Alright; here we go… With two-handers, I tend to ask people to introduce themselves. So: who are you?
Ivan Wesley: This is Brittany Wesley, and my name is Ivan Wesley. We’re Anchor Creative. Together, we love helping founders, inventors and leaders build their brand within the toy and game industry. Basically, I’m a big kid but Anchor Creative does anything in the realm of creative branding and package design: logos, packaging, art direction, copywriting, tradeshow booths, catalogues and advertisements… Anything that builds the brand in short.

And what’s your role, Brittany?
Brittany Wesley: On the website, I’m described as the ‘administrative ninja’ – but you might prefer ‘jack of all trades.’ I have a background in backstage management for theatre… So Ivan’s the art director while I’m the project manager; we collaborate through all things.

Perfect. And to help us orientate ourselves, what kind of packaging have you done in the toy game industry?
Ivan: Before we got our start in toys and games, we were doing brand work in the food and beverage industry with brands like Baskin-Robbins, Nutpods, and Disney licensed food. In 2019, we came to toys via the baby category… Later, that segued into games, puzzles, plush and bubbles, with more board games after that. We’ve also had some robotics and STEM-focused products.

Any specific examples?
Ivan: A few of our clients are South Beach Bubbles, Playper, Marmals and iPlay, iLearn… But our first client was Möbi. Möbi makes amazing games, baby toy and fidget-type products. They have a beautiful colour palette and they’re super innovative. We started with a game for them when Vanessa Ellingson asked us to do a project. Then she pulled us in for three baby toys after that.

Brittany: We were really lucky to get a start there. I just had a mum talk with Vanessa at our first toy fair – and we bonded over our little three-year-olds being adorable! So yes, we like landed a client through having mum chats in the midst of a faith journey… Faith because Ivan has over 23 years of CPG work but we’d never done toys. So we went to New York Toy Fair and it just turned into something.

And what was it that brought you to the Javits Center in the first place?
Ivan: It was a conscious choice to step towards my dream of designing for toys and games. I was 40 and felt that unless you take a step toward your dreams, you just keep dreaming. Brittany encouraged me because she could see my excitement when we worked on younger-aged products like food for kids, or licensed kids’ goods. One example that comes to mind was when we worked on the officially licensed WALL-E Treasure Race Game for Disney when that movie came out… We got to see the storyboards for the film and Brittany’s mum collaborated on it too!

Brittany’s mum did?! How so?
Brittany: My mum had a master’s degree in early childhood education, and she collaborated with us on how to formulate the game. This was around 2008. You had to scan a QR code to get a downloadable game board and a die that you taped together… There was a tie in with the National Raisin Company… Their specially designed boxes became the game pieces. You all had to collect junk, as part of a treasure hunt…

So it was all about reusing the packaging after it served its original purpose. How do you create something new out of something that already exists? And how do you engage a consumer in a new level? So there were a lot of different factors applied to that project. And it really inspired him, Deej! Ivan was like, “I want to do this forever!” But it took almost ten years for us to take the plunge and actively go after the toy industry.

Why did it take ten years?
Ivan: Food and beverage is an amazing industry – there’s so much creativity there, and we had the mindset for it. I didn’t think we were ready. I didn’t know if my credentials would be good enough; I doubted myself on the journey here to the point that Brittany had to say, “Just hit send!” You know? “Submit the Toy Fair application!”

Brittany: Ivan is the eternal perfectionist. He thinks and thinks and rethinks and rethinks designs to ensure a design is just right. That’s how he executes the final art; making sure what you’re getting is at the highest level. So what he sometimes needs is a crazy kooky boss that shoves him out the door, ‘You’re going to be uncomfortable… But you’re going to be okay with it!’ Because once he gets out there, he’s brilliant, and he really has fun.

So Brittany practically shoved you in the car to get to New York Toy Fair?
Ivan: Yes! And even as we drove, we expressed our doubts to each other. Brittany asked me: “What am I going to say? What do I need to do?” And I said, “Just be yourself; just be yourself and talk!” – which is good advice for everyone…

Welllllllllll… It’s not good advice for Billy Langsworthy; he should never be himself… But I take your point. Most people should just be authentic.
Brittany: Ha! Well, that’s what we learned over the past seven years: be authentic and show up daily. The toy industry really admires consistency. You can see it: some people come in, they’re really on fire with something… They have this great idea, they make it big, they do all this stuff – and then they fizzle out. But the industry respects people that keep going; keep moving forward… Take another step in the right direction and just continue to show up for clients and complete the work.

So when you came to Javits in 2019, what was the plan? Just meet people? Stick out your arm and start shaking hands?
Ivan: Yes, to meet people and start discussions about their creative process. What’s your design process? How do you do your branding? How do you do your packaging? And we knew some would say, “Oh, we have an in-house team” or whatever. But we also figured that someone would say, “I have a freelancer, but they flaked out recently!”

Oh, wow. You figured It was a numbers game? That you’d get a few people that weren’t happy with their current set up?
Ivan: Right. Someone was bound to say, “My freelancer just left me!” or “We just had a really bad experience…” So even if we didn’t work with them, we’d still get a sense of the landscape of the industry. And then there was the chance to look at the booths as if they’re packages… What’s grabbing attention? What’s stopping people as they walk the aisles? Because – as you know – you’ve only got a couple seconds to catch someone’s eye.

And is that still a good way to research, do you think? Can AI not do the job?
Brittany: I think it is still a good way to research. In fact, it’s really important right now because a lot of potential clients are exploring AI. They’ll tell you that they’ve created this thing on AI and they want you to replicate it or just fix a few things… Alternatively, they may have created a logo in AI and now they want the rest of the brand to match that. But that’s really short selling the brand as a whole because they’re already lost authentic movement.

How so?
Brittany: When you use AI, you’re pulling from things that already exist instead of creating something uniquely ownable for your brand in that moment. And I would say that your brand is worth paying a premium for so that everyone knows who you are and what you’re about. We know what the Nike Swoosh is, for example, and we know what Fisher-Price looks like. Why? Because they owned it, and they continue to be relevant to the consumer at hand. They consistently stay recognisable. And AI isn’t going to come in and show you something that says, ‘This is Fisher-Price.’

Surely it’s just a question of the prompt being correct?
Brittany: But for the prompt to be correct, you would have to input the right colours, the right shapes, the right parameters. AI doesn’t have the right moulds to it.

Right. So to give AI a really good prompt, you would have to know all about branding… And if you knew all about branding, you wouldn’t need AI…
Brittany: Right. You need to understand the pillars and tenets that you ascribe to your brand and that your brand carries all the way through. And I’m not saying that everybody has to carry the multimillion-dollar approach that Fisher-Price carries, but you do need to understand the pillars of your brand so that you can continue to remain your authentic self.

Yes. It’s very difficult, isn’t it? Because even with a wobbly prompt, AI’s able to produce – to an incredibly high standard – things that look extraordinary in isolation. So I could create a logo for myself that I think looks amazing, but I don’t know what I don’t know… It wouldn’t be based on my values or my personality or what’s in my heart… It’d be based on my ill-informed prompt.
Brittany: It is hard, yes. AI is an amazing tool, but we should let it be one of the tools that helps feed ideas rather than the one tool that you immediately grab to create the only idea. We should be talking about storytelling and being authentic – not just you as a person, but your brand… Your brand should reflect that authenticity, and how you translate that into your logo, your colour schemes… Everything you own as a brand.

And how interesting that people are skipping the most important part and just asking you to tweak what AI’s already done. Anyway! I took us off on a tangent: you got to Javits in 2019…
Ivan: Right. And then we saw that what we were doing in food was also there in toys and that the brands we saw would be open to fresh ideas and what we’re doing and looking to do it better. And it was exciting to get in the grassroots with a company and start to see where toy companies’ challenges were. Some of them have a great logo but the packaging needs help…Others have a great packaging structure but the branding’s not showing up right. Some companies have beautiful brands that exist on all floors, whether they’re the challenger brands or the mid- and top tier brands… They’re doing it well.

How, then, do you make the suggestion that someone may not be doing quite so well?
Brittany: We sometimes offer feedback with that sandwich equation… Start with a good thing, then give a critique but then end with another good thing.

The Shit Sandwich we call that in England… Were you trying to avoid saying that?!I
Brittany: I was! Ha!

Ha! But you mean a bit of good feedback, a bit of bad feedback, then another bit of good? The good feedback being the bread in the sandwich?
Brittany: Right. You end in a place where you’re celebrating them after giving them a bit of advice on something they can improve. And that’s something Ivan’s really good at it. I’m not; I’m very bad at it – I’m way too direct. I do very poorly with the compliments! Ha! But that’s why Ivan does the feedback; he executes it so much better.

Sounds like you’d give a shit sandwich with shit as the bread… Thin layer of praise in the middle! Ha! But in theory, someone can show you their packaging and you can offer an analysis on the good, the bad and the ugly…
Brittany: Yes. We can find the good and tell you it’s a brand asset… Maybe it’s a great logo or a hero image on the front of a box. But then the bad or the ugly… Maybe we need to update the hierarchy, say; or change the size of or the relationship between elements of a package… Because that relationship can make or break a product.

But presumably you have to be sensitive to the original design?
Ivan: Right. Because people can become married to an idea and it’s unhelpful if you do that; you don’t want to fall in love with your idea too much.

Brittany: So to your point: yes, we can do a dry critique on anything, but where we find the biggest strength is when we come in with the research… When we’ve already gone to stores, looked at direct competitors – online and real-life – and can see things that are within the same category; that are within the same package design structure, that lets us determine the right colouring and story message… Those kinds of thing. We look at all those levels. Being specific in the research helps direct where package design can and should go.

You also want to find the white space… So if everybody was designing with a white background and a black logo, then that’s not where you want to be. It’s so easy to blend into the noise. You want to stand out and blow your own horn; you’d want to make sure you had a colourful package. But then, which colour is going to be best? If we chose yellow, which shade? And why? Let’s make sure it doesn’t look like pee pee, for example! If we choose blue, let’s make sure it’s a really dynamic blue and one that no one else is using. And can we talk to your manufacturer to ensure you can have a Pantone colour that directs the print and prints that same across the board? And in four-colour processing, that’s sometimes hard to do.

Goodness me. I wouldn’t know where to start!
Brittany: This is why finding manufacturers that really care about quality control – and the end result – is so important. It helps ensure that your product always shines on shelf and doesn’t have a flux of print colours because of that four-colour processing. So we help ensure that your quality is consistent from start to finish right across the brand.

Amazing. And it sounds like it would’ve taken you a lot longer to get into the industry if it weren’t for Toy Fair.
Ivan: Oh, New York Toy Fair was a huge thing for us in terms of the education… The Creative Factor and the speaking panels were instrumental, and then we met people like Lisa Orman, and Richard Gottlieb. Sadly, Richard’s now passed away. He’d been speaking about the gig economy – and that was such a relief! Because we started Anchor in 2014 and had been working that way for years… Non-agency, direct, independent LLC.

So coming into the toy industry and hearing somebody actually coin a term for what we’d been doing gave us a sense of security; it anchored us a little bit. It gave us a community. And I was like, wait, other people do this too. We’re not alone. It’s totally a gig economy. So yes, it helped us find our language, find a group of people, find clients – and we needed all of that.

And Lisa Orman?
Ivan: Oh, Lisa was amazing to us! She would take us alongside and tell us about the industry and also refer us to clients. She got us in with Story Time Chess, which ended up being a very exciting product to work on: Story Time Backgammon. Story Time Chess and Story Time Backgammon both won TOTYs! So all the Toy Fair networking was great… Just connecting with folks, finding out how everything worked. It was the same in 2020 which is when we first met you and Billy.

Is that right?
Ivan: Yes, we didn’t really know a lot about the people behind games and product; we didn’t know the faces behind them. But we heard about your involvement with amazing brands like Bananagrams, and then you talked about magic and the importance of the creative processes… Then someone asked about keeping notes and you showed the audience your notebook and how worn out your back pocket was from keeping a notebook.

Ha! Now I’m self-conscious about it… I do want to say that these aren’t the same jeans six years later…
Brittany: Oh! Is there a hole?

There’s always a hole in my back pocket! There’s always a notebook and there’s always a hole!
Ivan: Ha! So yes, the magic part really solidified our love for you guys because you showed us that you love what you do, and that you use these methods that a lot of people designers don’t use… Now they’re jumping more and more to AI, they’re jumping to the computer… But there’s a foundation here in sketching, in writing things out, in using your hands to create. There’s so much value in that process.

Well, I’m thrilled you found some value in what we were saying. And surprised actually – it’s a miracle! But if it tickles people’s fancies, then they can read my thoughts on Notebooking in an article about it here… But all of this opened up the toy industry up for you?
Ivan: Yes. We’d already had a journey with food and beverage, and we were using those tools happily enough… But in the toy industry, people gave us an arm-wrap moment; almost a hug of welcome, you know? The feeling was we should keep doing what we were doing, keep being who we are, and keep creating – and that we could do it in this in this arena we’d fallen in love with. And over the years, the consistency that Brittany talked about – of showing up has led to amazing opportunities.

And who in the industry should now reach out to you? What kind of clients are you looking for?
Brittany: We’d love to collaborate with people who are looking to create packaging that really stands out on shelf. We’re looking for people who are in stores more than online because our specialty is on-shelf, consumer-appealing packaged goods… Pop and grab.

Pop and grab! I like that!
Brittany: We’re looking for people who want to spark imagination, put a hook on the shelf. Those are our top people. Also, there are two arenas that we suit perfectly… You have your Branded House: companies that have lots of products under that same name. For instance, we work with Playper… Playper makes great paperboard toys that construct together. Theirs is a branded house because they have a lot of Playper products. Then you have a House of Brands…

A House of Brands?
Ivan: So an example of that would be South Beach Bubbles. They have their South Beach Bubbles name, but they also have individual properties – WOWmazing, PoppinColorz and Buid-A-Bubble – product lines that are underneath that with their own different logos and so on. So to Brittany’s point, we can help companies build that family. Whether it’s a branded house with lots of products that need brand blocking on shelf and maybe have the challenge of the form factor… Are they individual packages? Are they on a floor display? Or there might be just one brand-new invention so we don’t have to do all the brands. We could just help you with this very specific one.

So two different types of client but each wants authenticity and quality?
Ivan: Exactly: people who value branding and overall presentation and that want to communicate their unique position in an authentic way. Those are the people we gravitate towards – not the people that just need a little logo. Not that there’s anything wrong with that… It’s just that it’s low thinking. Let’s come up higher – your brand’s worth more than that.

And before we started recording, you were talking about board games being like the beer aisle. Tell me about that on the record…
Ivan: I liken board games to the beer aisle or the beverage aisle because there’re lots of creative, crazy labels there. And you might think you’re going to buy wine by the label or buy an energy drink by the label… Well, the board game industry has that: a cacophony of imagery and graphics! But we love tackling that one new game. There’s that creative energy when you’re not building a consistent line of products.

But presumably one game could become that?
Ivan: Absolutely! One game might be later become lots of products, but you start by building that one standout idea that needs to really shine. So from a project standpoint, we like working with that first idea and building it out into multiple skus.

Brittany: We also like working with those who enjoy working with redheads! Ha!

And I’ll clarify that you’ve both got red hair. Your actual heads aren’t red…
Brittany: Ha! No! Ivan and I both have red hair and our four children do too.

Worth clarifying… I don’t want people to imagine you look like a pair of Swan Vestas matchsticks. Alright! I need to wrap things up. What, then, is the one question I could have asked you today but didn’t?
Brittany: Hmmm. Maybe ‘What’s your why?’

Oh, neat question. And what is your why?
Ivan: Well, I think we talked around a lot of it, but I think the mission is to bring someone’s authentic vision to life. That’s the most rewarding thing. We feel rewarded when our clients are pitching and selling with exuberance, excitement and confidence. There’s a life in that; a life around those connections of play. And it’s so exciting when your work meets a family – and we can all celebrate that.

Wonderful! Well, thank you for making time. Let’s now celebrate the end of your first Mojo interview with a slice of cake!

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