Wait until the Q1 numbers come out which will be horrible & can't wait to hear the temp CEO talk his way out of that mess. More headwinds, wish there were tailwinds, POS this, POS that, which is all BS, BTW......... NeverAfter High never took off & all that line did was have Disney retaliate by taking the Frozen line away from Mattel. Monster is truly dead now & Hot Wheels is burning rubber just to stay flat. BoomCo was a total backfire & a waste of millions of dollars which took almost 3 years to develop & countless of Hong Kong parties. Then the hammer will really fall when the Frozen money melts away @ the end of this year. No worries, the Q1 Drink the KoolAid propaganda should be entertaining when the numbers are announced. If the stock continues to slide & the dividends start to fall slide hang on to your hats......
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too many bets on bad things. Years of tolerating bad ideas. There's a difference between taking risks and doing dumb concepts that should never see the light of day. Juicebox, Hyperscan, - Ever After High. Ever after was the supreme arrogance of the design and marketing team who thought their poop didn't stink. It was totally cannibalistic to MH, but also just not relevant to girls. If you're making a brand for older girls, WTF do you launch with dolls? This is the idiot mentality that is killing the company. Boomco the team just never estimated Nerf's response in the marketplace. Having a better technology doesn't always help you -- look at how many better handhelds the crappy Gameboy fended off.
Really hoping ToyBox thinks differently and without a Mattel mindset. Thankfully, it's the one area Dickson seems to be leaving alone, so it should succeed...
"Mattel lacks the discipline and patience necessary to build a new business" - this is a LA thing, nobody here has patience for anything
"Mattel lacks the discipline and patience necessary to build a new business" - this is a LA thing, nobody here has patience for anything
+1 to the examples you cite. Megablocks and Boomco were desperate and poorly-conceived catch-up plays. From the beginning, retailers told Mattel "Don't try to out-Nerf Nerf", yet that's exactly what Boomco did. Never After High was a derivative that just plain backfired. The question Mattel management needs to ask & answer responsibly is "what's the price of innovation". They toss the word around, along with "take it to the next level" and other trite phrases. But it means nothing in the current regime. There is a pervasive fear of failure within the organization. More than ever, Mattel lacks the discipline and patience necessary to build a new business. If a new item or line doesn't generate headlines and get on Mommy blogs immediately after Toy Fair, they pull the plug and walk away. No progress can possibly be made in that environment. Management needs to encourage and inspire risk-taking and plan to learn from failures. They say you don't fail until you quit. By that standard, Mattel is set up for continual failure. The organization needs an overhaul from the top down, but upper management is so stifled and protective of their golden parachutes that no one is going to rock the boat. Any new CEO must wipe out the org chart and start all over. Is Hasbro's CEO available? Their stock is at a 52-week high while ours is at an all-time low. Hire Hasbro's CEO for 10 million a year. Money well spent, in the big picture that's a drop in the bucket. He understands the business.