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Court of the Dead

May 18, 2009

Designer Toy people in mainstream media

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I was both amused and a little unnerved this morning when I flipped open this month’s issue of Fast Company magazine and poked through their “100 Most Creative People in Business” article… A big full-page pic of a giant red KAWS figure was on page 95! WTF?!
On further investigation, I found that 3 of the 100 people Fast Company chose are in the designer toy industry!

Here they are:
#54: Masamichi Katayama, Principal at Wonderwall
#56: Charles Rivkin, President & CEO of W!ldbrain (FYI Wildbrain owns part or all of Kidrobot)
#70: Brian Donnelly (KAWS): Artist/designer/owner of OriginalFake

This mainstream media coverage of players in our little designer toy industry is exciting, to be sure, but does this mean that our industry is now considered “legitimate”? And if art toys are now legit, is that good or bad? I mean, as a store owner, I can only be happy that more and more people are getting turned on to designer toys. More people buying toys means more customers for the shops. But, when a subversive idea hits the mainstream, does it continue to be subversive?

And what will happen to our subversive “toys” once the general population gets their hooks in? Will our toys become “Disney-fied”? Will a sufficient number of artists and companies continue to push the envelope of subversion, and continue to test the limits of people’s comfort zones? Or will many of our beloved manufacturers embrace the growing mass interest in their products by developing more cartoony, less offensive, less explicit art toys so that they can make bigger profits?

I mean, profit is good. Me and Stephanie were collectors first, before we started Tenacious Toys, but without generating some sort of profit, we’d go out of business fast. So profit is a good thing. But would increased profits be worth the price we’d pay once the art toy community starts catering to the masses?

May 17, 2009

Travis Lampe Tear Drips blind box toys coming next week

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Thanks to one of our best customers for turning us on to the Tear Drips by Travis Lampe!

Tear Drips are a new art toy project produced by a collaboration between Chicago-based product development specialists Squibbles Ink, designer toy store Rotofugi and artist Travis Lampe.

Tear Drips arrive next week. There are 12 designs and they come packed 12 to a case- one of each per case to make collecting a full set easy...

May 13, 2009

Toy2R developing a line of 18-inch Qee Pillows!

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Coming soon from Toy2R are these fun 18" tall Qee pillows!

The first lineup of pillows will be the popular DOINK Qee (above).

After that will most likely be a line of Toyer Qee pillows, and then who knows? Sky's the limit on this idea, with so many Qees out there. They are aiming to make the retail price around $40 each. Your furniture is sort of the last frontier for your designer toy collection... you already have toys all over your desk, bedroom, office and living room, plus the toy-related art on your walls. Why not stick a Qee pillow on your bed and another on the couch and just really, fully succumb to your addiction?

Junko Mizuno Pure Trance mini figure series from Kidrobot

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Dropping early June is this very interesting and subversive 3" mini figure series from Kidrobot: Pure Trance by Junko Mizuno. Based on her manga book by the same name, Pure Trance deals with adult themes, so much so that it comes with some sort of adult content warning. Which makes it way cooler than all those Yummy Donut keychains you've been collecting lately.
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