Sergio Anna, Head of Product at Craft Buddy, talks Buddies, sticker albums, pin badges – and what’s next

Sergio, let’s start at the beginning. How did you get into product development?
It’s coincidental really! I joined in Iwantoneofthose.com in 2006 – and back then I was very analytical… But suddenly I was surrounded by gadgets and gifts – cool quirky stuff. I loved it. One day, I had a product idea – a beanie hat with headphones built into it. My colleagues loved it but they weren’t ready to develop their own product at the time. So the financial director lent me the money to make it myself – and it sold brilliantly! I gave him the money back in two months, with a lot of profit as well!

One of our suppliers at the time was Thumbs Up – and they loved this product – so I eventually moved and worked there. And that was to make product. It was there that I also started to go and see factories to understand how the manufacturing ecosystem actually worked. We’d come up with wacky ideas every week and I had a lot of freedom there. One of my first products was a backwards watch – a watch that went backwards! It was very fun.

And that’s interesting considering the work you’re doing now at Craft Buddy feels, on paper, very systems based. You’re creating these processes to enable consumers to make these incredible things.
Yes, and I actually joined Craft Buddy as an e-commerce manager! I created our site. As part of the initiation here you get given some Crystal Art to do. I was very ambitious and picked a 70 x 70 kit! I spent a week on it and just couldn’t get on with it! I thought, this isn’t for me! I then tried a 30 x 30 kit and gave up after five minutes… In the end I did a card kit – and even that was hard for me to do! In the meantime, Gary – our MD – was talking to Disney about doing a licensed range. He asked me to help them with that, so my first product here were the Crystal Art Buddies – I made a product that I could do!

Wow! So Buddies came from that? From a need to offer something simpler to consumers?
Yes! I love Funko figures and thought we could so something that blends crafting with character collecting. Something you do make and display. And the traditional view was that a crafting kit is valued based on the time it takes you to complete. The more time, the more value – but for me, it was the opposite. The quicker I can complete it, the more rewarding it is because I get to my finished product faster. So that’s what sparked the idea for the Buddies.

Digging into that, did the characters mean these kits used different types of gems? Or that the crafting process had to be altered?
They use fewer gems than what the other products used at the time. That meant we went for a more pixelated type of artwork. And then we use special gems occasionally for extra detail. Like with Jasmine, she’s holding the magic lamp, which is made of these golden special gems. Same with Tinkerbell’s wings – we used special silver gems for those.

And that format has since lent itself nicely to your sticker albums and pin badges.
Yes! For the pin badges, I was watching Tomorrowland and they have these pin badges in that movie, but they looked collectible. I liked that idea of a collectible you could wear, as well as display on your shelf. pins are collectible. And there were some tricky elements there due to the size! The pin badges were 30% smaller than anything we’d ever done, so we needed smaller gems! I spoke to the factory for six months to persuade them to that.

What helped convince them?
Well, it wouldn’t be a single use thing… Once we had these new smaller gems, we could use them in all sorts of different ranges. So that helped… And these were metal, so printing on the metal with the glue… It had never been done before. So it was a big challenge, but worth it!

And as well as the factory, did you have to convince Craft Buddy to embrace the challenge?
Ha! I had to convince them first about the sticker album! I was nervous, because with the sticker album there were two big factors… Disney and the fact we’d have to place a much bigger order than we had been used to! To say to our Director: “You need make 100,000 of these and it’s going to be great” – all with a smile on my face – was a lot of pressure… If it didn’t work, I may well have emigrated to a different country.

Ha!
Luckily, that product went crazy. So the sticker album gave me a lot of credit for the future, so when I had to present the pin badges – another bold idea, because is it jewellery? Is it a toy? Is it collectible? – it was easier because I had some credit in the bank! And Dino and Gary Wadhwani – our Directors – are fantastic. They’re inspiring because they’re not scared of trying something new.

And with all of these products, the process you go through really does make you feel like you’re an expert. It feels like you’re achieving something special…
Yes, that’s the secret sauce. You need the process and the end result to be satisfying. And you need people with no craft skills to be able to grasp the system and feel like they’re really making something special… Making something that a crafter or artisan might make. That’s the trick, and for the ranges I’ve worked on, it comes from my own inability to do crafts! And for the pin badges, there were some adaptations. I had to change the tools because they needed to pick up smaller gems. We also needed to change the wax because smaller gems are lighter, so they stick into the pen easier – but we needed them to not stay stuck to the pen! I think it took six or seven months before we were happy with the glue.

And what’s in-store for this year?
We’re exploring 3D characters and objects… This could push us into the accessories space with clips, keyrings, things like that. We’ll also be launching Hello Kitty ranges with Sanrio. That’s been such a fun brand to work with – their style is made for this kind of product and we’ll span different lines. Buddies, pin badges, sticker album… Lots on the way!

The nice thing is that it feels like we’ve still only scratched the surface of where we can go. We have an amazing team and a great relationship with our factories. As technology moves on and certain limitations go away, we can really continue to innovate and push crafting to the next level. We want to be at the top of our game and really push ahead.

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