, geez, you can do a five second message to now it’s you could do a 20 minute message. You could do a sequence. You could read a whole book on one little communicator just by pressing a button that would go to the next page in a Children’s book. We can, as the technology gets more capable and more available to us, our internal stuff is getting more sophisticated so we could just, we can meet more needs and then the shell becomes because of 3d printing.

If someone says to us, kids are loving this toy, this book, this story, this play, this movie, we just feel that we can do anything for kids that somebody comes to us and we’re developing a network, whether it’s these wonderful musical programmers we work with to do this, we’re developing a network of people who get our mission, like Richard Hirsch is a programmer, Bill Peterson is our designer. And I’m leaving out, many people who help us accomplish [00:25:00] this, but we’ve finally gotten to the point in our shop where we feel short of sending a satellite up into space. We feel like, you know we’re not, we’re still in mid tech and light tech. We’re not obviously at high tech, but for something that would be meaningful for a child, if there’s a spark of an idea, either in us, a spark of an idea and a child, the spark of an idea in an occupational therapist. And they say, can you make this? Yeah. We now know we can say, yes, we can do it and if one person needs it and it would change their life, we will do it. It’s very exciting for us. The positive side of this tech creep.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. Thank you for sharing.

So for our listener and viewer, what is the best way for people to find you online?

Seth Kanor: Okay. We are at enablingdevices.Com. And for those of you who are spelling challenged, like I am, that’s E N A B L I N G devices. com. And the website’s very extensive. Hopefully it’s, I think we’ve made it a little [00:26:00] easier to navigate. I’m happy to give out my email. It’s set @enablingdevices.com anyone is welcome to email me. I will either get you an answer myself or get you to somebody in the company who can give you an answer and the door is open here. We’re near White Plains in New York and we have families visit if they want to try stuff. We’re in a little town called Hawthorne, New York, so we have great tech support. Vinny Lavodi and tech support is wonderful. If you have questions, our sales team headed by christy Chioffi is very knowledgeable, so there’s just, there’s a lot of support here.

If you have questions, and if we don’t know the answer, we have a network of people we can get you to, if you have a Child you have questions about or an adult or somebody with any neurological impairment.

Jason Hsieh: Thank you so much and for our listeners thank you for tuning in to today’s episode of toy business on box podcast. We really hope you have enjoyed the conversation and find it insightful and inspiring. If you like what you have heard be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform so you’d never miss an episode [00:27:00] We really appreciate your support and we love you if you can leave us a review and share the podcast with your friend and colleague. For resources Tips and the latest update in the toys and game industry.

Visit our website at toy-launch. com. Join the conversation and connect with us on social media using hashtag #ToyBusinessUnboxed. We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestion for the future episode. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joys to toys. This is Jason Hsieh signing off on the toy business on box podcast, and I’ll see you in the next episode.