How Kess Entertainment Blends Toy Innovation & Entertainment

Jason Hsieh (00:42)
Welcome back to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed. In this episode, we are joined by Alex, a seasoned expert in toys, puzzle and gaming industry with a very unique family history. Alex’s grandfather invented the hula hoop and his parents founded the outdoor toy company, Maui Toys. And with a wealth of experience in both entertainment and toys and game industry, Alex has built the current brand that he currently runs, Cass Entertainment, into a striving business. So thank you so much for being on our podcast today, Alex.

Alex Kessler (01:12)
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

Jason Hsieh (01:14)
Yeah, so I know this is like a family ⁓ legacy business that you have been running. Can you kind of share a little bit about the background, maybe talking about your grandfather and talking about your parents, businesses they have run?

Alex Kessler (01:27)
So my my grandfather was a depression era plastics manufacturer. He got started during World War Two, repurposing the plastic and trash off of World War One planes and then reading it for planes for World War Two. He had 2500 pounds to his name, mostly in industrial equipment. everything from push, pull, bottle caps to they did for detergent to a way to unsink sunken ships to

a lot of flooring and kitchen cabinets and weather stripping. But then most relevant to this story is a plastic extruded toy hoop. And then didn’t know what to do with it. It was just something he tried making work. He was an entrepreneur at Harvard, he just come up with ideas. And then about a year later, Art Linkletter’ had a Aboriginal dance troupe on doing a bunch of different dances from New Zealand. And one of them was a dance with a bamboo hoop that eventually

fostered the toy play pattern of Dancing with the Hula Hoop and the Hula Hoop fad, which was the first fad in American history. My grandfather knew Art Linkletter through growing up together and they called him up knowing he had this product. It was like, hey, you can make this, right? Can we sell it? And so them and Wham-O all partnered together to create the first fad. After the fad kind of tailed down, he was like, don’t know anything about toys. This is this was too much of a roller coaster.

And so we got out of it. And then around on the 30th anniversary, which is the year I was born. So 1988. So 1958 was the year the fad of the Hula hoop happened. 1988. A grocer chain out of Ohio reached out to my father and was like, Hey, it’s the 30th anniversary. We’d love to do a run. My grandfather once again, no interest in doing this. None of the family had any interest. It was a big family business. All my cousins were a part of it.

And so my dad and my mom left and started making hoops and got started with there, did really well. And then we’re able to grow it to being one of the largest outdoor spring summer brands in the country called Maui Toys. They made everything from the sky ball to the wave hoop to jump ropes, the rock and roll top, which was their first like big hit was a music playing that played white belt when you spun it as a top.

I saw as the patent and like first million copies sold plaque in his office. And then from 2010, my dad started investing in other companies, everything from cannabis, he’s actually very involved in that space. And then to entertainment play, he was a producer

and to medical equipment to transportation. And so then he was too busy. And so then at the same time, specific, I was looking to build an outdoor spring summer brand they just bought Mount it! Kids only. And there was an opportunity for them to buy Maui and so I sold. And that’s kind of when I jumped full time into the toy industry. So if you had asked me when I was in my early 20s, if I

would work for my father, would say hell no. Okay. Yeah. And so when he sold, was like, okay, I like because I was at the time working in entertainment, which I think we’ll get into in a bit. And wanted a career change. And it was an opportunity to join without having my dad be my direct boss, because that sounded miserable at the time. Now we get along very well. And then so left joined Jax at the time.

and, and, and jumped in the business pretty, pretty fully started marketing and sales. and then, due to my dad being busy and kind of retiring, the product development team, had a vacuum on, on design and ideas. And I was able to jump in having been the test dummy for every toy my parents ever made, broken a lot of dollars worth of prototypes in my life. and then I, eventually, started running the product development department. Then,

Jax decided to shut down domestic operations for Maui, moving all manufacturing out of the country, moving kind of most of the team into other divisions. And I thought that as an opportunity to start Kess because I think manufacturing domestically was really important. It’s now more important than ever if you pay attention to the news. And I knew that there were reasons that we were able to be really successful with what we were doing. So that’s where we ended up.

Jason Hsieh (05:21)
Yeah, and I also want to dive into, because you have a lot of experience, not just in the toys and game industry, but also on the entertainment side. Can you kind of also tell the listener a little bit about what you have done on the entertainment side and some of the projects you have worked on so far?

Alex Kessler (05:36)
Yeah, so that was what I wanted to do originally. So when I got out of college, I started working in entertainment. started at a town agency called Innovative Artists. I worked my way through the mail room to being an assistant. It was during the era of, if anyone has watched Entourage, and so a lot of the agents that we also worked with, this was pre the canceling era of don’t make hostile work environments. So I got yelled at a lot. And then there was an opportunity to go work for Vin Di Bona

Productions, which are if you’ve ever seen America’s Funniest Home Videos is the production a lot of reality tv. I worked for them. And then a buddy of mine had an idea and wanted to create kind of like a YouTube production company competitor. The kind of like a Hulu-esque platform and I wanted to make TV so I started a production company with him. And so we did a lot of gaming content. So we were it was a lot of we did a TV show kind of like Clark’s meet Scrubs based around playing

tabletop games based in a local game store. We did like a tonight show talk show project with Rocket Jump, who was one of the biggest YouTube channels at the time. We were one of the first vendors at VidCon. We were the first I think year two at VidCon, we had a booth, year two and year three. And then start making television. That was kind of the deal. It was also an era where people, know, investment wise, like, you could make

TV, but on YouTube at a full production television experience, which ended up not being the case, right? That’s eventually why I left was we were making high quality TV show level content and the ad revenue just wasn’t especially then. If you were a million billion subscriber person or even hundreds of thousands subscriber person and you were just by yourself doing production content as like a vlogger, money was there for you. If you were paying a crew of eight

to 20 people, a cast of 12 people, writers, et cetera. The ad revenue just wasn’t. And Patreon didn’t even exist yet. So there wasn’t really an opportunity there.

Yeah, so that’s that’s the beginning of my life. Since then, so I continued even once I joined Jax, I founded one of the largest Magic: The Gathering content podcasts. So about competitive gaming there with my host, now my VP of sales, co host, and then transitioned into doing content early on in like

2018, 2019 for TikTok and doing Magic: The Gathering content there and having like a Magic: The Gathering ambassador and gaming ambassador for Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro for years now. And then kind of coinciding with us launching our game titles and what we’re doing here at Kess.

Jason Hsieh (08:00)
Hmm, I see, I see, I see. And how do you translate some of those experiences that you have done in the entertainment industry into the toys and games business that you currently run?

Alex Kessler (08:09)
Yeah, so kind of in two probably key ways. One, I’ve had a good track record up to this point of like kind of reading the pulse somewhat is exciting entertainment wise. So we were able to jump onto the anime trend, for instance, before right, it blew up. One of the reasons we’ve been able to do well there is before COVID, we were already working with licensing partners and already talking to people like Toei to do a One Piece board game and puzzles and

talking to Crunchyroll and Funimation to do content there. We already had a game with VizD working on Naruto and Baruto and knowing that like, hey, as this industry continues to make really good content and streaming is hungry for good content, there’s going to be an opportunity here for this to blow up in the United States. And then COVID happened, Avatar the Last Airbender released on Netflix was the biggest show of all time for them as a re-release and then just kind of hit the ground running where we…

were really able to buy understanding with that retail. And then that’s kind of translated even to now where seeing the writing on the wall a few years ago on how kind of the comic focused movie landscape was kind of waning, right? With the Marvel MCU trailing down and the kind of restructuring. That video game content was finally getting into the point where it’s starting to do well, right? We had the Sega movie.

with Sonic do the first one to do well successfully. And then that was followed by the Mario Brothers movies making a billion dollars. Last of Us, which is airing its second season now Fallout last year. But then even Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddy’s movies that from a critical perspective were panned. But the fandom was so rabid for it and excited for it that they’ve done stunning and we were able to kind of jump in with licensors ahead of time on that. then so like

Being able understand what that landscape and what the media landscape looked like and making sure we’re on trend has been really successful. Other side of that spectrum, which is just knowing how content creation works, knowing how to build followings online, understanding TikTok, what I think a lot of people didn’t has been really successful in kind of helping build communities, building audience for those brands that we’re working on. Between me and Ben, who we’ve been able to do really successful projects on, you know,

growing audiences in those spaces and that continues to do well.

Jason Hsieh (10:22)
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I know you have secured some very impressive license in animation or the animate space. Like what are some of the process you guys to secure all the big licenses?

Alex Kessler (10:37)
Yeah, so we have relationships with the licensors and we built those through going to licensing expo and knowing someone who knew someone who knew someone. But the kind of the way that the conversations really started to foster strongly was we were walking into the meetings and at a time when toy companies would come to anime studios and do one of two things, they would say, we want Dragon Ball Z or Sailor Moon. And that’s it.

Or they would come in and like, what’s good? You tell us what we should be licensing. And I walked into the meetings being like, I want Jujustu Kaizen and Haikyu. And Chainsaw Man the manga got announced for an anime two years. We want to secure the licensing rights of that now because we know that that’s going to be extremely hype come 2023. You know, let’s focus on these properties that I know are good in the audience is therefore, but maybe the classic.

toy industries are really looking at the action figure industry isn’t really looking at because they in the US don’t understand this market. And so just being a giant nerd and being knowledgeable about the properties. I mean, we we in general at Kess kind of are proud of the fact that we’re fans of the properties that we’re working on, you know, we’re fan content about content that we love. And so

being able to talk to licensors at their level, you know, I’m in meetings with TOEI and correcting the licensing approval on what artwork for which pirate ships exists in the property, right? And so that’s been I think the licensors appreciate that, right? Like they, they need their licensing partners to know the properties that they’re working on to some extent, because otherwise there’s just not a way for them to feel comfortable with you.

handling your children, right? This is their baby. This is the thing that they care the most about and they want to make sure their partners do as well.

Jason Hsieh (12:16)
For sure. think that’s also one thing that makes your company stand out, doing those negotiations with the licensors, because you understand the property. You actually watch, I believe you also watch some of the anime yourself.

Alex Kessler (12:27)
All of it, but most of it. Watched all of it.

Jason Hsieh (12:30)
Yeah. And I know you have like a few new products you’re also working on. If you don’t mind sharing.

Alex Kessler (12:35)
Yeah,

so so this year we have well, we have for sure for channels launching tariffs will dictate at what extent that is. But on the first one, we launched the new trivia game called Castless, which is in house developed. worked with the professional world of movie trivia, a show called Movie Trivia Schmoedown, which is by WWE writers to kind of produce this really cool game. We also the next game is caught that’s coming on right now is Hunter x Hunter.

So this is based on Hunter x Hunter 287th exams. I actually was the lead designer on this game, which is really going to come to fruition. But this comes out in June. It comes out early at Barnes and Noble, starting into May. And then the rest of the world will have it by July. And then we also have a Tamagotchi game that comes out towards the end of beginning of Q3, as long as the world of shipping doesn’t explode. the political climate.

Jason Hsieh (13:27)
Yeah, personally, I’m also a huge anime fan myself. Actually, you mentioned about Hunter x Hunter. I watch all the episodes myself. So I know the property really well. And that’s something my one of my daughter also I’m really into anime. And as you know, my background, my wife is Japanese and I speak full in Japanese myself. And we go back to Japan every single year during the summer. Yeah. So yeah, so I think just like you say, a lot of the scene that’s already trending in Japan, but it’s not quite trending in US yet.

but you only know that if you are following the anime culture really closely in Japan. And I think that’s also some of your unique ability because of the experience you have been working in the entertainment industry that kind of you have like a special eye for like what is going to be trending in the upcoming futures. So, and I also want to dive into when you are getting those like licenses from some licensors.

What is your current processes for product design and also manufacturing? And how long does that usually take you and your team to do that after you secure the license?

Alex Kessler (14:31)
Yeah, it depends on the property. Kind of what we call sometimes is a year zero. for game design, especially, it can take up to two years to do a game design project. For instance, we’re working on a second one piece game now that has not been announced. And it is starting development over a year and a half ago and won’t come out till next year.

So depending on the size of the game, some games have been developed within two months and then some games take much longer. Then the licensing approval process happens that takes probably another three months all in if we’re lucky. then manufacturing goes through like a 45 day period to kind of get it up and running and then an additional 45 days of production with eight week shipping logistics, getting through all of everyone’s

VCs into the water into our warehouse into their warehouse on destroy shelves. As far as production goes, or as far as sales and working with partners, it depends. Normally we’ll about a year ahead of time start pitching to our retail partners what our planned releases for the next year are. then depending on the partner and what they want to do, if I’m from Target or Barnes & Noble, we’ll make their selections. That’ll kind of dictate to some extent what we

go to market on but then on properties that they don’t pick up will work with specialty and hobby to your local game store and your partners and Amazon to launch in those categories and those platforms to kind of have a launch there as well. So it just depends on what retails are excited for and what we end up doing. Normally, we try and structure different price points on a yearly launch. We’ll have a $20 game, a $30 game, a $50 game.

and a $10 game and that’s kind of like the range that we spectrum and then we figure out what’s possible.

Jason Hsieh (16:07)
I see. And how much play testing do you also do in that process?

Alex Kessler (16:11)
I think the most important thing you do when developing a game is play tests. In fact, we have this afternoon, we’ll be scheduling probably three different play tests. We’ll also do blind play testing where we send a rule book that’s hopefully good enough and a bunch of hardboard components that have hand scribbled notes on them. You can see something like this. ⁓ And hope they figure it out. And we have a questionnaire that they fill out and we get information. We do a bunch of testing in-house with our in-house designers. We’ll do testing with

Jason Hsieh (16:28)
⁓ huh

Alex Kessler (16:39)
whoever we can get in the office and then figure it out.

Jason Hsieh (16:41)
I see, see. And I know you have so many different product lines right now. How many total SKUs do you currently carry?

Alex Kessler (16:48)
I think it’s somewhere around 150 different SKUs are currently on line shelf in market at the moment. We normally launch around 10 new SKUs a year between the toy line, the puzzle line and the games line. And then it’s like five a season. So for instance, for spring summer this year, we launched a new bubble line. We have two new bubble products on the market at like five below in Albertsons. We have a new hoop at Target, a tie dye hoop that’s like a

You could run it over with a car, which is cool. And then we have a new ⁓ jumper up with Friendship Place, on like Taylor Swift trend. And then as far as games go, we launched the games I mentioned. So that’s around 10 products.

Jason Hsieh (17:25)
I see. Okay. Yeah, that’s quite a bit of a SKU to manage. And you also have like a dedicated a puzzle line called de.bored

Alex Kessler (17:33)
Yeah, yeah, so we launched that right before COVID, which was beneficial. It kind of focuses both on in-house developed artwork that we work with independent artists on to develop and then launch. And then we also have a line of licensed products that we do. This year we did a One Piece puzzle and then we’ve done Jujutsu Kaisen, Haikyu, Spy x Family, Chainsaw Man, think are this. And then Full Metal Alchemist are the anime licenses we’ve done in puzzles and then in-house developed artwork.

Jason Hsieh (17:58)
I see. Okay. And how do you, as far as marketing, goes like because you have so many different line like puzzle and hula hoops and then games like how, is your overall like marketing strategy

Alex Kessler (18:11)
each line is different. And because the audiences are different, right? Games games are older skewing. We’re like 13 plus. But like a lot of the audience for what we’re working on is even in the 18 plus adult gamer world with expendable income. And in that world, it’s really looking into their fandoms, right? We work with the licensors to to attach their fandoms. We have our own community building tools, everything from Discord to Facebook to.

Now blue sky and etc. And then for the puzzle world was very Instagram focused. the anime properties that goes to the entertainment space. But for there is very focused on TikTok and Instagram. And then working with our retail partners on at store retail excitement. And then for this outdoor spring summer stuff, there’s a lot of like there’s there’s some amount of influence work we do across the board on all platforms.

With toys, we’re a little bit more careful becasue you don’t want to focus on like, we have never been bitten, but we’ve seen people be bitten of like working with family influencers that then that turns dark. Like when people are kind of making a living off of their children, there could be problems there. So we try and be very selective when we’re working with people. We have PR companies we work with that help us vet them go through that vetting process. And then

do a lot of in-store marketing experiences. So we work on making sure all of our products shine on shelf. When you see them at retail, you know what it is. Why is it exciting? Why is it pretty? Why would I buy this? And that has been really successful.

Jason Hsieh (19:30)
I see. Do you have any tips for our audience to stay ahead of the trend in the toys and game industry?

Alex Kessler (19:36)
Jokingly be addicted to social media. ⁓ I think like be aware, you know, go to stores, be, be like as much as you can, right? See what other people are doing. See what’s selling, see what’s not selling, see whether it might be holes. Look into what you’re noticing as far as trends, as far as audiences go. There’s really cool features on like stuff like TikTok where you can look at the hashtag and it’ll give you.

views on that individual hashtag or the number of videos on the individual hashtag, which is a very useful tool. There is kind of some more content on Google and with YouTube and Meta as well. If you want to kind of validate the gut feeling you’re having on what vibes are good at the moment. And that from a research perspective is very helpful.

And then also communicating with buying partners, we do a lot of, which I know is not the easiest thing to do, but getting their feedback, getting what they’re seeing as far as what they’re getting and kind of trying to be ahead of what they’re seeing instead of behind.

Jason Hsieh (20:27)
Got it. Thank you so much for sharing. What has been some of your most rewarding moment in the industry so far?

Alex Kessler (20:33)
Getting the One Piece license and launching a game for it. That was amazing. ⁓ I’m a massive One Piece fan. It’s been really, really exciting to see how well people have appreciated that game, how it’s done, how it’s at the market, and just getting to be a part of creating something in that community. know, Oda-sensei is like an amazing world builder and creator and being able to even adjacently get to participate in that world has been stunning.

Up on the target for the first time we had there’s a photo that exists somewhere and I had like the worst haircut of my life so I don’t share this but our big PDQ of dropped out balls which was our first ball that we launched with our hoops at store level and then like even seeing people like cousins finding our toys at market and be like we found your stuff that that was probably another those are probably the two big big rewarding that jumped to mind off the question for sure.

Jason Hsieh (21:19)
I see. Thank you so much for sharing those unique moments. And as well, kind of wrapping up today’s interview here, if you have to share just one piece of advice with someone that’s getting started within the toys and game industry, what would that be?

Alex Kessler (21:31)
Build a community, like I think, it’s the thing that sucks right now. I think about the world to some extent. And like you hear a lot about it the music industry where like successful musicians now are people that are able to build themselves online and build a community around themselves. But I think that like really participating on the internet and building communities around yourself is gonna really, really help kind of build an audience and be able to build product.

Especially in the world of gaming and game design, that the entry to get started is really through a Kickstarter environment and that kind of experience. I think my ability to be online and to communicate directly with people that are using our product and having fun with our games has been invaluable from the very beginning.

Jason Hsieh (22:11)
Got it. Okay. Yeah. And thank you so much for being on our show. Where can people find more about your company online?

Alex Kessler (22:18)
Yeah,

you can. So if you go to kessentertainment.co no “m” at the end, that’s our main website. I’m @kesswylie on basically every platform. So Instagram, TikTok, Blue Sky. I don’t really post on X very much anymore. And then kess_ent or kessplay on all platforms. So that’s that’s the best place to find us for sure.

Jason Hsieh (22:37)
Okay, I’ll make sure we include that in the show note. And thank you so much again for being on our show today and sharing your experiences and your amazing story with the brand you have built so far. For our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Toy Business Unboxed podcast. We hope you have enjoyed today’s 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 never miss an episode.

We really appreciate your support and would love it if you can leave us a review and share the podcast with your friend and colleague. For more resource tips and the latest update we in the toys and game industry, visit our website at toy-launch.com. Join the conversation and connect with us on social media using #toybusinessunboxed. We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future episodes. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joy to toys. This is Jason Hsieh signing off on the Toy Business Unboxed Podcast. We’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much, everyone.