TOYS & FOOD & BEVERAGE
Under the Visual Playthings umbrella, I have designed dozens and dozens of toys, promotional give-aways, candy products, Cracker Jack prizes, candy dispensers, and multitudes of retail products including the number one selling children's training potty for Fisher Price, The Royal Potty.
When I was Product Development Director for Imaginings3, creators of Flix candy, we partnered with Pixar for a tie-in with Monsters, Inc.
With a strong background in pocket-sized, moving characters, I realized that we could go way beyond their traditional static figurine on candy sticks and designed toppers with movements which would bring the characters to life.
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Sully is known for his deep, booming voice and a face characterized by a large, bucket-shaped jaw. Whether screaming, shouting or talking softly, Sully's mouth opens and closes distinctively. It seemed critical for engaging play, to make Sully into a talking puppet.
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I was able to design a lever disguised as Sully's dinosaur spikes, making the movement of the mouth on this small character possible.
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Sully's sidekick, Mike, is characterized by his one gigantic, very expressive eyeball. Again, disguising the mechanism was critical and so I connected his eyeball to his hard hat which turns to animate his eye. These toys were a huge hit, bringing the moving to life in the candy aisle and resulting in huge sales.
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Flix had also been creating push puppets for various characters. My Sully featured a full puppet mouth and color breaks that were sprayed rather than tampo printed to make a more accurate recreation of the original character.
KIDS' MEALS
I designed Happy Meal toys for McDonald's for over ten years working in every material conceivable and making toys for markets around the globe. I worked with licenses of every sort from movies to toy companies, publishers, TV networks and entertainment venues. I took this knowledge to the candy industry which has other requirements but mirrors the QSR market. These lip pops started a trend in the market. If imitation is truly a sign of flattery, I should feel flattered that this product has been imitated in many industries and in many other similar products. Still in stores, the company for which I designed these has continued to create generations of different styles of mouths and faces on their candy pacifiers.
