Welcome to another episode of the Toy Business Unboxed Podcast, where we sit down with Miguel Muñoz Marin, CEO of Recontour. Miguel’s path ran from managing toy vendors at Amazon Spain to co-founding Recontour, an e-commerce holding company built during the aggregator boom of 2020. He shares why staying disciplined on valuation kept Recontour standing while many bigger aggregators, including Thrasio, collapsed. Miguel also walks through what has actually worked for growing brands like Best Chess Set Ever, from centralizing operations to expanding into new countries.
#181: What Killed the E-Commerce Aggregator Boom – Toy Business Unboxed
Episode Highlight
- 00:42 Welcome and guest introduction
- 01:28 Managing toy vendors at Amazon
- 04:21 Starting Emantina as a wholesaler
- 06:29 Founding Recontour in 2020
- 08:53 Why many aggregators failed
- 18:29 Centralizing teams across brands
- 22:41 Showing off Best Chess Set Ever
- 25:55 Why chess stays evergreen
- 27:26 His advice for newcomers
From Telecom Engineer to Amazon’s Toy Buyer in Spain
Miguel started his career as an engineer in the telecom industry before joining Amazon in 2013 as a senior vendor manager overseeing toys for its newly launched Spanish marketplace. He managed more than a hundred vendors, from Mattel and Lego down to small local suppliers, while Amazon Spain was still establishing itself in the market. Much of his early work focused on activating the European Fulfillment Network, then later on building direct relationships with Spanish vendors who had no presence with other European Amazon marketplaces. Miguel spent two years in that role before deciding to move into entrepreneurship.
Starting Emantina and Learning to Be His Own Boss
In 2016, Miguel launched Emantina, a wholesale business that helped get products onto Amazon that the retailer could not source directly on its own. What began as a partnership with his former Amazon colleagues grew into a catalog of more than a million SKUs. Miguel took Emantina from zero to 3.2 million euros in annual sales over five years, entirely bootstrapped. That experience convinced him he preferred building his own path over corporate life, and set him up for his next venture.
Founding Recontour During the Aggregator Boom
In 2019, Miguel connected with e-commerce entrepreneur Kevin, and together they founded Recontour in 2020 to take part in the aggregator boom then sweeping e-commerce. Rather than chasing the larger brands most aggregators competed for, Recontour focused on smaller businesses doing between half a million and two million dollars in revenue, a segment Miguel felt was being overlooked. The company built its toy portfolio around two brands, Shaka Ball, a beach paddle game secured through an exclusive distribution deal with a college friend, and Best Chess Set Ever, acquired in 2022. Recontour later added a third brand, a supplements company called Longevity Botanicals, rounding out its current portfolio.
Staying Disciplined While Other Aggregators Collapsed
Miguel says many aggregators failed because they rushed to deploy capital and paid inflated multiples, sometimes eight to ten times earnings, for businesses with shaky foundations. Much of that spending was financed with debt that became unsustainable once interest rates rose. Miguel and his co-founder never paid more than three times earnings for any acquisition, staying cautious even as competitors moved faster. He also points to a lack of true e-commerce operators among aggregator leadership, many of whom came from finance instead, as a key reason the promised economies of scale never fully materialized.
Keeping a Brand’s Identity Alive After Acquisition
Miguel admits that even at Recontour’s smaller scale, he is not a core user of any of the three brands in the portfolio and does not carry the same personal passion the original founders had. He tries to compensate with a broader passion for e-commerce and operations rather than any single brand, and says building a strong, professional team matters more than chasing that founder-level emotional connection. He also notes that founder passion cuts both ways, since it can lead to decisions made with the heart rather than the head. Losing that passion after an acquisition is a real trade-off any brand buyer needs to plan around.
Centralizing Teams Instead of Running Brand Silos
Recontour initially assigned dedicated brand managers to each brand, but Miguel says that structure did not scale well and left each brand operating like its own isolated kingdom. The company switched to a centralized model, where standardized processes and SOPs for functions like customer support and quality assurance are applied consistently across every brand. That change made the business easier to scale and reduced fixed costs, even though it took time and some trial and error to get there. Recontour now treats operational consistency, not brand-specific management, as the foundation of how it runs the portfolio.
Growing Through New Countries, Channels, and In-House PPC
Geographic expansion has been Recontour’s most reliable growth lever, taking brands built for the US and Canada into markets like Mexico and the UK, each requiring its own toy safety regulations, product certifications, and tax compliance before launch. Walmart.com did not work out for Best Chess Set Ever, since its premium positioning does not match Walmart’s value-focused shoppers, while direct-to-consumer sales have grown strongest for Longevity Botanicals. Recontour is now pushing further into B2B through the Fair marketplace and exploring TikTok Shop for the first time this year, aiming to follow a proven playbook rather than improvise. After testing outside agencies and outsourced help, Recontour also built its PPC management fully in-house, training its own team to control ad spend while planning to expand into new Amazon video ad formats and paid social this year.
Advice for Newcomers in the Toy and Game Industry
Miguel’s advice is simple: only get into the toy industry if you genuinely love it. He points to the seasonality, the reliance on East Asian manufacturing, and constantly shifting tariffs as reasons the business gets harder every year regardless of experience. Passion, he says, is what carries operators through the industry’s toughest stretches, since less exciting but stable businesses exist for people who just want reliable profit without the grind. Miguel adds that toy industry veterans tend to stay in the business for their entire careers, a pattern he has seen firsthand and attributes to that same underlying passion for play.
Conclusion
Miguel Muñoz Marin’s path from Amazon vendor manager to multi-brand CEO reflects a consistent theme: discipline over speed. From refusing to overpay for acquisitions to centralizing operations across Recontour’s portfolio, that same caution has kept the company standing while faster-moving competitors struggled. Betting on an evergreen category like chess, rather than chasing short-lived trends, has given Recontour a more predictable foundation to build from. His story is a reminder that surviving an industry boom often comes down to what a company chooses not to do.
Connect with Miguel Muñoz Marin
If you’re interested in learning more about Recontour or connecting with Miguel Muñoz Marin you can reach out through the following channels:
- Website: Visit Recontour’s official website to know more about the company.
- Website: Visit Best Chess Ever’s official website to purchase the game and more.
- Website: Register and be an authorized retailer of their brands at Best Chess Ever wholesale website.
- Email: Reach out directly at bestnightgames@recontour.io for inquiries and more.
Transcript
Jason Hsieh (00:42)
Hi, welcome back to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed podcast. I’m your host, Jason Hsieh. Today we have Miguel, the CEO of Recontour, and he’s also a seasoned toy industry expert. In today’s discussion, we’ll talk about his journey growing multiple different brands inside and outside of the toys and game industry and his journey so far about some of the struggles, some of the decisions that he had to make over the year to make sure the company can continue to grow and also scale.
So thank you so much for having you on our show today.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (01:13)
Hi Jason, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Jason Hsieh (01:16)
Yeah. So before we dive into the interview, can you kind of share with our audience a little bit about your background and how do you even got into this industry and like starting all the different brands that you have?
Miguel Muñoz Marin (01:28)
Yeah, so I’m an engineer by education. I was working in the telecom industry, the first part of my career. And then in 2013, I got the opportunity to join Amazon, recently started its marketplace in Spain. And I was hired to be a senior vendor manager or a buyer of their toys retail
So yes, suddenly, I basically was myself in a new industry, in the toy industry that I didn’t know anything about, managing more than 100 vendors from big like the Mattel, the Legos of the world to very small vendors and really tried to get a dent toy market where Amazon was really like a new player in Spain at the time because it had just launched like a year and half before I joined.
Jason Hsieh (01:52)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
I see. Well, I don’t have a lot of personal experience with Amazon Spain. What are some of the things that you notice since you have a lot of experience comparing Spain market to US market?
Miguel Muñoz Marin (02:27)
Well, it’s like the way Amazon manages is kind of different stores. They normally try to replicate what work in other markets. Normally they try new things in the US, then those things are replicated and maybe adopted a little bit in other more mature European markets like the UK and Germany. In Spain at the beginning, it was a lot about just having all the selection that
Jason Hsieh (02:37)
Okay, okay, I see.
Hmm.
Selections, okay,
I see.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (02:54)
That
Amazon had in the EU. So Amazon has this thing that is called the European Fulfillment Network, where basically a piece of inventory that is available in Germany, can bought by any customer across all Europe if it meets the regulatory requirements to go cross borders and everything. So a lot of the work that we had initially was to make that selection available. But then
Jason Hsieh (02:57)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (03:17)
A second stage, it really needed to develop those vendor relationships in Spain. There were some very specific Spanish vendors that they didn’t have a relationship with any other Amazon marketplaces in Europe. Obviously, Spanish customers were looking for those products, so we had to establish those relationships. Then there were the multinationals of the world, like Mattel, Hasbro, Lego, that they have their own country managers at their own sales operations.
Cultivate those and establish those relationships to really offer the best selection of products at the best price to Spanish customers.
Jason Hsieh (03:51)
I see. And how long were you in that
Particular role? How many years?
Miguel Muñoz Marin (03:55)
So I was there two years. Yeah, it was really like, as you all know, like toys is very, very seasonal business. I joined in August. So I was basically thrown into a Q4 right from the get-go. And yeah, Q4 in Amazon, hard. You learn a lot. I was there two years, but it was like, I had the feeling that I was there like five or six from all that.
Jason Hsieh (03:58)
Two years, okay.
I see. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah. It’s like drinking from the fire hose for sure. So yeah, a lot of information. Yeah. And then what inspired you to transition from like a corporate position to launching your own business now with like managing multiple
Miguel Muñoz Marin (04:21)
And that’s for all your time.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
I started another business before Recontour. So in 2016, I started Emantina. Emantina, it’s a wholesaler of all kinds of products. So basically, when I was in Amazon, things changed very quickly. At the beginning, I really joined a startup. But then became corporate very quickly. And I was a little bit fed up that.
Jason Hsieh (04:41)
I see.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (04:57)
That was kind like the stuff that I left in the telco industry before I joined Amazon at British Telecom. So yeah, so I basically an opportunity where Amazon needed to help to get all the products in the world in their store. I basically became, Emantina became an enabler for that. So we, at the beginning working with my previous colleagues, the buyers of other categories.
Jason Hsieh (05:02)
Mm-hmm.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (05:18)
We were basically going for those brands or those SKUs that for whatever reason Amazon couldn’t get. And we started with a couple of brands, but we ended up with more than a million SKUs. And I took that business from zero to 3.2 million euros in annual sales to a seven figure solid business in five years. Yeah, that kind of like, that was a bootstrap business. I kind of like saw wow
Jason Hsieh (05:36)
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (05:42)
I really like being an entrepreneur and being in charge of my destiny. And yeah, in 2019, I met another e-commerce entrepreneur that was kind like in a similar situation where we both had started a business several years ago and we were looking for a new challenge. And we started brainstorming about, OK, what could we do in the e-commerce space?
Jason Hsieh (05:51)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (06:06)
Leverage our previous experience. And that’s basically all the aggregator boom was happening. So there was like these thesis that basically say, okay, the same thing that happens in private equity where a company acquires different brands, and then they try to manage it as a portfolio, achieve energies, economies of scale, was starting to happening in e-commerce, and there was a lot of investment happening.
Jason Hsieh (06:06)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (06:29)
So, yeah, so we decided to found a rep on Turing 2020. We, at the time it was really, really hot. So we got funding pretty quickly. We tried to focus ourselves in a very specific niche. Like most of the aggregators that were looking at big brands that were making five plus million dollars in revenue. And we saw that there was bigger potential in smaller brands, between half a million and 2 million.
Jason Hsieh (06:30)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (06:54)
Where you could really take them from where they were to a much bigger scale quicker, also with more risk. We thought that a lot of those brands that were kind of being left behind, a of other entrepreneurs, they were ignoring them because they need to deploy their capital too quickly. So yeah, we decided to focus on that niche. We acquired brands and had an exclusive distribution agreement with another brand.
Jason Hsieh (06:54)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (07:19)
And yeah, two of the brands that we had in the portfolio, they happened to be toys. We had the first brand that we got in the portfolio is Shaka Ball which is a beach paddle game. That brand we didn’t acquire it. It was an exclusive distribution agreement that we did with the original founders of the company, which was a friend of mine that we went together to the tax school of business at Dartmouth.
Jason Hsieh (07:19)
Yeah.
You
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (07:43)
And saw him playing with the toy at our reunion and got the conversation started. They needed somebody to help them take the product from Kickstarter to the next phase. And we just said, OK, we just started this business. Can we help you guys? And then in 2022, we acquired Best Chess Set Ever or Best Night Games, which is the chess set company that we still currently have in the portfolio, like Shaka Ball.
Jason Hsieh (07:53)
Anyway.
Mm-hmm.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (08:07)
Unfortunately, last year we decided to discontinue the brand and we’re in the last inventory that we have from it. But yeah, let’s Best Chess Set Ever is one of our flag brands in the current portfolio.
Jason Hsieh (08:17)
I see. See. Yeah. I think that was a very interesting model. Just like you say in a couple of years ago, it was kind of like all the rage. See all the news,
The PRs, billion dollar aggregators. It was pretty a crazy time. But then I think the industry as a whole also kind of went through some of the turbulence. There’s a lot of aggregator actually went out of business altogether, including Thrasio, one of the biggest one in the industry.
What do you think is like what did they did wrong? Like why did they even went out of business despite of all the capital, the, all the manpower, all the advantage they had back then.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (08:53)
I think first of all, there was a rush for moving too quickly and to deploy that capital that basically made a lot of these companies to pay crazy multiples for businesses that didn’t have that long term success guaranteed at all. Okay. So they were buying companies that they had very unstable foundation and they paid
Jason Hsieh (08:58)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (09:16)
Crazy multiples for them. That’s something that I reckon too we were very, we never paid more than 3X for any of the business we bought. We were very, very cautious about them. And yeah, some people end up paying like eight, nine, 10 times a bit that earnings for that. So you really need to scale those businesses and you can like put it yourself in a very difficult position because these…
Jason Hsieh (09:25)
Yeah. Yeah.
Wow. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (09:41)
Purchases, most of the aggregators also, they were done with debt. And when debt was cheap, was okay, but then the interest rates went up and they had to stop. Yeah. So they had to repay that debt and that put them, a lot of them into very tough situations. I guess another point that made all of this happen is that many of the people that got into this aggregator business, they were not people familiar with e-commerce.
Jason Hsieh (09:45)
Hmm.
Yeah. Went up. It’s getting very risky. Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (10:05)
There were people coming more from finance and engineering type of stuff.
Jason Hsieh (10:05)
Hmm.
China and so on. They are not
A great operator in the e-commerce world to begin
Miguel Muñoz Marin (10:13)
Yeah,
And to make these things work, you really need to be an operator. And I think becoming more and more challenging because most of the people at the time, 2020, 2021, they were okay just doing with Amazon as a marketplace. But now you need to have your own D2C store. Need to have B2B. You need to have TikTok shop. And that adds…
Jason Hsieh (10:31)
Yes,
Miguel Muñoz Marin (10:36)
A lot of levels of complexity to manage all of that. And I think that that complexity was not fully understood by a lot of these leaders that were not coming from e-commerce. Yeah, I think those are the main reasons. And yeah, we were more cautious than the average. And it’s true that both my co-founder, Kevin, and myself, we were both experienced operators.
Jason Hsieh (10:38)
Publicity.
Twitter.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (10:59)
So yeah, I can’t say that this has been a home run. I don’t think it has been a home run for everybody because I think a third thing that didn’t really happen is that lot of the value that was expected to be created was supposed to be achieved by economies of scale, but by doing what the previous owners of these companies were doing with a lot fewer resources.
Jason Hsieh (11:12)
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (11:18)
And those efficiencies, they didn’t really materialize in a lot of cases. So yeah, that’s something that we struggle ourselves. And that has taken us a number of years to get to a moment where we say, we’re profitable right now. We have a stable, predictable business. But it took a while, like integrating these brands and making them.
Jason Hsieh (11:21)
I see, okay, okay.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (11:39)
Together it’s not easy.
Jason Hsieh (11:41)
And from my perspective, correct me if I’m wrong, what I noticed in some of the brand during the acquisition process is the brand identity actually got lost in the process of the merger. Like for example, some of the smaller brand, I think a lot of the brand identity is attached to the founder because they have such a huge passion and a vision for the brand and how they brand want to look like. But once they get merged to those bigger company, a lot of those messages get lost.
All the brands there, but there’s no strong differentiators. But you feel like the same when you see other bigger aggregators buying like 20, 30 brands all at the same time?
Miguel Muñoz Marin (12:15)
Yeah, think it happens at all degrees of scale, especially for a bigger aggregator, but it even happened to our scale. Of the three brands that we have, I’m not a core user of any of them. And I don’t have that passion that the original founders have. I try to have it, but it’s really hard. It’s something that, in the end, it’s more like I…
Jason Hsieh (12:27)
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (12:38)
More passion for the industry overall and for e-commerce than for falling in love with any of these particular brands. So yeah, that’s definitely also another challenge that once you kind of lose that passion of the founder, it’s hard to achieve the same. You really need to build a really good team, be very, very professional about And yeah, it’s also true that sometimes passion
Jason Hsieh (12:45)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (13:02)
It also has the other side of the coin. It can make you do irrational things because you’re not only thinking things, you’re making decisions with your heart instead of your head. Overall, losing that passion, I think, is a disadvantage and it’s a challenge that anybody who had acquired a brand, they need to be aware of before making that step.
Jason Hsieh (13:08)
Yes, yes, for sure.
Yeah, yeah, true.
Yeah. And one thing I want to follow up since you have experienced launching so many different brands across multiple different industry, but I know launching the brand, even at the company that’s already doing maybe 500K for them to take them to multiple seven figures, there’s a lot of strategy involved. How do you really approach, for example, if you are looking back your own journey, how are you building awareness and trust in like the specialness, especially for smaller brand in the toys and game industry? What are some of the strategy?
That work really well for you and your brand.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (13:55)
Well, like awareness and trust, the brands that we acquired, were primarily strong in Amazon. Okay. And how do you do that in Amazon? You’re part of a platform and you’re basically playing by the rules. It really comes on the way that you present your product and also how your product is perceived by, for example, customer reviews and customer ratings. Okay. So that’s something that you need to be super on top of it all the time. Whenever there is a bad customer review.
Jason Hsieh (14:03)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (14:22)
Look at it in detail, understand, OK, is this a one-off thing, or is there a real underlying problem here that we need to fix? That’s something that is absolutely key. We haven’t been great in selling our products direct to consumer. And that’s something that we’re working on. But yeah, when you’re doing D2C,
Jason Hsieh (14:37)
Yeah. Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (14:42)
You have a lot of other ways to communicate with your customers that you do when you’re just in Amazon. You have social networks to speak to your customers. You have your own customer support that deals with anything, either proactively or reactively, with your customers. You have many more means of keeping open that dialogue.
Jason Hsieh (14:45)
Yes, yes, yes.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (15:04)
But it also requires a lot more work. Whereas in Amazon, it’s everything basically done for you. And you just need to make sure that those reviews are stay the same. And in terms like what worked for us, like a scaling. So both and my co-founder, we came with a lot of experience from selling in Amazon. And one of the ways that we try to grow our brand so that we have been more successful is really by geographical expansion. So.
Jason Hsieh (15:09)
Yeah.
Okay.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (15:29)
The brands that
We bought, they were either present just in the US or the US and Canada. And we have launched them in Mexico. We have launched them in UK. It’s something that requires a little bit of work. You need to meet the regulations of the different countries. There’s different FOIA regulations in the UK, the EU, and Canada. And you need to have all the certificates to prove that your products are safe.
Jason Hsieh (15:37)
Okay. Okay.
Yes, yes.
Yes, sir.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (15:58)
All of that, you need to also establish your basic taxes in each of the countries because you’re to be selling and every country wants to get their share of your business. You need to establish that compliance layer also. But yeah, that has been the most successful way. We have tried growing into different channels for a number of years.
Jason Hsieh (16:10)
Yes, of course.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (16:21)
Until 2025, for example, we tried selling in walmart.com and that was not successful. Was always kind of like around. Yeah, I think it has to do also a little bit with the nature of our products, like our products, need to be more on the premium high end side of the spectrum. Walmart customers are kind of like looking more for value products.
Jason Hsieh (16:22)
Yeah.
Okay. It’s not possible. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Walmart
Is the opposite. It’s the people that’s looking for the cheapest and the most affordable product that usually shop on Walmart. So, yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (16:47)
Yeah. Yeah.
And then we’ve been trying to grow D2C. We’ve been successful primarily with our longevity botanicals brand, our supplements brand. But yeah, and now what we’re trying to work a lot is more B2B, so selling to wholesalers and retailers. And in the last year, we’ve been trying to push a lot fair, which is this marketplace.
Jason Hsieh (16:59)
Okay.
Okay.
Fair, okay.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (17:11)
That connects
Jason Hsieh (17:11)
Yeah, yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (17:12)
Brand owners with the small retailers. And yeah, it’s growing and it looks like a promising channel. And we have a couple of also strong relationships with retailers. So for example, Best Chess Set Ever, Best set Games is available in bars and noble. This is like a relationship that we already inherited from the founder of the business, but that’s…
Jason Hsieh (17:14)
Mm-hmm. Yes,
I see.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (17:36)
That makes the product visible in physical stores, which is always helpful.
Jason Hsieh (17:41)
I see. How about TikTok? Are you also doing TikTok shop?
Miguel Muñoz Marin (17:44)
So we haven’t done anything. It’s in our plan for this year. It’s a channel that we are right now exploring and trying to learn the best practices. We don’t want to re-implement the wheel. We want to go with a playbook that is proven. Because normally, whenever you get into a new channel, what you know from the other channels doesn’t work. So you really need to go with a clear set of processes.
Jason Hsieh (17:48)
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, a little choice.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (18:07)
Things that have worked for others. So yeah, that’s one of our for this year, but yeah, we haven’t started yet.
Jason Hsieh (18:13)
I see, I see, I see. So I guess
How do you balance growing multiple brands while ensuring each one gets the attention that it deserves? How do you structure your team? Do you have like dedicated team members for each brand or is this the same team that’s kind of just share managing all the different brands?
Miguel Muñoz Marin (18:29)
So we kind of like try both. We tried like brand managers at the beginning where we spread the brands between different people and we realized that that didn’t really work. When you have like multiple brands, it’s hard, but what you really need to do is have like best in class standardized process and SOPs. If you’re good at managing quality assurance or customer support,
Jason Hsieh (18:35)
Yeah?
Now, okay.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (18:51)
And you adapt the customer support to meet the needs of all your brands, then the whole function is going to work well. And that’s what we have focused on. Now we have a centralized approach yeah, it has worked a lot better than when we had it broken down by brands. Like each of the brands was kind of like their own little kingdom and there were no other teams. Team transfer from one to the other.
Jason Hsieh (18:55)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (19:13)
So yeah, it’s much better to have it all centralized and try to apply best practices. It’s also easier to scale, to reduce fixed cost. So yeah, that’s what we learned a little bit the hard way because yeah, as I said, we tried both ways.
Jason Hsieh (19:28)
I see. See. Thank you so much for sharing that. And what are some of your main focus for this upcoming years to grow the other different brands?
Miguel Muñoz Marin (19:36)
So we have like a pretty substantial growth target. We’re gonna try to grow 50 % year on year. That is a mix a lot of initiatives. So I was just discussing this with my head of growth the other day. We have like 27 different projects and we’re gonna have to. Yeah.
Jason Hsieh (19:50)
That’s a lot of project. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (19:54)
But yeah, so we have a couple of, for best night games, Best Chess Set Ever in particular, we have a couple of Amazon marketplaces that have shown a lot of promising sales and that we just dip the toe in the water. So those are gonna be in Mexico and UK. So we believe that we can really grow those.
Jason Hsieh (20:05)
Okay.
Yes.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (20:14)
Then we’re going to try to grow our direct to consumer sales through bestchesssetever.com our direct to consumer Shopify website. And then we’re also going to try TikTok Shop, as we mentioned. And then finally, I would say that it’s Best B2B so…
Jason Hsieh (20:18)
In.
Okay.
Okay. Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (20:32)
Work on those relationships, get back to some customers, some clients that they haven’t bought product from us, some toy shops in a while, and also really try to get the most out of FAIR and try to get more sales through that channel because doing very little, we saw some promising results and yeah, those are the main areas where we’re gonna focus. And then we have become also quite good at
PPC management and we think that it can become a really a growth lever. PPC, we tried it absolutely everything. We tried with two or three different agencies. We tried bringing it in-house with some VAs. In the end, what worked for us was really bringing us a core function of the business and educate our people. So we spent
Jason Hsieh (20:57)
Yeah.
Yeah.
In.
Mm-hmm.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (21:18)
We invested quite a lot of money in training them in PPC management. And now we have a team that I feel really proud about that are doing a really good job. They are able to keep the tacos, the advertising spend under control. I think the challenge for this year is how can we can really grow and try new different types of campaigns. Like we would be mostly focusing on sponsored products and exporter brand videos, but there’s a lot of different new formats that are
Jason Hsieh (21:24)
Yeah.
On to control,
Miguel Muñoz Marin (21:44)
Available and that are new that we should be checking out and find. Not yet, no. We don’t have the scale to do that in many of the brands. But for example, there is this new video features for a sponsor products that Amazon just released. Now with AI, you can really generate videos very easily with your products.
Jason Hsieh (21:47)
Are you doing DSP for any of your brand? Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (22:09)
So yes, we’re going to try to generate a bunch of content so can use that. And then, we’re going to also try to do some advertising social networks, which we haven’t done at the moment. So yeah, we’re going to go to all the meta platforms and try to see if we can drive traffic both to Amazon or D2C sites to get new customers.
Jason Hsieh (22:13)
Mm.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (22:31)
To those channels.
Jason Hsieh (22:34)
I see. See.
I see. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I know you have some of your product with you. Will you mind sharing with the audience one of your product?
Miguel Muñoz Marin (22:41)
Yes, this is the Best Chess Set Ever, we currently have two SKUs. At some point we had six, but we decided to focus on the ones that were really making a difference and the ones that have better customer feedback. So we have these chess sets, they’re primarily meant for people that play chess regularly, people that like, for example, playing tournaments, that are in chess clubs.
They’re kind like higher quality chess sets than the average thing that you can find in a shop. This is our quadruple weighted chess set. We have it available in triple weighted and quadruple weighted. So these are very heavy pieces. One of the unique things of our product is that we have a double-sided silicone board. So it’s green on one side and black on the other. This is a patented design.
Jason Hsieh (23:25)
Okay.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (23:27)
People that like, especially playing tournaments, they like the contrast of the green so that they can really see the pieces more clearly. And the pieces, they’re just beautiful. They are our own design. This is a version where we have these googly eyes that it’s kind of like an experiment that we do. But yes, you can see they’re very detailed. Look at the hair of the horse.
Yeah, let me show you, for example, yeah, like the roots, they’re very heavy. So they have like this feeling when you put them on the mat, the pieces, they’re not gonna move.
Jason Hsieh (24:00)
It’s pretty
Big. Yeah. It’s full size. Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (24:02)
They’re
Big, like when you move them, they’ll stay, they have like these felted bottoms that allow them also to slide them. You want to slide them on the silicone board. But yeah, but they’re heavy that have that nice feeling that yeah, like if you’re playing, don’t know, for example, in a park, the wind is not going to move them, okay?
And yeah, they have that nice feeling. Like lot of times, don’t know, like somebody’s playing chess, they can like touch the board and all the pieces go to the floor. Like these ones there, it’s going to be hard because of the weight that they have.
Jason Hsieh (24:31)
Hmm. I see. See.
See. Yeah. And that’s the best, one of the best selling SKU in the brand?
Miguel Muñoz Marin (24:38)
This is actually our second. So this is really the most premium product that we have. I have here also the 3X, which it’s kind of like more for the general public. But yes, as you can see here, the pieces, This is the 4X, and this is the 3X.
Jason Hsieh (24:44)
Yeah.
Okay, okay. Slightly bigger. Yeah. Okay.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (24:58)
Yeah,
They’re taller. Also the design is a little bit less sophisticated. So for example, let me get the knight.
Jason Hsieh (25:04)
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (25:06)
Like this is the night of the 4X this is the night of the 3X, so it’s a little bit less elaborated, of these products, we have our own molds, so they’re unique designs, and they’re not kind of like out of the that you can find in any chess set, so, these ones have been purposely designed for us.
Jason Hsieh (25:08)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Okay. Yeah.
Okay, okay.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (25:28)
And yeah, they come in nice bags so that you can carry them. And they’re very also like these box you can put it anywhere. You can put it in a bag if you want to take it for a travel. So they’re also good to move around and to take to tournaments. Yeah, that’s pretty much it.
Jason Hsieh (25:32)
Okay.
I see. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that as well. How do you see as some of the trend that you’re noticing within the toys and game industry, especially around like your category like chess?
Miguel Muñoz Marin (25:55)
Well, the good thing about our category is that it’s not very trend. It doesn’t suffer of many trends. So chess is 1,500 years old. So it’s one of the oldest games in the world. But it’s also one of the most widely played games in the world. And that is why we really like it. Because when I was working in Amazon, I saw that all of the trends.
Jason Hsieh (26:03)
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (26:15)
It’s just nuts, like especially if there is any sort of licensing or things like that, like what’s popular today is not popular tomorrow. And especially in such a seasonal category where you have to make all of those huge inventory purchase decisions for the holidays, it really takes a lot of risk. So when we were looking at the brand, we said, OK,
Jason Hsieh (26:20)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (26:38)
This is good because it’s a very old game. It’s gonna be popular. It’s true that when we bought it, it was right after this TV show, The Queen’s Gambit, in Netflix had been released. So there was like an extra spike of interest in chess. For it’s really evergreen.
Jason Hsieh (26:51)
Okay.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (26:53)
That’s why we are in this space. I think in toys, because of the seasonality, you really need to try to focus on the stuff that stays and remains. If you’re just focusing on the trends, maybe you can make a lot of money for short periods of time, but there’s going to be a lot of risk involved. We were just not, we didn’t have the appetite for that. We decided to focus on something that was more evergreen and predictable.
Jason Hsieh (27:01)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Got it. Yeah.
Thank you for sharing that. So as we’re kind of wrapping up today’s interview, if you have to share just one piece of advice with someone that’s just getting started within the toys and game industry, what would that be?
Miguel Muñoz Marin (27:26)
Well, I would say that really, like if you’re thinking about getting like, get it if you really love it. It’s a very hard industry to play because of that seasonality, because most of the production of goods is by East Asian with the tariffs and all that, that has become harder. And no matter what, how much experience you have, like every year there’s something new.
Jason Hsieh (27:41)
Yeah.
Yes, yes, I agree. Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (27:48)
And you’re
Going to have to go through very tough times. So I think you better have that passion for it so that that can really take you through those harsh times. Don’t go into it if you don’t love it or if you are just like not super into it. You really need to have that passion because it’s going to be hard and that passion will really…
Jason Hsieh (27:55)
Mm-hmm.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (28:08)
Allow you to get to your goals.
Jason Hsieh (28:11)
Yeah, I think that’s a very good piece of advice and I think
That applies to almost all the different types of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship itself is not an easy journey. There’s a lot of things that life was going to throw at you.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (28:23)
Well, but there are other businesses that they’re just unsexy and nobody’s interested in and they’re super profitable, they don’t have max competition precisely because they’re not sexy. And yeah, if you don’t have the passion for toys, I would say like, don’t get into it.
Jason Hsieh (28:30)
Yeah, I see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (28:42)
One thing that I remember, Simba, is this toy manufacturer based in Germany. They’re really big. Had a relationship with them as a buyer when I was in Amazon. And one of the things that he told me is that, most of the people that get into this industry, they stay forever until they retire. It’s an industry that most of the people,
Jason Hsieh (28:47)
Okay.
Yeah.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (28:59)
Like other industries people come and go but in the toy industry people stay there for many years and I think it’s really for that passion. It’s not all toys are meant for kids but it’s kind of that pleasure of playing whether you’re an adult or a kid it really draws some type of people into it so yeah have that passion for it or probably you won’t.
Jason Hsieh (29:11)
Thank you.
Hmm.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (29:21)
You won’t be there in the industry for a while.
Jason Hsieh (29:23)
For sure. Yeah, that’s a very good piece of advice. And for our audience, that would like to learn a little bit more about all the different brands that you have. Where is the best place for people to find you online?
Miguel Muñoz Marin (29:32)
Well, for like the best place to buy our like chess sets is bestchesssetever.com. If you’re a retailer or want to carry our brand, there’s links on the website also to go to our fair shop or our B2C shop. We have bestchesssetever.biz also.
And yeah, if you guys want to reach us by email, the best email is bestnightgames@recontour.io. Recontour is R-E-C-O-N-T-O-U-R.io.
Jason Hsieh (30:02)
Hmm.
I see. Okay. Thank you so much for sharing that.
We’ll make sure we put that into the show note. And thank you so much for your time today, sharing your journey and your wisdom within the industry.
Miguel Muñoz Marin (30:17)
Well, thank you very much, Jason, for having me. It’s been a pleasure. And yeah, if anybody wants to reach out for knowing more about our products or about my entrepreneurial journey, I’ll be very happy to connect. I’m also active in LinkedIn. So yeah, people can look for my name there and connect that way.
Jason Hsieh (30:36)
I see. Thank you so much. And thank you for our audience for tuning into this episode of Toy Business Unboxed podcast. I hope today’s conversation give you some practical insight and fresh inspiration for growing your own toys or game brands. This podcast is proudly brought to by Toylaunch, a leading marketing and growth partner for toys and game company. At Toylaunch, we help brands scale on Amazon and beyond through full service account management, advertising, SEO, creative, catalog optimization, and more.
If you’re looking for a proven team that understands both the toys and game industry and the e-commerce marketing, we’re here to help. If you’d a personal breakdown of your brand, your opportunity and your best next marketing move, you can schedule a free consultation with us. Just visit toy-launch.com/schedule. And if you want to connect with other toys and game founder, join our free community, Toys and Game Launchpad at Facebook.
And for more resource update and industry insight, visit us at anytime at toys-launch.com. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joy through 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.
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