Here is a truly unique company run by a couple of young entrepreneurs: Happy Worker.
As co-creators and co-founders of Happy Worker and The Toy Agency, Shirley Yee and Kris Schantz create fun for big kids… and try their hardest to turn all working stiffs into happy workers.
The duo first came up with the idea for a geek action figure in early 2002 while working in the IT industry after the dotcom collapse. Shirley was working as a web developer, and Kris was creating products and managing marketing for entrepreneurial Internet companies. Through some persistence and an abundance of nerdy love, the pair joined forces with other toy-minded people and turned a little napkin drawing into a real live toy – the GeekMan Action Figure hit retail shelves and office cubicles in mid 2004. (More about the making of GeekMan at http://www.happyworker.com/geekman/makingof.html)
Since their firstborn toy Happy Worker has added other original action figures, including BossMan – mighty manager, SuperMom – mini mommy heroine, and MoneyMan – your friendly neighborhood financial hero. Happy Worker’s toys are now available in 6 countries and have made over 250 media appearances.
“We had to try our hand at inventing toys… we had all these crazy toy ideas burning holes in our heads, and we needed to let them out. But like most things, with toys coming up with crazy ideas is the easy part. Turning them into reality… takes real passion and business sanity.”
One of the challenges they faced was that neither had any real experience in the toy industry. They invested all the free time they could find on evenings and weekends towards researching the toy business… first via books and online, then by attending Toy Fair in New York, and finally by making contacts in the industry. “The learning process was a lot of fun… and a lot of homework. But after about a year of research we’d learned as much as we could about the industry without actually making a toy.”
After seeing their retail toys, in early 2005 Yahoo! asked Happy Worker for creative toy ideas to add excitement to their upcoming marketing campaigns. Together they launched a line of exclusive HR related action figures for Yahoo!’s HotJobs division. “The action figures were introduced at the world’s largest HR trade show, and Yahoo!’s booth was crazy busy with people clamoring for the toys. Before the show was over they’d run out of action figures, and more importantly recorded a huge increase in booth traffic and show sales over previous years.” The companies have worked together for the last 3 years.
Since then Happy Worker has completed a number of successful custom toy projects for other brands, and created a separate division, “The Toy Agency by Happy Worker”, focused on designing and producing tailor-made toys and gifts from scratch for companies and marketing agencies.
Evan Carmichael
