How Toy Innovation Transforms Childhood Learning: Insights from Colin simonds

EP097_02-19-25_Colin Simons

Jason Hsieh (00:43)
Hi, welcome to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed podcast. Today we have an incredible guest, Colin, the mastermind behind More Fun. Colin didn’t just started as a toy inventor, he was also a business fixer and helping companies getting back on their feet. When he encountered a failed toy brick company back in 1997, he saw the potential and that really started his 25th journey into the educational toy space. And he has tons of experience and tons of story to share with us.

on today’s podcast. Thank you so much for joining us on the episode today.

Colin Simonds (01:16)
This is great to be here. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens and it’s quite exciting. I’m retired now, but I have so many memories and I did so much that was interesting. I hope people enjoy the podcast.

Jason Hsieh (01:28)
Yeah, so first of all, can you just kind of go through you? I know this is 25 years of history, but can you kind of recap on how you first got started and just a couple of the highlights in your careers?

Colin Simonds (01:38)
Well, one.

work in that so I became an accountant and I joined Pricewaterhouse, one of the big companies. I learned to be passed my exams, they sent me to the Middle East where amongst other things I was arrested and put under house arrest because I had failed to sign the accounts of the National Bank when they told me to. They were wrong which is why I couldn’t sign them. I had many adventures out there and my life seems to have been full of adventures ever since. I also want a huge new client.

in the Middle East, which was a huge bank, by calling the general manager from the bank vault where I shouldn’t have been able to get in. And he said, if you don’t tell anyone, you’re going to have the work. So I’m not a conventional guy. I tend to do things differently. I then joined a huge US company, part of a business fixing team, traveling around Europe, fixing companies. I learned a lot. It was fascinating. And then I left and joined 20th Century Fox. I loved the film business. I had some amazing adventures there.

Jason Hsieh (02:16)
I

Colin Simonds (02:31)
far too long and complicated for today. And then I became a turnaround director under the Pricewaterhouse umbrella. I did some national health work, which was stunningly, amazingly incompetent. And then I was sent to a company called Mottik ⁓ I don’t know who found my name, but Mottik were making bricks. And I’m going to start showing things. Here is a Mottik brick.

Jason Hsieh (02:47)
Hmm, okay.

Okay.

Colin Simonds (02:58)
you’ll see that it joins on the side with these little pins. And so they had invented a sort of brick that joined on four sides and they were in deep trouble. The business really couldn’t be fixed, but it was a nice idea. And once I realized it couldn’t be fixed, I had this…

Jason Hsieh (03:02)
Mm-hmm.

Colin Simonds (03:18)
dream in the night that I was gonna fix it and start again. I changed from being a chartered accountant to a toy designer in a blink, which was pretty dumb because I really had no idea what I was doing. But I had a fantastic childhood with a fixation for construction toys. And I think that’s where the inspirations came from. So you asked me in one of the questions,

what I did to change a failed Motic into a new business called More Fun. I talk too much, so interrupt at any time. I have the gift of the gab, as you’ve probably noticed. I can talk for hours, but anyway, Motic failed because those little pieces were just too small for kids to put in the bricks.

Jason Hsieh (03:58)
Okay, okay.

Colin Simonds (03:59)
fact

there was a report by one of the big toy companies who looked at buying it that that was one of the problems. So after a lot of thought, I remember saying to the managing director who joined me and worked on this that had you ever seen a dice with one, two, three, four and no five, six, I couldn’t see the why you had a cube that only joined on four sides. So we made one that joined on all the sides. And we reintroduced

the Lego Duplo studs and made it Lego Duplo size. And we made it join on all sides, again, with a pin.

that you pushed in.

Jason Hsieh (04:30)
But it’s much bigger for the…

Colin Simonds (04:32)
to

bring a pin but it did look a bit strange having a yellow pin in all the bricks. That’s how we started and that was one of the first big mistakes I made. I didn’t test it with kids until we were ready in production.

Jason Hsieh (04:44)
Well…

Colin Simonds (04:45)
This was a bit hard for the kids. Then more fun too, which was much simpler. But I’ll come back to that later. The important thing I’m trying to mention throughout this is as a part-time mentor for toy companies, I made every mistake imaginable along the way. And I would love to share that experience with young people starting down the road. And I’m not charging for it. They get a day free of my time.

Jason Hsieh (04:51)
I see.

Colin Simonds (05:08)
So just look at my notes for a second. Yes, Arctic also had some management problems on a big customer that wouldn’t pay. There was no way to fix it. I had a fanaticism as a child about Lego and the early bricks that were around. Now, one of the earliest bricks are these, which are two pins.

Jason Hsieh (05:32)
OK. OK.

Colin Simonds (05:33)
And they made a rubber and they’re British and they’re pre-war and they were called mini bricks. And I had a set of them. I still have it. Mini bricks. And a two pin rubber brick. And it had the most wonderful, I can’t really show it well here, book of instructions that I loved. And I still have the set. And those will say what probably made in about 1946, 1947, no, 1936, 1937.

Jason Hsieh (05:41)
okay.

Colin Simonds (05:58)
And then I had those, and then I had a set of these.

which one of the very first stacking bricks. They don’t clip together, but they stacked. And that was called…

Jason Hsieh (06:06)
Hmm.

Colin Simonds (06:08)
Kittycraft, another British company. All right? And Kittycraft then moved on and they produced another brick, which is quite strange.

Jason Hsieh (06:19)
Okay, can you just can you verbally describe the break for our listeners?

Colin Simonds (06:23)
out. You probably can’t see it, but it says patented in UK, Hilary Page product. Now that was the original eight studded brick, British design. And then I’m going to show you another one. You’ve to find the right one here. And this one says Lego in the back. It is

Jason Hsieh (06:44)
Okay.

Colin Simonds (06:45)
Shall I say remarkably similar? If it’s remarkably similar that they actually join.

Jason Hsieh (06:51)
and

Colin Simonds (06:53)
listeners

may be fascinated to see the Hilary Page website that tells this story of how in fact the first Lego style bricks were in fact made in England by Hilary Page. And then what happened was Lego took the brick and he took the little dinks out which were windows and just made that.

Jason Hsieh (07:14)
Mm-hmm.

Colin Simonds (07:14)
And then they added later the rings, which was breakthrough, and that was the LEGO patent. But LEGO also tried to stop everybody making eight stud bricks, which is another battle. And there were quite a lot of other companies. I have loads of these. This is an East German one making LEGO style, but trying to use a different joiner to get around the LEGO system.

Jason Hsieh (07:19)
Yeah.

Hmm, okay.

Colin Simonds (07:34)
And then Kitty Craft

made these bricks.

Jason Hsieh (07:37)
OK. It looks much bigger.

Colin Simonds (07:39)
Strange things about these bricks. So this is my set from childhood as you’ll see it’s exactly the same size But doesn’t have the circles in the back, yeah, I moved on from kiddie craft to duplo as a child but you know duplo had that and you could make piles of them and they had

Jason Hsieh (07:46)
Okay.

Colin Simonds (07:57)
the four studs, you could make piles of them. And you were very lucky you had some of these. And I remember going to the shop as a child and saying, I want longer ones. want to make long, they don’t make longer ones.

Jason Hsieh (08:09)
Mm-hmm.

Colin Simonds (08:10)
More fun makes longer ones.

Jason Hsieh (08:12)
Well,

that’s a really good

Colin Simonds (08:14)
Because when I was a child, I wasn’t allowed longer ones. And my whole passion was to make what I wanted to play with. I love these. And what I found out was other people love them as well. And that was, as an accountant, a bit of a surprise. And so we then decided to get rid of the little tiny pins and the bricks would just join.

Jason Hsieh (08:21)
End of

Colin Simonds (08:36)
with side joiners. Much easier for the young children. That’s when the business started to go because the original ones, it was okay, but they weren’t that excited. And then we did a number of things like we added instructions. And these instructions were the teacher’s idea. The bricks exactly fit on the page so that they can put them in the right place. It’s exactly.

Jason Hsieh (08:37)
okay. Yeah.

Okay

Colin Simonds (08:57)
the level one, and then we have level two, and then we have level three, five and six, each one gets more difficult. So the same box can be played with by a three year old and a seven year old. And the kindergartens loved that. I had a school in Scotland who came in the early days to my booth and bought a set, a big set for the school.

Jason Hsieh (09:04)
I see.

Okay.

Colin Simonds (09:20)
the the

Jason Hsieh (09:23)
Okay.

Colin Simonds (09:24)
And I used to wave this at the Lego lawyer when he arrived on the booth. And when their designers came, we used to have a laugh about it because the Lego designers used to come and say, Colin, what have you done this year? Because look, let’s be honest. They invented that. And then they invented that. Wow. And then they invented that. Wow.

Jason Hsieh (09:39)
Yeah.

Colin Simonds (09:44)
The Lego stuff for the eight year olds and 10 year olds is fantastic. Let’s have no question about that. But for the young kids, this is not exciting. So what happens? We then added to our joining system a triangle. Now the advantage of triangles is you can make a circle.

Being a toy expert, I’m going to ask you to be the one in a hundred who gets this answer right. If you look at this, how many colors are there?

Jason Hsieh (10:08)
How many

Colin Simonds (10:10)
percent

get it wrong. If I turn it, how many colors are there?

Jason Hsieh (10:12)
Okay

I see red, blue and black.

Colin Simonds (10:16)
You missed purple.

Jason Hsieh (10:17)
okay, okay, okay. Got it.

Colin Simonds (10:19)
Can

you spin Duplo bricks and make mixed colors? No. The teachers like that kind of stuff. And okay, I do it as a bit of a show. I did say turn it, so I gave you a little hint. To be fair, 99 % get that question wrong, but it kind of shows what we can do. So where have I got to? Yeah, we had a little bit of hassle from Lego on our booth a couple of times. I can’t say too much, but…

They hadn’t got a case and they went away. They didn’t like our bricks. And in fact, in Germany, we had to make bricks with extra large studs because they claimed a patent on this size, which eventually they lost in court. And so we could sell everybody the same bricks. So we had to make German packs and Austrian packs with a different size brick. was crazy. So what happened then?

So these stud bricks were invented in the UK and then they were developed by Lego into Duplo. And I wanted to take that another step. Now going back to, I lost them, these ones, the very original bricks, you’ll see these. I called this as a child and upside down brick because you could put the joiners on both sides. So I made.

this brick.

Jason Hsieh (11:27)
Hmm, okay. okay. Okay.

Colin Simonds (11:29)
You can put it on the Lego brick.

and make it upside down.

Jason Hsieh (11:32)
I see, okay, okay. You can connect.

Colin Simonds (11:35)
going.

What is so exciting about only building upwards? What happens if I

What a brick that has studs everywhere. Now, sadly, there’s so much more the child can explore, which all goes back to my frustrations as a child that I couldn’t build what I wanted to build. So that’s a multi-brick and we called it Hi-Cube and other things. But unfortunately, that didn’t come out until too near COVID. then COVID was because I was a school business was a disaster for us.

Jason Hsieh (11:43)
Hmm.

Colin Simonds (12:02)
Everything I did was really a natural development of my childhood and what I’d seen in the market and Mottic. So one of the things I claim cheekily is that more fun is better than Duplo Lego. So clearly this is maybe better than that.

and I’ve showed you the circles now.

Jason Hsieh (12:21)
You have a dragon too?

Colin Simonds (12:23)
I did this with Duplo.

Just squares and triangles. It’s 1800 pieces. It took my designer a week to make. I had no idea when I invented it how powerful the squares and triangles are. Of course, being British.

Jason Hsieh (12:31)
Okay.

Colin Simonds (12:39)
We had to make London Bridge.

Jason Hsieh (12:40)
Yeah, I can see that.

Colin Simonds (12:42)
So this was now buzzing and I was selling and I was having tremendous fun and traveling the world, but why is it better? Well, it’s patented. So that helped me to build the business. Yeah, we had copies in China, but they were so badly made you couldn’t join them. People calling me and saying, your bricks don’t join. I said, well, you didn’t buy them from me. And they’d send me this to them. said, yeah, they’re made in China.

And they had wonderful names like Four Fun instead of More Fun and even Door Fun. I don’t really know what Door Fun means but they had brain bricks, yep, and they had bricks with wheels but no axles and so we never really bothered about them. I did have a very large customer come to me in Hong Kong once and he brought me three different copies and he said

Your bricks are too expensive. I’m going to buy the Chinese copies. So I said, there are actually seven. Would you like all the names and addresses?

Jason Hsieh (13:29)
Hmm

hahahahah

Colin Simonds (13:35)
He said, why would you give me that? said, because if you buy them, your customers will hate you because they don’t join. Because in actual fact, the technology to make those two join smoothly took me three years and nearly bankrupted me. That is extremely difficult to achieve smoothly. And they didn’t know the technology, so they just didn’t work.

Jason Hsieh (13:55)
I see.

Colin Simonds (13:56)
There

was a Korean, there was another country that did manage to make copies, but I’ll come back to that later. They were quite good copies.

Jason Hsieh (14:03)
I see. So, looking back, one of the questions I want to ask is, I know throughout your journey inside the industry, what was one of the biggest challenge when you first started looking back? Can you share some of that too?

Colin Simonds (14:17)
There were many, but to give you one example, I had expert advice how to make tools to make the brakes. So we had the drawings and we gave them to the tool maker and we paid him 25,000 pounds and he produced some very pretty looking brakes that didn’t join.

Jason Hsieh (14:24)
Okay.

okay.

Colin Simonds (14:34)
And I said, they’re no good. They don’t join. He said, well, I’ve made what’s in the drawings. If it doesn’t join, that’s your problem. So I said, how do we recut it, change it to fix it? He said, really, I’m not interested. So bye. And they have 25,000 pounds down the toilet. I have no idea how to write a contract or how to make this happen. And I eventually found a guy in New Zealand who had a passion and he wanted to help me and,

It took him two years, but we managed to find how to make them join. And the more difficult it became, the more I thought the Chinese will have trouble copy it. So one of the biggest challenges was to make the first good bricks. three years to get to market because although we had pretty looking prototypes and with a bit of an angle grinder on a file, I could make them join. Yeah. And

I remember going to meeting with ones that I put a bit of WD-40 on because they were a bit stiff. And eventually we worked it out and managed to find a technology that would make this possible. And so that was one of the biggest struggles was how to actually make the product work.

I can talk about those in a minute if you want to I’m just going to change my screen back to get my my but so So more fun beside Duplo. Yes, and so then I wanted to make it even more challenging for the kids So we invented which was partly from Motic what we called an X piece Which slides in the side

which means that instead of just joining that way, you can now join.

That way.

Jason Hsieh (15:59)
you can join from any angle you want. Okay.

Colin Simonds (16:02)
You get a 90 degree turn. And then I invented another piece, which I called a T piece, because it looks a bit like a T shape. And that allows you to put a brick anywhere you really want on a brick. You just sort of join it on like that.

Jason Hsieh (16:15)
okay, okay.

Colin Simonds (16:16)
We gave this to the kids of age four, five, six, and their stuff they did was amazing. I remember sitting on the floor in Mexico with the Minister of Education, who’d seen us at a show, and he said, I want to take you to a school tomorrow. And we showed the bricks to some children and gave them all a pile of bricks and said, here’s the picture on the wall, see if you can make it. And after 10 minutes, he came to me said,

I have never ever seen so much concentration, so much effort, so much learning going on. He said, this product is amazing. And I tell you, it still sends a shiver down my spine to tell you that story. Because I was an accountant, for heaven’s sake, and I had made something that impressed the minister in Mexico. And it was those direction changes added to the side joiner that added a bit of extra sparkle.

I’ve already seen that it had a wheel and an axle, of course you have to have that. But after a few years I decided I needed more. More, more fun. And so now that I knew how to join bricks sideways, I did maths fun. Oops, upside down. No, didn’t. Here we are. Maths fun.

Jason Hsieh (17:18)
Mm-hmm.

Colin Simonds (17:19)
So this is the question, the red, and this is the answer. So here we have.

Jason Hsieh (17:25)
Okay, okay the modification table

Colin Simonds (17:27)
Three plus three must be six unless they’ve messed it up upside down. Okay, so Yeah, the whole principle Was to teach children how to add and subtract so we did math We did work on and various other things using printed bricks So I am I Really enjoyed adding different products every year to try and have something new Although of course the investment level was high. It was all right because we’re making money

And then we got these legal cases. Our US distributor, had to, his three years came to an end and I said, I’m sorry, it isn’t working. You’re not cooperating, you’re not doing very well. We’re gonna look for somebody else. And we got this massive legal suit against us for three quarters of a million dollars with five main charges of things that we had done wrong.

Jason Hsieh (18:13)
Hmm, OK.

Colin Simonds (18:14)
All of

which, in my honest opinion, were complete lies. And my lawyer wanted half a million dollar advance to defend us in the US courts against this big company, who actually really wanted my stock tools and patents.

We eventually closed the company in the UK. I personally owned the patents so they couldn’t get those. And we did it through lawyers and liquidators and did it all properly. And then the American bailiffs arrived with the rent for $750,000 at my house, which was expected. And my lawyer was on the line and the bailiff arrived and said, I need to gain access.

And I said, well, my office is upstairs on the first floor. I’ve always worked from home. This is actually my house, but I have a separate office. I said, you want to get in, you’ll need a helicopter because I’m not letting you in the house. And he said, I have to take the assets. I said, what have you got? I said, some old laptops and a couple of desks bolted to the wall, but you can’t have them because you’re not getting in. said, I’ve never had this before. said,

Jason Hsieh (19:11)
you

Colin Simonds (19:16)
I’ll call the office and he came back and he said subsection B 47 blah blah blah and I said I’m afraid he’s got you there so we’ll go to plan B which is child protection.

And so I said, under child protection, you can’t come in. He said, why? said, because you’ve got to go past my young daughter’s bedrooms to get to the office.

Jason Hsieh (19:32)
Ha ha ha ha ha!

Colin Simonds (19:33)
And he said, are they here? I said, I’m not obliged to answer that. I said, so you’d be unwise to try it, wouldn’t you? And he said, I’ll call the office, he back, he said, we’ve never had that one before. said, I can’t come in. He said, can I come in and have a coffee? I said, off the record, that’s fine. And we had a coffee and he said, I’ll be back. I said, yeah, in about four weeks. He said, what are you going to do then? I said, you’ll have to wait and see. Anyway, by then the company had basically been folded up, liquidated, all the paperwork done.

legally and the UK liquidator wrote to them and said your claim has been struck out as being incorrect and they responded our claim has been through the court you can’t argue it’s incorrect and he responded we are not the 52nd state and if I say it’s not correct it’s not correct and there’s nothing you can do about it so that was the end of that claim and in fact that company

Jason Hsieh (20:18)
Hmm.

Colin Simonds (20:22)
had internal management struggles after that and disappeared. But it cost me a year of my life, a huge amount of stress and money. I wouldn’t say it’s a warning to others, but gosh, if you have a good product, you’ve really got to have good lawyers and good defenses. Otherwise you’ll lose it because there’s people out there who go, that’s nice. It’ll steal it. So if you’re starting a new company, there’s a warning there.

Jason Hsieh (20:39)
How to take it. Yeah.

Colin Simonds (20:45)
And someone else tried to steal the patent and that’s another huge long story. In fact, they did steal the US patent. I had to buy it back.

Jason Hsieh (20:52)
Whoa! How the heck did they steal your US patent?

Colin Simonds (20:55)
Yeah, they went to the old Mottic patent, which had not been fully registered. They bought it from the liquidator. And the liquidator refused to tell me what they’d paid for it. And there was something dodgy going on there. And they then went back to the US patent office and said there’d been a mistake in it. And they adjusted it to cover my bricks. So I couldn’t make my bricks in America anymore.

Jason Hsieh (21:15)
wow. Okay.

Colin Simonds (21:16)
And my patent lawyer said, well, if we go to court, there’s a 50-50 chance we’ll win. And I need $200,000 to go to court.

Jason Hsieh (21:23)
my god.

Colin Simonds (21:23)
They all want my money, but I didn’t have that kind of money. And eventually they wanted two million dollars. We had to pay them one hundred thousand to ten thousand a year for ten years. And the guy I went and met the owner of this company and he liked me and like what I was doing and said, OK, we won’t crash your business. I’ll let you off. He knew it was a scam. And so they are.

Jason Hsieh (21:25)
Yeah.

man.

Colin Simonds (21:45)
You asked me about crazy adventures in one of your questions. Yeah. If that wasn’t crazy enough, I’ve got a much crazier one. How are we doing for time?

Jason Hsieh (21:52)
We still have a few minutes and we’ll try to wrap up in maybe five, five minutes, five, 10 minutes.

Colin Simonds (21:57)
Well, I had a customer in Philippines who turned out to be not the customer I thought he was. And when I cut him off, he threatened to kill me unless I paid him money. And then he threatened to kill my daughter, which made it rather serious. I had to go to find people who were ex-MI5 to help me. They put me onto the chief of police, his wife in Manila. And we managed to persuade his ex-colleagues to rat on him.

for which I had to pay a moderate sum. They hated him anyway. The chief of billers wife had managed to hack their emails and hack their Facebook accounts, but it’s in Philippines and I didn’t do it. And I had found out exactly what was going on. And I went to Manila on a unregistered ticket, British Airways and checked into the Hilton under a false name. And my first email when I arrived from the

guy that was threatening my life said, welcome to the Hilton Manila. My lads will be around to see you shortly.

Jason Hsieh (22:53)
wow, that’s some crazy spy movie.

Colin Simonds (22:56)
I thought I was in the toy business, not the drug business.

But so I can’t I won’t finish that story. It’s too long, but I want to show you a couple more things because We then moved on to gears and pulleys like here’s another one. Okay, Right, so this is a pulley system So I’d show this to the teacher and say How do I make this one go a different way to that one and about one in three and get it, right?

Jason Hsieh (23:14)
Okay.

Colin Simonds (23:25)
Of with a chain, you can’t do it. But with this one, you just take that off, put it on that way. So now they go opposite directions. Only I’ve got it stuck. I didn’t put it on properly. So now they’re going opposite directions. the teachers really liked how educational this kind of stuff is. And we wrote another thing they liked were these books.

which had more instructions in. Beautiful. And we saw tens of thousands of books and we wrote teacher guides to how to do lesson plans. And we really got involved with the schools towards the end. then, say, Covid crashed my business. But there was a huge amount we did. And just to pick one or two more. Yeah, you asked in the proudest moment of my life was the first award I got in 2002, I think.

I was invited to the British Awards Toy Awards dinner and told that I’d entered for construction toys and that I’d won an award. And I was broke at the time and the tickets were very expensive, but we went and they said, third place construction, blah, blah. Second place construction, blah, blah, blah. First place construction. And it wasn’t us, it was Lego.

I didn’t get a prize. So I’m sitting there and somebody says, Colin, Colin, gotta go up, gotta go up. They gave me toy of the year.

Jason Hsieh (24:33)
okay, okay, okay.

Colin Simonds (24:34)
They

upgraded it to toy of the year and I wept. I was crushed. And you asked me that my proudest moment and I’m proud of that. And I got 36 gold awards in different countries, six different countries from my products. And I’m very proud of that. And I’ve got a new construction toy under construction. I’ve designed another one. I probably have a partner in Poland, but that may not happen. And so.

I might be interested in looking for a partner. I only want to be a royalty in commission. I don’t want to work anymore. I don’t mind designing, but I don’t want to be at a desk all day. I’m 73, I’ve had enough of that. yeah. And then you asked me, what advice would I give to a startup?

Jason Hsieh (25:13)
what kind of advice would you like to share with someone that’s getting started in the toy industry and what would be your your piece of wisdom? for others?

Colin Simonds (25:22)
I would basically say, give me a call and I will tell you all the mistakes we made and how to avoid them. Like never make a toy and make it into a mold until the children have tried it because you’ll find out they don’t like it too late. You need to plan your production and plan your location, plan your EN71 and ASTM. Otherwise you’ll find you make a product that doesn’t pass the toy tests.

You’ve got to be very careful about where you get your dyes and all the rest. are so many legal hassles. And then I didn’t get a patent in Hong Kong. So what happened at the toy shows in Hong Kong, the second biggest in the world, there were copies and there’s nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t close their stands when they turned up in Germany. I could close their stands. But nobody said you’ve got to have a patent in Hong Kong. I thought it’s a very small country. Why do I need a patent?

So I made these mistakes and in hindsight, I would love to share those with young people starting. Like, why don’t you try and sell to India? I can explain to you why you can’t sell to India and you can’t send to Brazil and you can’t sell to Indonesia unless you’re a huge company and why? And because of growing international trade barriers and the de-globalization of the world.

I can tell you about factory audits and having Chinese people in your warehouse saying that you have to do it this way. And then the next week you have the Thai people in and they say, no, no, no, you’ve got to do it this way. So you have this sheet on the wall that says the Chinese are coming, we’ve got to change back to that way. was completely insane, but that’s what you had to do.

Jason Hsieh (26:49)
I

Colin Simonds (26:53)
If you’re starting it up, I won’t charge you. I’ll be happy to do a nice long Zoom call and share my pains and pleasures as they are and as I am.

Jason Hsieh (27:02)
I see. Thank you so much. So where can people find you then?

Colin Simonds (27:05)
I’m Colin Simmons and there’s only two in that I know of with the same spelling with one and you’ll probably find me on LinkedIn. You’ll find me on Facebook and I’m very happy for you to have my email and give it to people you think that’s okay and that want to contact me about starting a toy company. It’d be my pleasure to share my pleasures, pains and secrets.

Jason Hsieh (27:25)
I see. Thank you so much for offering that to our listener. I will also make sure we include your link in the show note so we can also mention that. So

and for our listeners, thank you so much for tuning into this episode and for the toy business on box 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 so you never miss an episode. We really appreciate your support and we love it if you can leave us a review.

and share the podcast with your friend and Kali. For more resources, tips, and the latest update we in the toys and games industry, visit our website at toy-launch.com. Join the conversation and join us on social media using hashtag toybusinessunbox. We’ll love to hear your feedback and suggestion for future episode. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, and keep bringing joy to toys. This is Jason Shea signing off on the Toy Business Unbox podcast, and we’ll see you in the next episode.