Been with FP for over 20 years now. There was a time when FP was the leader in preschool toy design. It was our passion to do it good and do it right. No detail was over looked, breadboard models were built to prove out a design. Models were tested with kids in the playlab, concepts were then redesigned and new models were built it to make it better, we did this until the product was right…period.
Today that’s all history, now we just rough out a sketch and send it to Asia and hope for the best. Hope is not a strategy! The model shop was once the hub of R&D. Designers would be refining their designs, building breadboards and collaborating with other designers to solve problems. Today the R&D shop is dead quiet, no activity whatsoever, a relic of the past. The Playlab, where invaluable child testing took place is all but shut down. Engineering too is nothing more than loading data into the PLM system that does not work. There is very little real engineering going on here. Little design and little engineering = poor products, it’s really that simple folks. We now value marketing and sales over the quality of the product.
Here is a quote from the late Steve Jobs.
"I have my own theory about why the decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The product starts valuing the great salesmen, because they're the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company."
What took 70+ years to build and fine tune into the greatest preschool toy company ever, has only taken Mattel less than 5 years to completely destroy. Sales of our core preschool businesses are down nearly a third from just a few years ago. The ever wise outside consultants we paid tens of millions of dollars to suggested we walk away from many of our core businesses a few years ago (propel), simply walk away from hundreds of millions of dollars of business that were slightly less profitable than other categories, with the hope of making up the difference by selling more playsets? To date we never made up the difference and that represents one reason why our business is down nearly a third. We all saw it, we all thought it was nuts, stupid, irresponsible, what were they thinking? Sure enough we walked away and our competitors happily filled in the shelves we vacated with their product. No we didn’t get beat by our competitors, we simply walked away, gave it away for free.
Last year I bought a few toys for my kids at the FP toy store for the holidays. The store has all of Mattel products not just FP products. I won’t say what product I bought as not to offended any of my co workers, but after opening the toy and putting it together, I realize it was junk, it didn’t work at all. I thought, wow, how did this make it into production, it’s junk, a waste of money, I simply threw it away, I really did.
We had 80 people volunteer to simply walk away (early retirement) from their jobs last month. Nearly 10% of the campus was eager to leave and get out. What kind of message is that? Most people I have talked to are very happy to leave, they see the writing on the wall. Product quality will continue to erode along with sales. Productivity, innovation, moral is at the lowest level I have ever seen. What’s left of Engineering and Design will most likely all move to Asia over the next year or two.
The current upper management group are here to execute this transition. They have no allegiance to FP EA, it’s culture, or it’s people. They are all Mattel transplants who surely don’t want to be in Buffalo and can’t wait to finish here and get back to California.
In my mind Fisher-Price is already gone.