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.
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.
I was able to design a lever disguised as Sully's dinosaur spikes, making the movement of the mouth on this small character possible.
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.
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.
