The following is excerpted from LDS Living. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
Tauni Beck looked at the two card games she and her husband, Brent, were going to launch at the February 2012 New York Toy Fair and realized there was a major problem.
The products they’d made, Grandpa Beck’s Golf and Cover Your Assets, were improved versions of old face-card games. But because different artists had worked on the games at different times, the boxes didn’t look like they were from the same company—and Tauni felt a strong prompting from the Spirit that they should.
“I knew that the golf one needed to change one more time [because] it was really important that we go to Toy Fair with two games that were branded in a connected way,” Tauni says. But reprinting the golf game box would come at a high cost: “I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, we’ve already printed this thing twice. … How am I going to tell Brent this?’”
Tauni thought and prayed about the matter for a week before bringing it up with Brent. Together, with only six months to complete the project, they decided to have their game box reformatted and printed once again.
“Having two games that were branded together was more powerful than two disparate games because it made it a real brand,” Brent says. And in the midst of the massive Javits Center in Manhattan where countless other companies were marketing their toys, they hoped that having a real brand would help them stand out to distributors and retailers.
When everything was taken care of, the Becks packed up their games, flew to New York, and set up a booth at Toy Fair, hoping against all odds that they’d meet someone who was interested in their company—but no dice. Days passed, and hardly anyone talked to them about their business.
“I was like, ‘We have just dumped thousands of dollars down the drain. What have we done?” Tauni recalls thinking.
But then, on the second-to-last day of the fair, two distributors from Lion Rampant Imports in Canada approached the Becks’ table. Tauni watched as one of those distributors looked down at the boxes. And then back up. “You have a brand!” she said, impressed.
Tauni was thrilled to realize that their efforts to rebrand the golf game had paid off. “It still gives me goosebumps,” she says, explaining that those distributors, and the owner of the Red Balloon toy stores, who also came to their booth, decided to take a chance on them. “The Spirit helps us in so many ways in our everyday lives. And so, we had a brand. … It was a long time before we really made any profit from it, but we were on the way. I know it was inspiration. … It opened the door for us.”
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
