Toy companies like Lego have experimented here and there with crowdsourcing, listening to customers' input and churning out products they're looking for. But it's the core of Squishable's mission.
The New York startup allows fans to choose and design plush, furry stuffed animals. Led by husband and wife, the 11-person team uses social media to build a dedicated following, turning its 850,000 Facebook fans into active participants in the creative process, engaging with customers on every aspect from design to color.
Squishable's approach originally focused on vetting and prototyping ideas based on fan interaction and feedback on their Facebook page. In total, about 160 different designs have been created in the company's history, with hundreds of thousands of units sold in 600 stores nationwide, mostly at gift and independent toy outlets, zoos and aquariums. (Google has purchased droves of Android plushes since 2008.)
But in late 2012, the company launched Project Open Squish, a website dedicated to streamlining fan design that caused submissions and sales to skyrocket, said their management team.
How It Works
After submitting a design to Project Open Squish (free for those 18 and older), fans can vote on designs on the Squishable website on a biweekly basis. Winners are sent to Squishable's factory in China for prototyping, and Squishable staff evaluate and send revisions back to the factory, if necessary. Squishable turns to its Facebook page with any design problems. After the approval of a prototype, it is sent to production.
Fans have submitted about 3,500 designs since the company debuted Project Open Squish. This week, the site released two toys designed by fans: a werewolf (below) and a hyena.
Since fans vote every two weeks, there is a huge pipeline of designs in the queue, said Zoe Fraade-Blanar, a Squishable cofounder with husband Aaron Glazer.
"We really try to subscribe to the idea that fans are smarter than we are," Zoe Fraade-Blanar. "They're really the people that have the power in the company because they're the people with the money, so you might as well do what they want."
This new format is more effective because it lets fans take charge.
"It helps a lot to say that 850,000 people are willing to be our fan on Facebook and vote on what style we come out with next," said Charles Donefer, the company's managing squisher and general counsel.
Donefer described Squishable as a tech company that answers every fan question on its Facebook page. He says Squishable could not exist in the old toy manufacturing model of design and trade show.
Starting From the Couch
Although Project Open Squish is a relatively new tool, fan involvement is ingrained in the company's roots.
Fraade-Blanar and her husband started the company after quitting their jobs in to volunteer in Asia after the 2005 tsunami. They visited a plush factory in Thailand and brought home a huggable, polyester friend. The plush took up residence on their couch and gained enough attention from visitors to give the pair confidence to ditch their corporate consulting and programing jobs in 2011 and focus on building a new business.
"We've been doing versions of crowdsourcing ever since Squishable started," Fraade-Blanar said.
In the early days, Fraade-Blanar would lock herself in a hotel and spend days drawing designs. Then, she would submit them to the Squishable Facebook page, anxious over fan reactions, tweaking and adjusting based on reactions.
Squishable employees used to ask fans to nominate species of animals to create, and fans voted on their preference. But as time passed, they began asking Facebook fans more specific design questions, Donefer explained.
"People would ask us if they could send designs and we didn't have a process," he said. "It matters when you ask from a suggestion from your fans that you actually take their suggestions to heart."
Do you think fans should have this much of a say in a company's production? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Squishable
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