Spin Master’s Jamie Ricottone on the story behind the TOTY-winning Primal Hatch – and what’s next for the brand

Jamie, we’re chatting here at New York Toy Fair, where Spin Master picked up Toy of the Year and Action Figure of the Year for Primal Hatch – congratulations!
Thank you! We’re all delighted – it was a great night.

As part of the team behind Primal Hatch, talk me through the origins and some key decisions that shaped the item?
It was truly the brainchild of the incredible talented designers and engineers that we work with. The leader of our New Brand Group – Ben Dermer – tasked them to create a hatching dinosaur. So they came up with this amazing platform, we looked at it and thought: ‘Wow, we can really do something with this’.

When I came on board as designer, I thought it was important to change the orientation of the egg to really separate it from Hatchimals – Hatchimals was upright and the original prototype for this was upright. So we moved it onto its side, which then allowed the dinosaur to become larger inside as well.

Smart!
It just helped it become its own thing, because our goal from the beginning was that we don’t want it to be ‘a dinosaur by Hatchimals’. We wanted this to be its own brand – and I think we got there.

Absolutely. And this launched with the Jurassic World licence – how did that come into play?
Well, we were in the middle of development when Dave Voss joined Spin Master as EVP of Global Toy Design & Development. He came from Universal which brought valuable insight, plus we had strong existing partnerships with Universal across other brands – all of which helped make things happen with getting the Jurassic World licence. Launching this item in a movie year with Jurassic World Rebirth really helped take this toy to the next level. Last year’s Toy Fair was also very good to us and it’s just been a wild ride since!

You mentioned about wanting this to be a different beast to Hatchimals, but did the company’s experience with that brand help here?
Absolutely. We’re lucky enough to have the patented Hatchimals egg, but we wanted to up the ante here by adding a layer a slime to the inside of the egg. The vision was to really recreate that iconic moment in Jurassic Park when the baby raptor hatches, so making the slime replicate that as closely as possible was key – and we got there. Finding a toolable, manufacturable way to do the slime compound was a true feat because it’s a two-part compound and that’s hard to do on an assembly line.

How long was the design process?
Two years. It’s been a wild, amazing experience.

And you’re also debuting Primal Hatch Hybrid Hatchers here. These launch in the Spring – how would you pitch them?
With Hybrid Hatchers, the goal was to take the Primal Hatch interactive experience and shrink it down to an action figure scale to bring in collectability into the line. What’s really cool about these guys is that it’s a blind box, so you don’t really know what you’re going to get.

And the process here is that you inject this colour-changing DNA into the egg and watch it burst open with gooey slime to reveal one of the creatures inside.
Exactly. We loved the idea of injecting an egg with DNA. We just thought that was so cool and we really fought for that idea. What we’ve come up with is a way of decoding the dinosaur species inside the egg using a scanner card. Then you do the same thing to your injector, which reveals your animal DNA. That gives you clues about what’s inside your egg.

For example, the egg scan might reveal a Allosaurus and the DNA scan reveals its DNA tiger – so we’ll get a mix of the two. We also recreated the slime experience on the inside of this egg too. There are 10 dinos to collect and we have a chase dino that goes clear when you squirt him with warm water – he cloaks like the Predator!

Very cool. I know you also have the Primal Hatch Hatching Megalodon coming in the Fall.
Yes! The lead designer on that one is Paul Reynolds – he’s done an incredible job. I’m just getting the glory at Toy Fair presenting it to people!

Ha! We’ll get a chat with Paul in the diary! And before we wrap up, what’s next for you?
I’m still helping out with the Primal Hatch team and away from that brand we have exciting new things on the horizon. Our team’s job is to come up with whatever’s going to shock the world and that’s exactly what we have planned.

Nicely teased! And in light of the recent TOTY win, at the other end of the scale, what would you say is the most underrated item you’ve worked on at Spin?
There’s a Kinetic Sand dinosaur item I did that maybe doesn’t get as much love as it should. It’s called Kinetic Sand Dino Dig – you dig through tar-coloured sand and reveal lava-coloured sand underneath. You find dino bones in there and put them together to create these little charming dino bone characters.

So you have history with dinosaurs.
Oh yeah, I’ve pushed them into as many lines as I could.

Ha! And how to you find your way into toy design?
I started off at industrial design school wanting to work in the film industry – I wanted to build props and spaceships and stuff! I had a really good friend who graduated a few years ahead of me and he started working at Spin – I didn’t realise that there was actually a toy opportunity in Toronto. I thought that sounded exciting and an internship showed up between third and fourth year at design school. I applied, got it and worked with the Air Hogs team for the summer. It changed my life. I was like: ‘This what I want to do. I love this.’

It was a difficult time to get back into Spin at that time, so it actually took me five years to make my way back to a seat there. But I persevered and here we are here today. I’ve been here almost nine years now.

Amazing. Last question! What fuels your creativity?
I’m the type of guy that needs to step away for a minute. I’m an avid off-road motorcyclist so I go out in the woods and ride my bike real fast – do something completely different. Then I come back and feel like refreshed. And then from a design perspective, there’s a lot of intuition there. I’ll think ‘this is going to be fun’ and you have to trust that intuition. There was a lot of that with the whole Primal Hatch line and it’s worked out so far.

It has indeed! Thanks again Jamie – and congrats to you and the team on the TOTY wins!

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