How Overcoming Challenges Led to Award-Winning Toys: The Journey of Kevin and Laurie Lane

EP071_07-19-24_Kevin and Laurie Lane

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: Hello everyone. Welcome back for another episode of Toy Business Unbox. I’m your host Jason Hsieh, and today we have a wonderful interview coming ahead with Kevin and Laurie, the creative mind behind Create A Castle. From a simple vocation inspiration to revolutionizing the sand and [00:01:00] snow sculpture building businesses, they have a incredible journey they’re gonna share it with our audience today, and we’re gonna discover how they turn their moment of frustration into a toy industry sensation, overcoming challenges, and won multiple award including 2020s outdoor toys of the years, and also get insight into their innovative spirit and also why they started the business. Thank you for joining with us today.

Kevin: Our pleasure.

Laurie: Thank you for having us

Jason Hsieh: What made the idea of Behind the Create A Castle? How does everything started for you guys?

Kevin: Back, what was it, 2016 we were on vacation. And I had loved building sandcastles with my kids. We were going out to visit Laurie’s family in California, in Laguna Beach specifically, and I couldn’t bring all the big, bulky, sharp tools with me halfway basically across the country from Connecticut to California. Walking down to the beach, I realized I saw this dad and son using a flip mold. And I had gone recently to the hardware store to buy all these tools, knowing I was [00:02:00] leaving about a hundred dollars on a table buckets, tools, spatula, as you name it. I went and bought all of it to sculpt. And walking down to the beach, I see this dad and son using a flip mold. And realize that there was a frustration point and we all know it. Flip molds have been around forever. When you flip ’em and lift them, they generally don’t work that well. The sand tends to stick inside even if it does work perfectly it’s a one dimensional thing. It’s very small and you’re limited to how far you could take the sculpture. That’s when I realized that they would probably love to be able to do what I was able to do after years and years of practice with my kids. And that’s when I dreamed up create a castle to split the molds instead of lifting the molds. And also allow us for stacking on the right kind of beaches,

Laurie: basically that aha moment of there has to be a better way. Wait, I’m doing something. Everybody should be able to do this.

Jason Hsieh: I see, That’s incredible. And I also have three kids myself, 14, 10, and six. [00:03:00] And my son especially, he’s on the autism spectrum. He love playing with sand. He does love playing with sand. When in my old house in Seattle you can still play outside during the summer and in Phoenix, he couldn’t really play outside in the summer it’s too hot. So we had a sand pit in our backyard for my son that I built actually. Thank you for creating that and too bad I didn’t run into your company or I didn’t buy a toy earlier when I still have the same pit in my backyard.

Kevin: Ah, you got a reason to build another one now?

Jason Hsieh: Okay, do another one in the desert in Phoenix.

What was some of the first steps that you took to turn this idea that you got into a tangible product?

Kevin: Yeah. I think that night when I came up with this aha, like Laurie called it the aha moment. I went home and literally not home, but we went back to the

Laurie: You still on vacation? Yeah.

Kevin: Yeah. We went back to our hotel and I started researching on Alibaba, on Amazon to see if anything like I [00:04:00] was dreaming up existed. And we went through the whole process of really developing this at that early stage. And then we took it once we realized that there was really nothing on the market. I literally started ordering bigger buckets, like I think eight to 10 gallon buckets versus the traditional five gallon buckets. And modified ’em and started making crude prototypes by cutting ’em in half and zip tying ’em together. That was our earliest, that adaptation to seeing if this was a realistic kind of approach to whether or not this would work, which is crude prototyping. Versus getting into CNC machining and that heavy cost that comes along with doing all that.

Laurie: Yeah. He literally would take the zip tied bucket and go down to our local lake beach and he would be down there at night so nobody would see what he was doing. And like the security guard at one point was, what are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here. And he’s

Kevin: he actually called the cops on me.

Jason Hsieh: He called the cop on you.

Laurie: But then they explain he explained, listen, I don’t want anybody to see this. And they [00:05:00] were like, all right. That’s pretty cool. So they were very good with, they understood.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.

Do you have background in product design or how do you even know about the CNC machine and all the other technical aspects?

Kevin: Yeah. Being an entrepreneur you get thrust into things very quickly. And just by chance, so my background is actually tech. I did a website development, website engineering, CIS admin work. The full spectrum. And I was, happened to be working on another entrepreneur’s project, helping the engineer launch into the Amazon platform. We’re putting all the specs in to Amazon.

Jason Hsieh: Okay.

Kevin: And that’s when I started talking to the engineer saying, Hey, I have this idea, would you be interested in helping us? And he said, absolutely. So that’s when we started doing drawings in CAD and brought everything to life. And because I was in tech. I could go to, I had a friend who was working at MakerBot at the time. So he was literally like rapid prototyping 3D printouts for me once we got to [00:06:00] that early development stage.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, whoa. Okay.

And how long does it take you from idea to the first prototype?

Kevin: So idea to prototype was what, within a few months, right?

Laurie: That was pretty quick. Yeah. Maybe six. Maybe six months. ‘Cause there were a lot of different the very first 3D prototype was probably just a couple of months. But then when we actually did

Kevin: the CNC

Laurie: the CNC prototype was probably about six or seven months.

Kevin: Yep. And then we, through the engineer that we were working with is where we actually had our contact point with manufacturing. We actually started manufacturing in Taiwan.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, whoa. Okay.

Kevin: Yeah. So we started, we did our CNC machining at multiple, there’s a big tip for everybody. Because our product has multiple parts we CNC machined in different, three different factories throughout China. So they all did different parts. So they never really,

Jason Hsieh: what is the advantage of doing that?

Kevin: So they wouldn’t know [00:07:00] exactly what we were manufacturing.

Laurie: We patented everything because it was the first time being done.So we didn’t wanna send it and say, here you go.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. Yeah. Because then they can copy the whole thing and all

Laurie: thank goodness, like Joel. Big shout out to Joel, our engineer who I mean. Who’s just amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Joel, who helped us develop this and get it started in Taiwan and gave us that tip.

Jason Hsieh: Do you have some of the product that you have it in person right now? You can show the viewer ?

Laurie: I have the indoor.

Kevin: Oh, I have this right here actually. Yeah. So I’ll show you the traditional, I actually have a traditional one right here. I’m sorry. It’s real dusty. I don’t use this much. So this, you fill it and you flip it and you lift it.

Laurie: So sometimes some of that detail will come out, but it’s, if it does come out, it’s boring.

Kevin: It’s very limited detail. There’s really not much to it. There really can’t be because you’re lifting it versus ours is two pieces [00:08:00] that snaps together like this. And you’re gonna roll the buckle over and roll the buckle over. Now you,

Jason Hsieh: when do you put a sand in? Do you put a sand in, then close it, or you close it, then put it in?

Laurie: No. You put it first.

Kevin: You construct it like this. This would be flat on the ground, and you could start filling this. And when you’re ready and. You would just unbuckle and then see these pull points right here is where you go straight.

Laurie: So instead of lifting it like your brain is trained to do, because that’s what you’ve always done. Ah, you actually pull it apart. So then the details stays, the castle stays together, and then we have the different size pieces.So you can stack them if you know the sand is good enough to stack. but you then you remove the pieces from the top down.

Kevin: Yeah. Down and sand sculpting, like Laurie said, in sand sculpting, it’s always top to the bottom, right bottom, and then top bottom it comes with all these. More detailed tools with the kit as well, which is to cut windows or doors.

Jason Hsieh: I know that’s also professional sense sculpture. Do they also use your product or like [00:09:00] professional sense sculpting?

Kevin: So some professionals that I have worked with actually do love using some of our tools to speed the process up. Generally they can’t use preform molds and professional sand sculpting. They don’t wanna develop any of the bricks or anything. They wanna have to do all that by hand

Laurie: but they can use some of the tools but they love we have one Dan in the Sand down and Dustin and he actually gives classes using our kits and then shows them his sculpting techniques as well. And we’ve started that whole lesson program ourselves. Which is,

Jason Hsieh: and last time we talk, I seen you guys are also working with Disney right now.

Can you also share a little bit about your collaboration With Disney currently?

Laurie: We’re very excited. We just started a program as a Disney port Adventure or excursion. So in St. Thomas, and we’re working with Anthony Schultz from Tropical Treasure Hunt. We’re affiliated with his company. He does his,

Jason Hsieh: so I can get a discount for my next cruise trip to you guys, right?

Laurie: When we do, I’ll give you [00:10:00] one. When we get one,

Kevin: just come off the boat, I’ll work with you.

Laurie: So we do these excursions. They can sign up online or on the cruise ship for the Disney Fantasy that stops in St. Thomas and then they get off the boat in St. Thomas and they come and they meet our team, Kevin, will be down there. And then we have depending on the amount of people in the group. We have other team leaders and they learn how to use the kit. They have a bunch of kits provided, sorry, our dog just busted in the not a kid busting in. We have a dog busting in. But they can do the port excursion, the port adventure, right on the beach in Megan’s Bay. They build castles. It’s family time. It’s time spent on the beach doing something fun together and they can build these castles and you traditionally couldn’t do that because it would take too long. As a traditional sand sculpture. But now with our kids, you can do that and then still be creative and add to it. It’s amazing to see what the people come up with and the touches they put on it.

Kevin: Yeah. It’s, not only about [00:11:00] the time that it would take to do traditional sand sculpting. It’s really about training other people to help because we’re doing this in mass, so our first two lessons have averaged around 40 people each. Yeah, so we’re gonna scale that up to anywhere from a hundred to 150 each group as we go.

Jason Hsieh: Do they get to keep some of the product when they finish as well or?

Laurie: They get a toolkit. We’re giving everybody because the size of our product we talked about maybe giving them a product to take home or have that be part of the package. People might not have room. So we give ’em a toolkit, which comes with the sculpting tools. It’s that small enough in one of our backpacks.

Kevin: And then they can go to all their other beaches while they’re in the Caribbean.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, that’s a great idea. Yeah,

Laurie: So they’re, loving it. And someone just sent us a message, ’cause we literally have just done two of these. This is brand new and someone just sent us a message. Thanks for the tool. So she must have been from the cruise line which is pretty exciting,

Jason Hsieh: okay. Very cool. Very cool. So now we talk about the pretty part of the [00:12:00] business. The question I wanted to ask is, we all have our own struggle as a toy entrepreneur.

What are some of the biggest challenges that you have faced in your early day of your business before you collaborate with Disney and all the glory that you have right now?

Laurie: Even with Disney now, there’s still as an entrepreneur there’s struggles every day. You know what I mean? And when something great happens, something else happens. You’re constantly on that entrepreneurial rollercoaster. But we’ve gone through so many challenges. With starting with COVID when we first started we were just getting our feet went into this business. I had worked for Disney actually for about 10 years, but I was on the retail side of it as a district manager. And Kevin had the tech background. So we went through the learning curves of we started in Taiwan, but we were really paying too much. We didn’t realize, and we actually got our kits in all in pieces. So the buckles were supposed to be attached, which they are now. But they were not, they came in separate. So every kit that came in, we had [00:13:00] to sit there and snap off.

Jason Hsieh: Oh man, that sounds like a nightmare.

Kevin: Tens of thousands of kits.

Laurie: we did this. Our kids are like, I never wanna attach another buckle again. Our friends, our neighbors, our family, like so many people attached all those buckles, but we kinda learned and then we got into packaging and all of that. So we went through those where you just, you ask a lot of questions. You ask for help. You don’t ever hesitate to someone who’s been there, done that. Don’t ever let your ego think, I can’t ask a it’s a stupid question. No question is a stupid question if you don’t know the answer.

Kevin: Ask.

Laurie: You gotta ask somebody. I think the biggest hurdle would probably be one of the biggest hurdles is the shipping. All of the shipping issues that happened when COVID, so we won 2020 outdoor to the year. So exciting.

Kevin: Mind you, we won 2020 of the year. We weren’t even in a package yet. We didn’t have box design.

Laurie: It was just a backpack. Oh yeah

Kevin: We had a hang tag on a backpack. That was it.

Laurie: And We [00:14:00] won Toy of the Year. We were so excited, got all these purchase orders at Toy Fair and two weeks later the world shut down. So all the purchase orders were canceled, A few smaller stores kept ’em, but

Jason Hsieh: yeah, I remember in 2020 I have a container got stuck outside of La and I spent $15,000 on that container. A very painful moment to see your, all that money sitting in the water, not coming in. Because they couldn’t receive anything into the poor, and I lost a lot of money that year too.

Laurie: Oh, we lost, we said, because our normal container prices when we had first started were like 4,500 to 5,000 to get it from overseas to us, right?

Jason Hsieh: Yeah,

Laurie: During COVID, right after that, we were paying 25,000 a container. So like we were just like flushing a hundred thousand dollars down the toilet. You know what I mean? No, we weren’t getting anything more from it.

Kevin: Months at a time. Yeah

Jason Hsieh: it was bad.

Laurie: It was total insanity. And the delays, like you said, it sat on the porch. So we had two big box [00:15:00] store orders, Costco, Canada, and Sam’s Club, which we were very excited about. And I think we would’ve, if it hadn’t have been the shipping issues after COVID, it would’ve been a totally different outcome. But Sam’s Club picked it up from us on time in China and was supposed to be on the floor, May 1st. It didn’t get put on their floor and into their warehouse ’cause everybody was still delayed with all everything until July 1st. So by then they’re already putting out, we missed the

Jason Hsieh: Oh yeah, you missed the season. Yeah, I already missed the season.

Laurie: So then they liquidated it, which thankfully they didn’t charge us for that.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. But, still that’s back.

Laurie: Liquidators picked it up. So we had been man fighting ourself on Amazon for two years now, and it was through no fault of our own, like just, it was just the whole bad timing. Yeah. Timing.

Kevin: Didn’t make it online on Sam’s Club. Yeah. And everything. Same thing in Costco, Canada too.

Jason Hsieh: Oh man.

Laurie: It’s just. Those are the kind of strawberries,

Jason Hsieh: the nature of your product because [00:16:00] it’s also seasonal, so

Laurie: yeah, that is. But now we have the indoor, which is why we invented our indoor product comes with the mini molds, and we’ve talked about this like with your son. Remember we were talking about this comes with a compound and mini molds, and it’s great for building castles indoors and stuff. And we develop that.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, I still need to convince my wife about it. She doesn’t like it to have dust and anything inside the house

Laurie: because the kinetic sand, it’s not messy like kinetic sand. That’s what we’re trying to overcome.

Kevin: Yeah. We’ll send you a care. You can trial it.

Laurie: She can test it. We’ll prove her. It’s not messy like kinetic sand. It doesn’t get in every nook and cranny.

But that’s how we over tried to combat the seasonality of our product is to come up with the indoor line, which can be sold year round.

Jason Hsieh: Another story I wanted to share with the audience. You guys are also on Shark Tank! How does that change your world?

Laurie: It was crazy. It was a crazy bump in our business. We aired when? October, [00:17:00] 2022. We had filmed in July, so we were lucky because it was a short window that we had to keep everything to ourselves and stuff. Some people film in the summer or the fall and then don’t air till May. And you can’t like, say anything. So that’s probably like of the most difficult things is like keeping everything quiet. But that was amazing. That weekend on our website, we had such a huge increase that you couldn’t pay for that amount of advertising to get that.

Jason Hsieh: Did any of the shark actually back you?

Laurie: Yeah, we had a guest shark, Kendra Scott. She’s has a jewelry empire. So she, we picked her, we had two offers. We had her offer and then we also had an offer from Damon John. But his was more on the licensing side of it. Wanted to license out our technology, which would’ve been fine too. We had to decide which way we wanted to go, but we had put so much blood, sweat, and tears into the Create A Castle brand that we kinda wanted to stay with that. And that was Kendra’s view to keep it as Create A Castle. So

Jason Hsieh: what was the deal that you strike at [00:18:00] the end?

Laurie: We got 20%, she got 20% of our business.

Jason Hsieh: For how much?

Laurie: For 350,000.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, okay. Okay. 350,000 times five. Yeah, so that’s about 1.77 evaluation. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Laurie: Yep. So that was good. So we had that deal and then it tooked quite a while to actually get everything to come to fruition with her and stuff. So we’ve been working with her maybe about a year now. So we’ve met A lot of great members of her team.

Kevin: We just did a bill yesterday down at one of her stores in New York City, her flagship. In soho.

Jason Hsieh: Okay. Okay. Oh, she have retail storefront? Is that what she does?

Kevin: Yes, she has over a hundred locations nationally

Laurie: and then online. She’s based in Texas,

Jason Hsieh: but for jewelry. Not for

Laurie: jewelry. Yep.

Kevin: Strictly jewelry.

Laurie: Yep. Yep. Strictly jewelry. So they brought us in to the soho store and we did an event.

Jason Hsieh: So are you going to have a special version that has ska Diamond on the catalog going forward is that

Laurie: we said that we’ll do a, so yeah, we’ll get a Kendra Scott Jewel in there someday. But yeah, so Kevin [00:19:00] built, they did it, they titled the event Create Your Shine, which was really neat, and they focused on us and had people come in for an event from five to seven. And, the team down there was amazing. Matt and his team and Kevin built a feature castle with the Create Your Shine logo, and they actually put like a few jewelry pieces in there. It was beautiful. It really was like such an amazing event. Do you see that?

Kevin: Yeah. I Or not? I’m not sure. You can see it.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. Yeah, I can see it. I can see it. Wow. That’s incredible. You built that? You built that. You built that.

Kevin: Yeah, we built that them in about two and a half hours with our molds. We brought some sand in.

Jason Hsieh: I would like to have a beauty and a be castle please. Deliver to my house tomorrow.

Laurie: Come build it.

Kevin: Yeah. We were real nervous because we have our own table which has sides. And the director of the whole thing down there was like, look, we had this beautiful round table. It’s sitting in front of the window. Can you build on top of that? I’m like, look, I can do that sides to it, so we’re gonna make a mess. He’s that’s okay, we’ll just clean it. We used that round table and [00:20:00] it ended up being beautiful.

Laurie: Yeah, it was great.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah, it looked incredible. Yeah. It was very eye catching for the people walking by. Oh, whoa. What the heck is it?

Kevin: Oh yeah. Yeah. A lot of people stopped it.

Laurie: Yeah, it was nice because it was right in the window and stuff. So it was great.

Jason Hsieh: So what has been the most rewarding part of your journey with Create A Castle so far?

Kevin: I think, the most rewarding is when you get a message from a customer in Australia or Germany where they’re using your product something that was born out of your mind. And you know that you’re bringing joy to others through an idea that was basically sprung out of your imagination. that to me, is so fulfilling because like most people don’t realize the effort and work it actually takes to bring a product to life. And to see that result of somebody using it successfully without you being there, is just, it’s an incredible experience and moment.

Jason Hsieh: Same, being I also develop a lot of different toys over the year. The most rewarding moment is when my son is doing a product testing with my [00:21:00] prototype.

Laurie: Yeah,

Kevin: And praying he doesn’t break the prototype.

Jason Hsieh: Actually I told him try to break it. Try to break it as soon as you can.

Laurie: That’s good. Yeah. I remember when we had our prototype from China, when we actually got the physical prototype and it was we spent what, $5,000 and all the different pieces. And we went to the beach and a kid would try and take it. We’re like, no, there’s only, one. Only one. But it looked like a sandcastle thing, so they wanted to play with it. So I was like. So hard, but something too, I think that we like to always talk about like Kevin was saying, it’s so rewarding and everything to see people using it. But this some, a lesson that we always kinda try and tell everybody is, so when Kevin was young, around 10 years old. He used to draw. He was, he’s an artist and he has a twin brother, and his mom and grandmother owned a bake shop in their house. So she had to find them stuff to do so they wouldn’t drive them crazy because he had an older brother too. His mom bought him draw 50 books, which were very popular, how to draw books. And he used to draw castles, watching [00:22:00] them use their split mold pans and baked their cakes. When we started this whole thing, she was like, his mom was like, I think I have a picture of a castle you drew Kevin. That’s not the one you drew.

Kevin: That’s not the one I drew.

Laurie: That’s from the book.

Kevin: That’s from the book. And then I recreated that almost identical using our product.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, incredible. Whoa.

Kevin: Isn’t that crazy?

Jason Hsieh: Where is that background? Is that a lake? Was that ocean?

Kevin: Oh no, that’s in St. Thomas when I was practicing for Disney cruise lines.

Laurie: But we actually have that picture I’m trying to find here, of the one that he drew. And we tell everybody, you never know what you’re seeing and hearing as a child in the activities and technology is great and is helpful to kids in so many ways, but like hands on and creative play, nothing can beat it because this lived in the recesses of his mind for 40 years, watching split pans, drawing castles. And then here he creates [00:23:00] something that is exactly from that, from when he was 10 years old. So that’s, it’s just amazing. So

Jason Hsieh: What is the largest castle that you have built, with your product the largest one?

Kevin: Yeah. We actually had about, I think it was a hundred thousand pounds of sand delivered to our lake. It was a Shark Tank reveal castle. I actually flew a sculptor up from Florida that we worked with Dan in the San Anderson. And it was about 20 feet.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, whoa. Okay. And I see.

Kevin: Yeah, it was big.

Jason Hsieh: Pretty big. Okay. Okay,

Laurie: so this is the one he actually built. He actually drew that when he was 10.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, whoa. That’s the actual, whoa. You draw that when you’re 10. Whoa. Okay.

Laurie: He’s very artistic.

Jason Hsieh: Okay. So it’s funny because the, every time I draw I’m really bad at drawing. I can draw a cat and my son says a dog.

Laurie: That’s me too. Yeah. He’s very, artistic which helps with some of his builds too. So

Jason Hsieh: a hundred percent. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. And for those of you that’s listening, you can also see the picture and [00:24:00] all the product that we are describing at our YouTube channel. This is also broadcast to our YouTube channel. They can find it by searching for Toy Business unbox on YouTube and they can find the episode.

I wanna go back to some of the struggle you mentioned earlier dealing with the supply chain issue and also retail partnership with Costco, Sand Club and all the other big retailers. How has those experiences and those challenges shaped your 2024 strategy today for the business?

Kevin: Radically?

Laurie: Yeah, I think just the whole retail like landscape is changing anyways from big box to specialty and something that we’re trying to focus more now on. And actually that goes right to the Disney collaboration we have is experiential play. And you’ll hear that a lot now in a lot of the toy, even the big toy companies. People want, they don’t necessarily wanna buy a product, they wanna buy an experience and maybe they’ll buy a product too, but, they wanna buy an experience. We’re [00:25:00] doing that with the excursion program we’re doing that. He started down in St. Thomas when he is there, but we’re gonna try and roll it out to other places, lesson programs where they can actually have an experience using the product. They can still buy the product and get the product, but they get to actually experience as a family, as an individual, whatever it may be. And same with our indoor line. Having workshops where the kids can come and build in daycares and camps so that they actually get to physically play,

Kevin: make it an experience,

Laurie: experience the product, and then also get the product as well.

Jason Hsieh: So speaking with experience, as my passion and my line mission is to empower, support and educate kids with learning differences so they can live a life of possibilities.

Have you tried to use your product in any occupational therapy setting?

Laurie: We have a lot. We haven’t gone like mainstream with that, but we have had many teachers whether it’s special needs or anything. So many different areas of teaching have purchased the product for their schools, for [00:26:00] their classroom. But it’s definitely, that’s like next on our things to do. And our to-do list is to really get that indoor line into daycare special needs programs.

Kevin: Camp programs, like you said, in Mass.

Laurie: Yeah. And so we’ve started that a little bit.

Jason Hsieh: Sure. I think that’s something we can collaborate. We have a small email list about 20,000 parents with kids with special needs.

Laurie: That would be great. Absolutely.

Jason Hsieh: And as well winding down on today’s interview, thank you so much for sharing your experiences, the challenges, and also the success over the years as you build up your toy business.

One of the questions I ask every single guest on the podcast is, if you have to share just one piece of advice with someone that’s getting started in the toy industry, what would that be?

Kevin: I’d say start small. Work strategically. One of the biggest mistakes that I made early on was we had to deal with qvc. I over ordered on boxes, right? I still have boxes from QVC

Laurie: called the Cardboard [00:27:00] King.

Kevin: So literally don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start small even it’s gonna, even if it’s gonna cost you a little bit more upfront. Be strategic about your decisions early on in early stage.

Laurie: Yeah, just really stay true to who you are and don’t let naysayers bring you down. Be smart about decisions. But really, one of the main things that we have heard over and over. Why people, even like our product or our company, is they say they like the passion that we have for our business and for our mold. So you have to really believe in what you do. So if you can’t, if you’re gonna go develop a product and you can’t say this is the best thing, it’s gonna do this, it’s gonna do that, and you don’t have that passion for it. Then find another product to develop because you need to have that passion to stay the course. Overcome these challenges and work through them. ’cause if you don’t have that passion, it’s falling up with the passion.

Kevin: Yeah. If I didn’t have the passion with me when I was pitch, look, [00:28:00] we had to pitch to Disney Cruise lines, right?

 If I didn’t have that passion and teach them and show them the process of what to do and how to build properly, we wouldn’t have the deal.

Laurie: Yeah. Your excitement is contagious, so you need to have that excitement to have you work through the hurdles.

Jason Hsieh: That’s what actually what I told a lot of Beginning entrepreneur, because I’ve been doing this for since 2016 myself, you need to have a big enough why. Otherwise, when the things happen, the challenge arise, the problem happened. People just give up too easily because the only why for a lot of entrepreneur I talk to is, oh, I wanna make a lot of money. That is not big enough. You need to have a big enough why. That’s bigger than yourself. Yeah, bigger than your team. Bigger than what you can ever accomplish as a single human being. And that’s why my why is so big. I really want to change the world.Especially for the family in Asia. That’s where I’m from. I’m from Taiwan. And that’s a huge taboo in most of the Asian country around disabilities.

And so all the business I operate, which I currently [00:29:00] run, two businesses, a foundation, I have a podcast, I do all the different stuff. And currently writing a book as well. But everything I do is to make a little dent into the universe in my own little way. So hopefully I can leave a little bit of a positive legacy behind me after I die.

Laurie: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what we always say. Our whole, mission is to bring families together one castle at a time. So if we do that just indoor, outdoor, whatever it is, just to create that family time,

Kevin: a memory,

Laurie: and the happy,

Kevin: the photo on the fridge.

Laurie: Put a smile on a kid’s face, then that to me is,

Jason Hsieh: yeah. Otherwise the kids is just on their devices all day, every day.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. Yep.

Jason Hsieh: So where can our audience find you?

Laurie: Createacastle.com. All of our social media, everything is just, excuse me, at or hashtag create a castle. And then create a castle.com is our website and we’re on Amazon as well. But all of our product the whole assortment is on Create a castle.com.

Jason Hsieh: Okay. Perfect. I’ll make sure I include that in the show note.

Laurie: Thank you.

Jason Hsieh: Thank you [00:30:00] again for both of your time and sharing everything, all the wonderful story that you shared with our audiences.

Kevin: Thank you, Jason.

Laurie: Thank you for having us. We appreciate it.

Jason Hsieh (2): And thank you for our listener for tuning into this episode of Toy Business Unbox podcast. We hope you enjoy 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, but you never miss episode.

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We’ll love to hear your feedback and suggestion for future episode. Until next time, keep innovating. Keep creating, keep bringing joys to toys. This is Jason Hsieh, signing off on the Toy Business Unbox podcast. We’ll see you in the next episode.