Pitching products and having ideas: in conversation with So Sound’s Sarah Everett

Sarah Everett. Well, I’ll start by saying to you what I said to Ross Monks from Moose earlier, here… I’ve been meaning to interview you for years so thank you for making time! For those not in the know, what’s your job title?
So I work at So Sound, but I’m on the product development side rather than the music side of things. When I first started, I was a toy and game designer-slash-inventor… Now I’m a Senior Product Designer.

Senior Product Designer; perfect! And what kind of thing might you work on?
Well, you must get this quite a lot, Deej: lots of stuff I can’t talk about! One thing I can talk about is Snake Attack which launched in 2024… We did that with Wilder Toys. We also have some Nerf target-shooting games out, and there’s lots more coming in 2027. Does it matter that I can’t talk about them?!

No! Not at all: product development’s a bit clandestine; people understand that. Now, one of the reasons I’ve wanted to speak with you is that you’re one of these rare people that seems can have ideas – the spark part – and then has the logic and organisational skill to make it happen…
That’s a nice thing to say; thank you. I do sometimes get nervous when I think I’ve come up with a idea and said it out loud… I sometimes think, ‘Oh, damn! Now I have to figure out how that’s going to work!’ But I think a lot of people do that, don’t they? They start with a good idea and then realise they’ve given themselves an impossible job. Having said that, a lot of stuff that fascinates me is on the mechanism side of things: exploring mechanisms and seeing how things work.

By taking things apart and putting them back together?
Sometimes, yes – but there’re also a lot of websites of that kind of thing… 507movements.com comes to mind. And I’m obsessed with a guy called Thang 010146 on YouTube… He has every mechanism in the world on his channel, I love it! And even if you don’t exactly use one of the mechanisms he explains, just the way it influences your thinking helps bring ideas to life. He’s brilliant.

So you have that constant input thing going on; you’re always soaking up new information…
Yes, because I think that gives you confidence that a light bulb moment will arrive at some point… It will come when you need it; there’ll be an answer. And sometimes it comes from the smallest thing. I can give you an example if you’d like because, on my first day at So Sound, we were all trying to work out how to do one particularly tricky thing… And I had an idea that was based entirely on a clicky pen mechanism – I’d literally been playing with a clicky pen…

You’d just been clicking the pen? Nervously? And that turned out to be the basis of the solution?
Yes! I know that sounds fake, but it’s genuinely true. The clicky-pen mechanism was more or less what the project needed. So I worked on that for my first few months here. And I don’t want to sound too geeky, but if you actually look at how a clicky pen works, there’re quite a few parts in there; there’s quite a lot going on. It’s an everyday item that’s pretty cool. Open one up! Have you got one there?

No, I don’t really use clicky pens… You’re looking at me like I’m mad! But I shall tell you for why… I always have a pen in my trouser pocket. But quite often, if it’s a clicky pen, I’ll unknowingly click the pen on when I sit down! And then the nib pokes through the lining of my pocket and I’ll end up drawing on my thigh all day…
Are you putting this in the interview? Please include this! Ha!

Why would I include that?! Ha! I sound like an idiot! But it’s true… By the time I get to bed, it looks like Jackson Pollock’s doodled on my thigh. Anyway! We digress… So is it common for you to make those connections so directly?
No, I think a lot of the time solutions are evolving answers. Sometimes there’s a lightbulb moment, but most of the time it starts in one place, and as you explore how it’s going to work, you find another issue, and then you have to iron that out, then another, then another. It’s the same with games, I think. You can try it with one rule in place and it doesn’t quite work, so you drop that rule and put in another, and that doesn’t quite work – you keep tweaking, you know?

Only too well! How else do you stay creative, Sarah?
Hmmm… I don’t know how to answer that because I don’t really know what I do… I’m not someone that goes home and then does all sorts of arts and crafts on the side; I’ve never been an arty person. At school, I liked maths and I liked Design Technology, so I just chose a degree which basically meant I could do DT.
But that surprised people that knew me because I wasn’t overtly creative…

But the fact that you tend to have a clicky pen on you suggests that you keep a notebook, say?
Oh, yes! I do – I’m definitely a pen-and-paper person rather than a typing-up person. My notebook’s full of terrible sketches that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. You could never use them in a meeting! It’s a mess of notes; just me trying to get what’s in my head down on paper. I don’t really do nice sketches; I find it easier to go from rough sketches to working things it out in CAD or prototypes quite quickly.

And that takes us quite neatly into pitching… I’m curious about this! You don’t strike me as a flamboyant person; you’re not looking for the limelight! But you’re confident; you have the answers to a lot questions… How do you find pitching? Are you comfortable with it?
Ha! So when I first started, I thought that was the one part of the job that wasn’t going to be my cup of tea at all… I was quite happy to stay in the office, work on the concept, and let someone else pitch it. But when the time came, I resigned myself to having to do it. And actually, I think my first one was the Mojo Nation Virtual Pitch in lockdown; September 2021. But after maybe three or four calls, I was saying, “You know what? I actually like this way more than I thought I would!” That was a real surprise to me.

What made you change your mind?
I think I’d imagined that pitching was going to be this Apprentice-style presentation, or Dragons Den; Shark Tank! Do you know what I mean? I imagined it would be me stood at the front of a room with a pointer and a big screen and loads of judgmental people in an audience! Ha! And – as you know – it’s nothing like that because this industry’s much more casual… Sometimes a pitch is like a chat; it’s a conversation! And most of the feedback people give is quite fair! So it was nowhere near as intense as I thought it was going to be.

Great answer! And I know you’re too modest to offer tips to new inventors on pitching, but what would have helped you feel more confident pitching when you started?
I think I would’ve been more confident if I knew that a great idea can still be the wrong idea for someone! So getting a rejection doesn’t necessarily mean you had a bad idea… It just isn’t the right match for that company; it isn’t for them. I think that’s important because if I’d understood that when I first started, then I wouldn’t have built up so much worry in my head about pitching.

Nowadays, I think that – in this industry at least – you only have to do one or two pitches before you realise they’re mostly quite friendly. Some are even more like brainstorms than pitches so it’s often quite a nice conversation to have. It’s not intense. Also, I have one novel tip that works for me personally; I’m not saying it works for everybody…

Go on…
Actually, it brings it back to clicky pens… I hadn’t really thought about it before! But when I was nervous in my first few pitches, I found that having something in my hand made me feel a bit better, a bit like having a fidget toy. So I had a clicky pen – although I didn’t use the clicky part; that would’ve been quite annoying!

You’re quite an advocate of the clicky pen, aren’t you?! Ha! I have seen you with one, I just didn’t realise it was the source of your power. What about a clicky pen that doesn’t click? Could we invent a silent clicky pen for nervous pitchers?!
Ha! What would you call that, though? If it doesn’t click, it’s not a clicky pen…

But they’re not actually called clicky pens, are they?
Aren’t they?

Are they? I would’ve thought the click is merely a symptom of the function. Surely they’re not named after their most irritating quality?
Retractable pen, maybe?

I don’t know! Let’s say retractable pen for now. We need to invent a silent retractable pen. How did you come to be working at So Sound, Sarah? And how long have you been there?
I’ve been here four and a half years; I graduated in the middle of the pandemic. I briefly worked at a couple of non-toy places after graduating. I worked at a kitchen appliances company, uploading washing machines and dishwashers onto the website. They let me do the graphics for one of their new vans when they saw I could do some sort of basic graphic stuff!

Also, they let me rearrange the warehouse which was fun. I quite enjoyed the spatial reasoning and the logistics. Ha! Before that, I did my placement year at SharkNinja – Shark being the vacuum cleaners and Ninja being the air fryers – they’re together as one company. So I actually worked on air fryers when no one knew what an air fryer was!

Perfect! Well, now… We do need to start wrapping things up, Sarah – not least of all because I want to research non-clicky clicky pens. So tell me: what’s the most interesting object on your desk?
Well… We’ve come full circle! Ha! A lot of it is stuff I can’t describe because it’s in development; there are prototypes and bits and pieces like that. Oh! I know what my favourite thing is, though. You gave it to me, actually!

I gave it to you?
It’s the World’s Smallest Crocodile Dentist! I think the mechanism for that is brilliant… It’s so clever; it feels like it’s got electronics in it, but it hasn’t. So Crocodile Dentist is a brilliant game with an amazing mechanism – and seeing it at that scale is obviously just so much fun.

Great answer! And as you may know, lovely Bob Fuhrer invented Crocodile Dentist, so I’ll link to his interview about it here. He’s an absolute delight! And I’ll put in a link to Allen Dorfman here as well… He’s the dynamo behind World’s Smallest! Thanks for making time, Sarah.

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