How Viral Marketing Fueled Global Success: Insights from Enzo Gonzalez

EP073_01-22-25_Enzo Gonzalez

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, welcome to another episode of Toy Business Unbox. Today we are diving into with Enzo the founder and CEO of CMY Cubes. From crafting innovation and achieving global recognition. Enzo and his friend has really redefined on how we think about educational play and also toys, especially with his [00:01:00] product, CMY Cubes with award-winning product, which we’ll also talk about the uniqueness with his product design and how he was able to reach over 150 million social media viewer. I think social media is definitely a really strong plate with Enzos team. So thank you so much, Enzo, for being on our podcast today.

Enzo Gonzalez: Thanks for having me, Jason. Really excited to be here. Thanks for reaching out. I really enjoyed that intro that you just played because it’s just being reminded of all the other people who are sharing the journey in this space. It’s not something that I get to see very often. There’s a lot of e-commerce businesses and other businesses that i’m that I know and that I’m friends with. But people in like the toy or educational space, you don’t see that as often. So that was pretty cool.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. Thank you. And that is the focus of the podcast. So that’s, we have interview over 70 guests on the podcast, all in the toys and game space.

Enzo Gonzalez: Good job, man. Good job.

Jason Hsieh: Trying to interview even more people this year to bring more stories of what is working and not working. And I think your story and your journey is also very in [00:02:00] inspirational for a lot of our listener as well.

Can you start first sharing with our a listener, how is this idea behind the CMY Cube was born and since you have a product, when you are sharing the story, maybe also show the product because It’s hard to explain the product.

Enzo Gonzalez: Got a bunch of our product. So this is a mega cube of a CMY cube. So as you can see, as you turn it around, it’s, is it magenta or yellow or cyan? And it’s actually all three and none. So a CMY cube, it stands for cy magenta and yellow, and it’s a cube. And our business is named after the Hero product, but we sell all different sorts of products that have something to do with color theory, optics, geometry, physics in some way. You should be able to use our products to teach a variety of subjects. It doesn’t always have to be about education though. A lot of graphic designers, illustrators, things like that, they are interested in our products as well, just because of the color theory side of it.

And then the third space we’re in, which is probably the fastest [00:03:00] growing and it wasn’t something that we intended is special needs. Specifically things like autism like things like that. We never intended to be in that space, but people found our products, they found that it resonated with them. Either it helped ’em calm down or it’s like a meditation tool or something just to put your energy into, and so we’ve been developing there as well.

Business started when my partner my fiance, who is also my business partner, Gabrielle, during COVID, she was I think she was looking through TikTok or something like that, and she saw some videos on color theory and my background is in engineering. I went to school for aerospace engineering and she asked me just explain some facet of the universe. And I love color theory because it’s really misunderstood as the role that it plays in wider science because colors are actually part of the electromagnetic spectrum. But so is radio, radio waves. So are microwaves. So is the wifi that is making my computer work right now or the Bluetooth that’s making my headphones connect to the computer. Those are all different forms of [00:04:00] light. And so people don’t often think about it that way, but it’s true. And the strata of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can actually observe easily is what we call visible color. So I’m explaining all this to gab because this is, I’m nerding out on this. I love this. And she asked me to is there a way she could physically understand it ’cause I’m just making these abstract concepts and there’s these cool color mixing tools you can see online. And I’ve actually built a few for our website. They’re gonna be released in. But then I started looking into it. I was like it would be cool to have something that combined colors, because a prism separates colors. You put, you start with a hundred percent of visible light, which comes out as white, and you put it into a prism and it’ll separate the colors into their components.

But there wasn’t anything that did that in reverse. And I started looking it up and I saw that there were some artists back in the day, a guy named Vasa, who had these acrylic art installations in museums. And he would play with colored acrylic and mix the color so that from one angle you saw the sculpture in a certain color, but from the other angle it was a completely different color. I thought that was very cool. [00:05:00] And I started looking into stained glass and how people have been layering different colors to create new colors in a physical sense for,

Jason Hsieh: yeah

Enzo Gonzalez: Over a thousand years. There’s, some gothic cathedrals that use the same concept as my CMY cube that are centuries and centuries old, but there wasn’t anything that you could hold that was a consumer product, something that was made for the masses, not like an art piece or cathedral. And so I got prototyping because I’ve always had a workshop. I was trained in engineering, but I became a carpenter. So I’ve always had I’ve got all the tools. I got a 3D printer set up right here. I got a few 3D printers actually. So I’m just like, I’m playing around, And based on the inspiration and the research that I could find, we came up with the original prototype of A CMY cube.

Jason Hsieh: Was it originally that big? Was it smaller?

Enzo Gonzalez: No, this is actually not even the standard size. The standard size is, that big, but Just from what I had freely available. This is the mega cube. This is eight times the volume, twice the dimension on the side. And so we had an original prototype. Gab and I both had businesses previously. I had a carpentry company and Gab had a [00:06:00] handbag business. So we were experienced enough in business to know that we’d found something cool here, something kind of new, something that you couldn’t find. And when I went to name it as the CMY Cube that domain name was available. It’s like CMYcubes.com was available. And so if you know anything about e-commerce, finding a clean domain name domain,

Jason Hsieh: that is the tricky, yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: That is, that’s gold. That it was a goldmine. And when we saw that cmy cubes.com was available, Gab and I kinda looked at each other and this was, it must’ve been like 10:00 PM looked at each other and thought, okay let’s, just buy this domain. We probably spent, I don’t know, like four or 500 bucks that night and just bought every variation of this domain name because we’d, done a lot of domain name purchases in the past.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: So we knew that if like we’d found something cool, we needed to protect it. And then we put it on pre-order based on some really early prototype videos.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: And it went viral overnight.

Jason Hsieh: Oh wow. Okay. Okay.

Enzo Gonzalez: Overnight. So I think we woke up the first [00:07:00] day after putting some content out and there was like 30 orders, which is crazy because for there to be 30 orders, that means that thousands of people must have interacted with this piece of content, right? Because conversion rates are so low, especially for untested, really janky website content. And then the next day there was like a hundred orders, and the next day there was like hundreds of orders and it just it went, bananas. And at that point we only had prototypes. I didn’t even have,

Jason Hsieh: you don’t even have a physical product yet.

Enzo Gonzalez: Didn’t have physical product, didn’t have manufacturing facility for the product, didn’t have a distribution channel, had no idea what we were doing. Had never fulfilled products before. Like we’d fulfilled products for the handbags, it’s very different for something that’s a soft product, than it is for something that’s heavy and fragile like ours is. And I’ve done a service-based business before, so there was a steep learning curve. Fortunately, we had contacts that could help us get this thing manufactured. And it took about three months, but we did it. We finally made, our first order and started to fulfill and it was just in time for Christmas. So [00:08:00] then it was like early December and it’s me and Gab and Gabs mom and Gabs his best friend just in a storage unit a little, I guess in feet, like a 10 foot by 10 foot storage unit, just fulfilling thousands of these orders as best we could, like putting these and, the original product packaging.

We have really sleek product packaging now too because we refined it, but it was just like a white box that said CMY cube. There was nothing special about it, putting it in these poly mailers. Just hoping that it works printing each label one by one. But yeah, that was four years ago, four and a half years ago. Now we are in over 300 retailers worldwide. We’re in really notable ones too, like the Museum of Modern Art, the MoMA in New York, actually the MoMA New York MoMA, San Francisco MoMA tokyo, we’re in the Getty in Los Angeles. They stock our product, the National Children’s Museum in Washington, DC They stock us, the Philip and Patricia Frost Science Museum in Miami, the Luminar, there’s

Jason Hsieh: How do you secure those opportunities? Because those museums not easy to get in.

Enzo Gonzalez: Yeah. It was a combination of [00:09:00] things. One, is that pretty early on with our viral content on TikTok specifically?

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: We got, noticed by some pretty cool science influencers, science content creators. So I dunno you might be familiar, but probably someone in your audience would be the content creator vsauce, Michael Stevens from vsauce. He’s got at this point it must be 20 million followers on YouTube. And I’d been watching him since I was 10 years. Yeah. For, I’d been watching him, maybe not since I was 10, but I’d been watching him for, he’s 15 years and in the science YouTube space, he is royalty. He’s like the godfather. He’s well respected and everybody loves him. And we went viral with this cool new science gadget that no one had ever seen before. And he contacted us, his team contacted.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, okay.

Enzo Gonzalez: And, he, ’cause he had this quarterly subscription box called the Curiosity Box. And in that he’d include like a bunch of cool science and math games and just cool stuff to be curious about the universe with

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: But all the profits from [00:10:00] this went to Alzheimer’s research.

Jason Hsieh: Oh.

Enzo Gonzalez: And so he contacted us and asked if we could maybe be part of the curiosity box for one of the quarters and do a custom product with them.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: And. But they didn’t have a lot of money to buy the products. Not that they weren’t well funded, but like all their profits went back into Alzheimer’s research.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: And immediately we were like you’re Michael Stevens, you’re vsauce, you’re my hero. The profits go to Alzheimer’s research. We did it for cost price. We just, when we gave them 10,000 units, basically cost, price, made a custom packaging for them, and then we went viral again. But this time that we went viral, to his audience and then off the back of that, we just had so much. So many eyes were on our products since there was so much publicity that we’d been contacting smaller museums and just direct contacts and whatever. A few big names reach out, to us after that.

Jason Hsieh: I see

Enzo Gonzalez: some of them, I’m still in talks with about co-developing products, but some of the ones I can talk about are like the MoMA, New York.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: They came to us first.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, nice. Okay.

Enzo Gonzalez: And when we first shipped out to [00:11:00] them it was like we in business and in life as you grow and develop, you hit these milestones and maybe you’re working towards them and maybe you don’t know you’re working towards them, but every once in a while you get this experience where you look around and pinch yourself. Is this real? When the MoMA, reached out to me,

Jason Hsieh: yeah

Enzo Gonzalez: I, was like this is, incredible. And now the MoMA’s probably still in our top five biggest order. They order the most from us. But then off the back of the MoMA we realized that we should really try to get into the museum gift shop space, our product.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. It a really good fit. Yeah, it’s smart.

Enzo Gonzalez: Our product is like what do you call this? Is this a toy? It is a toy in the idea that you play with it. But it’s an educational toy because you can learn something with it, but it doesn’t fit the traditional toy space. It’s not an action figure.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. It’s a little bit different

Enzo Gonzalez: it’s not an action figure. It’s not a remote control car, it’s not a coloring book. What is this thing? And we realize that the way to describe it is the kind of thing you’d find in museums gift shop. That’s how you describe. And so now that we have the name, the MoMA on board. We would just [00:12:00] reach out to museums and be like, Hey, we’re in the MoMA. Hey, we’re in the MoMA. Hey, we’re in the MoMA. Hey, we’re in the MoMA. And then we got bigger and bigger that way. And then eventually it turns out that there’s museums whose buyers go to the MoMA, once a year we’ve heard this from a few different museums. They go to the MoMA to see what the MoMA is selling so that they can sell it back in every museum. So like museums in Columbia

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: Said that to us. Museums in Colorado said that to us.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, whoa. Okay.

Enzo Gonzalez: Once they know it fits in museums gift shop, once we’ve proven this case. Everyone else just wants it because they need cool things through the museum gift shop. So that’s how we got in everywhere. And eventually we got into my local science museum. ’cause I’m from Miami. And he got into the Philip and producer. Frost Science Museum in Miami, which was another momentous occasion for me. Yeah.

Jason Hsieh: I see. But you currently live in Australia, right?

Enzo Gonzalez: Yeah. We’re in the central coast of Australia. That’s where our headquarters are. That’s about an hour north of Sydney. I’ve been here for over a decade now. I’m a citizen of Australia.

Jason Hsieh: So I wanna take a step back because this whole story just sounds like a, almost like a [00:13:00] definitely entrepreneurial success. But taking back to originally when you first started four years ago.

What is that moment when you noticed your products going viral? What was going through your mind and were you trying to get like a utility pattern or design pattern immediately try to protect the concept?

Enzo Gonzalez: So short answer to that is we made mistakes, big ones, costly mistakes, huge. Keep you up at night crying to your mom mistakes. Now we have the system down. When we do new product development we will do the trademark. We will do the trademark, when we have an idea for a product, we wanna, whether or not we go through the actual full product development cycle and make a product at the end of it. We still do the trademark right in the beginning now. And we do the design patent or the copyright, whatever’s associated with that particular product. We’ll do that in prototyping. Before I release it. This, we didn’t know what we were doing. My business was I was in, I was a carpenter. I don’t need to trademark anything or patent anything. Like I’m just I’m building walls [00:14:00] and stuff and decks and gab, when she was doing her handbags, we did do a design registration for the handbag. But it’s a very different space. There are a lot of handbags in the world. If you take a walk down the street, you’ll see a thousand different types of handbags. Whereas this is a one of a kind unique product in the world. So it’s a different thing.

So we didn’t do the trademark. We had the domain name, we got the domain name, and that’s all we knew. We were like, wow, domain name, we got this. Let’s lock this. We didn’t do the trademark as early as we should have, and we didn’t do the design patent as early as we should have. We do have the trademark. I do have the trademark CMY cubes. It was a battle to get that though, because you’re and, the patent and things like that, because you’re supposed to do that before you release it to the public. Especially in America. Some countries don’t mind if you have public eyes on the product before you try to protect it. But America does. America really minds. They want you to do all of this before anybody gets to see it, so that you can prove that it was your idea and things like that. And they ended up being lawsuits. They ended up we’re always getting [00:15:00] sued. Not we’re always getting sued, but like being in business lawsuits are just kind of part of what happens. But we did go through some legal battles to get that people wanted to cancel our trademark. We’re actually in legal battle right now. We’re a counterfeit that sells on Amazon.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: That doesn’t even pretend not to be a counterfeit. They used our photos.

Jason Hsieh: Oh my God.

Enzo Gonzalez: They literally went to our website and our Amazon took our photos and they do it. And, they were selling in Amazon, and we were made aware of this because we got emails from people being like the products something’s wrong with the product. The product’s rubbish. Or it’s like it broke, or, and we’re like I spend so much time trying to make these absolutely fantastic. Excellent. High quality products like acrylic is diamond polished. We have a proprietary system that applies to the color. I spent a lot of time and even in the shipping, like the boxes designed to protect the product. So the kind of complaints that we were getting from people didn’t make sense and then we looked it up and these people had never purchased from us. Like we look up their name, we’re like, what’s your order number? What’s your name? We’re trying to go through this customer service [00:16:00] process. They never ordered it from us to this apparently pretty prolific counterfeit on Amazon that was selling crap, if you’ll excuse saying they were selling crap.

And customers were thinking that they were buying our product, but they weren’t. Yeah. They were buying someone else’s. And so then we got them taken down off of Amazon, which was like it’s a love hate relationship with Amazon in general, but at least they, if you have the trademark, you have the patent, they will protect your IP for you. So they got taken down off of Amazon. And their response to that was to sue us for damages and to try to get our trademark cancel. That’s a legal battle that I’m in right now.

 Our lawyers are very confident that we’re going to win and that they’re just trying to annoy us to the point where we’ll give in. But that’s just not how this is gonna go down. It’s just it, this is just part of what happens. So as far as did we protect things early on? We didn’t have the systems in place that we do now SOPs, right? And extended operating procedures where now there’s steps. There’s a timeline. We have our IP lawyers, [00:17:00] we have our international lawyers, we’ve got our legal business lawyers. Like we, we have these relationships that we’ve developed. We know what that process looks like. And it’s actually one of the pieces of advice that I give most often to new business founders or people that I coach is protect your IP early. Protect your IP first, protect your name, protect your products, protect it all first.

And the pushback you get to that is that people have just started out, they don’t even have a product that they can sell yet, and I’m asking them to spend a thousand dollars or $2,000 on some trademark or some time. And yeah, that, that sucks. That’s a big outlay for the average person who doesn’t have a business, who just has an idea. It’s a significant investment in oneself, right? It’s a leap of faith, but you have to invest in yourself if you wanna make something happen. And it’s much cheaper than paying for lawyers that cost $400 an hour, which is what I pay right now. I pay for multiple lawyers that cost upwards of 400 an hour. So if you can just do it when you should, it’s actually much cheaper the long run’s,

Jason Hsieh: much cheaper in the long run. [00:18:00]

Enzo Gonzalez: It’s a good stress test as well of whether or not you believe in yourself and whether or not you believe in your product, will you spend the money on yourself you know?

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. That’s a good piece of advice. And since you are able to expand internationally so quickly with your brand, what are some of other lessons learned from that international expansion?

Enzo Gonzalez: Different from most companies. We started internationally.

Jason Hsieh: Oh, okay. Okay.

Enzo Gonzalez: It was a concerted effort about a year and a half or two years in to actually increase our presence in Australia. And probably for American listeners specifically a strange idea because the American market is so enormous that you need to expand internationally at the beginning. You can just sell it to America, right? But it is a lot more normal for Australian companies, e-commerce companies. Australia’s a small country, it’s like 25 million people in the entire country. People don’t realize that the geographical area of Australia is the same, basically the same as the lower 48 of the United States. It’s the same size, but it’s got the population of Florida.

And so while it is a strong economy and it punches above its weight, it is [00:19:00] quite small. And so what Australian companies tend to do is shipped to Europe, shipped to the us, shipped to Canada, Japan, south America like everywhere everywhere like that. And because our marketing strategy in the beginning was go viral. Period. Full stop. There wasn’t a like an ad campaign on Facebook where we’re like, selecting Australia. We weren’t doing that. Yeah. It was just like, put this content out. Whoever likes it’s gonna see it, and our first orders were international orders. Probably two thirds of them were America. The lions share of the rest would’ve been Europe, and then maybe there was like an Australian order here and there. Now, that was in the beginning. That just happened. We had to figure out what that meant.

What I realized now though is that markets are different. Audiences are different. People are different, in general. And that’ll range from the kinds of products that they’re interested in to what they expect to pay for a certain product.

Like for instance, we have a Japanese distributor and their pricing is quite different from what it our pricing is in America, say. Yeah, we’ve learned a lot along the way.

Jason Hsieh: For sure. [00:20:00] And I want to kinda also piggyback on the success you have, especially with the viral content and with the amount of view. I think with some of the video, you gathered like a hundred some crazy number, like 150 million views.

Enzo Gonzalez: I think we’re more than that now. ‘Cause that’s actually an old figure.

Jason Hsieh: Were you just reaching out to influencer a lot or were you creating all the content in-house? What was your workflow and strategy? To create so many viral content for the brand?

Enzo Gonzalez: So there’s definitely a strategy, but I can’t take credit for in the slightest. I’m an engineer. I have a, an operations mindset. I have a logical mindset. I’m product development is my passion, my joy. I like making new things, but as far as this marketing strategy, I take zero credit for that. Our amazing success is 100% due to Gab. Gab got Gabrielle Saper, Gabby Saper. Her Instagram is scale with Gabs. Her TikTok is scale with Gabs. If you want to, if you wanna get more information about her viral marketing tactics, she’s a coach and an exec in another company called she com, which [00:21:00] is about helping women in business expand their companies. She’s chief of growth for that company, and her forte in coaching is viral marketing, so I

Jason Hsieh: Oh, okay.

Enzo Gonzalez: It, was a good team. It was a good team. I do know way more about marketing than your average person does for sure, because I’m in charge of the business and I have Gab with me all the time. As far as the actual strategy, that was all gab. So I can explain it in a second, but I just wanna make sure that credit is placed where credit is due for sure. And in the beginning we were posting our own content. So we would make content, we would make videos and just try to make them, this is the kind of early TikTok as well, just trying to make them sticky. I don’t have to say it. So my first series of videos, it was. How do you break a CMY cube, right? Okay. Which is crazy.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: One because why am I showing that my product can break?

Jason Hsieh: Yeah, can’t do it. Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: And two, so it’s a beautiful and semi fragile, like this is made of acrylic. Like these if you throw this at a wall. [00:22:00] It could chip, it won’t shatter. It’s not glass it can break.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: But we made a series of videos where we put it in a blender, put it in a microwave, ran over it with a car. Dropped it, just dropped it from the, like the top of a building or something. Just did a bunch of stuff to it just because it seems like it’s so precious. And so the idea was just go the complete opposite, like turn that on the tech

Jason Hsieh: opposite. I see. Okay.

Enzo Gonzalez: And and it worked and we, in the early days we were posting on Reddit and we would, we got, a lot of accounts banned that way because you’re not allowed to do that on Reddit. It was unfortunate because some of what I wanted to do on Reddit was really just share something cool. There’s cool channels and sub and subreddits where I just wanted to share how awesome this thing was and, other people did too. But then some of it just became a bit too marketing, right? And Reddit doesn’t like that. So we switched and we started just doing mostly on TikTok. And the TikTok ones just went viral from these videos because you have a combination of something that no one’s ever seen before with an interesting marketing strategy, which is,

Jason Hsieh: and all those video is shot in-house, or do you hire like a team or,

Enzo Gonzalez: originally they were all shot in-house. [00:23:00] Now, fast forward four years, we have a full-time content creator who off the back of our work with him has now started his own concentration agency. So he’s got four people and they’re all young. They’re all like, they’ve got their finger on the pulse. His name, is Lee. He is such an amazing, inspiring, just powerful young guy. And I so admire him even though I’ve got 10 years on him. Because if I had the confidence and I guess the self-belief that he does at his age, like who, who knows? But we brought him on board and it was a long process to find him because your brand and the voice of your brand is a very specific thing if you’re a real brand Nothing against dropshipping, but the voice of say, of Dropshipper is not gonna be the same as the company that develops and distributes their own products. Like we have our own culture, we have our own feel, and finding a constant creator that matched our energy on that was a long process.

And we went through a few different content creators [00:24:00] that we had found over the years and then we, found Lee and Lee just, he spoke with our voice without us having to train him to do that. It was just, and that was just a long process of just going through content creators, getting content made. But once we found him, we went all in which is why he’s opened up his agency now. And so he has his team and he selects the team and they also have our voice, but he’s still the main person. And now he makes our content with Gab. So Gab is in charge of marketing in general. We have another marketing manager here, and then they manage Lee and his team, and so they’ll come up with ideas and the campaign strategies for different markets. Say for ‘ cause we sell on TikTok shop now, and so there’s like social commerce side of what’s going on tikTok. But we also cross post to YouTube. We cross post to Instagram. We’re huge on Pinterest. We’ve got 2 million views a month on Pinterest. Things like that.

So all these different platforms, even sometimes down to the country, we’ll have different strategies and

Jason Hsieh: But is Lee and his team working exclusively only for your brand or he’s [00:25:00] also working with other brands?

Enzo Gonzalez: He has a couple of his own brands that he works on. But we’re definitely the lion’s share of what he’s doing. And yeah, so he makes the content for us and he does the editing and does the posting. Gab manages that and does the strategy that where he is going with that.

Jason Hsieh: I see. It sounds like you have a really incredible team, which is very important to support the growth and your vision. Vision.

Enzo Gonzalez: We have the best team. Every single person that works with us and works on these projects are people that I admire and I respect, and that I want to be more like in many ways, like every single person. It’s, a delicate thing. The culture and the feel of a company, because a company is really just

Jason Hsieh: made out people.

Enzo Gonzalez: People, or a person. And from when before I became a business owner or an entrepreneur you look at these companies. these mystical beings. These concepts, these kind of nebulous things of success. And then the ones that you come into contact with most often are enormous companies like Apple, Google. You got these like big hitters or like Mercedes, who knows? And they [00:26:00] seem really faceless and anonymous, or least they used to. Now you’re getting more faces to the companies. Like we do see more of Tin Cook, we see more of Elon Musk and things like that. But you, can forget from that viewpoint that there is no SpaceX. That’s not real. It’s not actually a real thing. It’s a concept. What it is, a group of people who are cooperating in the same direction. And that’s true all the way down to, even if you’re just like a, sole trader, somebody working on a business yourself how you feel about the business and how you act towards your customers is what the business is. And when selecting our team here, again, we’ve made mistakes. We’ve brought people on that weren’t the right even if their skills were exceptional, even if their skills were good, how they brought, how they showed up, and how they communicated with the rest of the team, if it doesn’t fit it can be a cancer for the company. And I don’t use that word, I don’t use that word lightly. I understand that there’s a lot of baggage associated with the word cancer. And I’m not trying to detract from people who suffer from that in any way, but businesses are organisms as well, [00:27:00] and they can also suffer from diseases in the same way. And, I’m using this as a specific metaphor to say that like it can be something that just eventually builds to the point where it can destroy your company. You need to select your team very carefully. And that’s why I’m so happy that our team is just aces, we’ve got the right people doing the right thing, and honestly, I love them all. Yeah.

Jason Hsieh: Got it. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing all your wisdom and,And also congratulations on your success so far as well. Wrapping up today’s interview, if you have to share just one piece of advice with someone that’s getting started within the toys and game industry, what would that be?

Enzo Gonzalez: You’re supposed to be afraid. There’s a lot in that sentence. I’m not trying to say you must be afraid, be afraid. What I’m trying to say is it’s okay that you’re afraid. That’s not an inhibitor. That’s not when you’re doing your calculus of whether you should move forward, the fear that you feel shouldn’t be something that stops you. That’s normal. Say you take an ice bath or something. It’s very cold and your body thinks it’s [00:28:00] dying this is supposed to happen. You’re supposed to be very cold. It’s supposed to feel like you’re dying. That’s what you’re doing, right? And the process to starting a business or running a business, fear is part of it.

I’ve got a big-ish team where we’re like we’re not a small business anymore. We’re not huge, like small medium business. We turn over in the millions at this point. And I’ve got so much going on and from almost any viewpoint looking out from the outside, looking in, I’m successful, this is successful, but I feel fear every day. And it’s just part of what happens. And part of why I think the development of being a business owner is, becoming comfortable with that, knowing when to listen to it and overcoming that in a way, or becoming a friend to your fear. Like your fear is not there for no reason. It’s, telling you about risk, right? But you don’t need to blow up those risks in your mind. You don’t need to overweigh the consequences of those risks. It’s, okay to be afraid. And the path to growth is through that fear. So that’s the one thing, normally when people are about to start something, they’re just like, I just don’t know. Should I do this? Whatever. Not to get overly philosophical for you here, but I have [00:29:00] tattooed on my arm, memento Maori, which means remember death, which I know just changes how this conversation feels a little bit, but I actually think it’s a very, it’s a positive thing for me. It’s that we’re all on this journey and we know where it ends. Okay? Like you, there’s no no one, gets through this alive. And so if there’s things that you feel you wanna do in your life what are you waiting for? Like here it is, do it. And often the worst case scenario, if you actually sit there and you write it out. Isn’t as bad as you think. Like maybe you blew a thousand dollars on a trademark that never went anywhere. At least you took a shot at yourself. And to be honest, in all of my interactions with people in all of my experience, I’ve actually never met somebody who didn’t accomplish what they set out to accomplish.

If they didn’t stop. If they didn’t give up, if they didn’t start giving into that fear. Like you, if you just keep going. You will keep making progress and then one day you’ll look back and be like, wow look, at all I’ve done. So yeah, that my one piece of advice is [00:30:00] like, you’re supposed to be afraid. It’s okay to be afraid.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. So for those listener that want to find more about you and your company, what is the best place for, people to find online?

Enzo Gonzalez: That’s one of my 2025 goals is actually to increase my personal brand and my presence online. I’m not, I’m personally not very active. I do coaching and things like that. Very select in ways. The best way to know more about us or our company is either with at CMY Cube. That’s Scion, magenta, yellow cubes. So it’s CMY cubes everywhere.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah.

Enzo Gonzalez: TikTok, Instagram, wherever. Scale with Gabs is gabs handle for TikTok and Instagram. Okay. If you message either of those platforms, there’s probably a way to get to me through them, but I am trying to, this year put more content out and just be more of a presence. It’s a long journey for me. It’s hard for me to feel like people wanna hear what I have to say, but I’ve had enough feedback where it seems like I’ve paid in blood, sweat, and tears for my lessons. And if anything, I have a responsibility to society to share that.

Jason Hsieh: Share that. Yeah. [00:31:00] Thank you so much. I’ll make sure we put that in the show note.

And for our listeners, thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Toy Business Unboxed Podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversation and find it insightful and inspiring.

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Join the conversation and connect with us on social media using hashtag #ToyBusinessUnboxed we love to hear your feedback and suggestion for future episode. Until next time, keep innovating. Keep creating, keep bringing joy to toys. This is Jason Hsieh signing off on the Toy Business Unbox podcast and we’ll see you in the next episode.