Wow! Stuff’s Kenny McAndrew gives a rare interview on friendship, toys and saying “What if…”

Kenny! Thank you SO much for joining me! I think you’ve demurred around a Mojo interview for the last five years or so… But here you are, under the most inviolable and sacred of oaths: the pinky promise!
The pinky promise, yes! It cannot be broken.

It cannot be broken! Is there a reason you’ve been hesitant about an interview before now, Kenny?
Oh, that’s an interesting one… I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily a shy person, but when Wow! Stuff started up, it was me, Graeme Taylor and Richard North. Richard was clearly the front man. He’s comfortable with all the publicity so it just fell upon us the way that it has – I’m not really bothered about this sort of stuff, so it suited us perfectly to have Graeme and me in the background and Rich up front with his natural charisma and love of PR.

Well, I’m so thrilled you’re here. And for the uninitiated, what’s your role at Wow! Stuff?
My role at Wow! Stuff is Director of Product Development. So I coordinate the design team and Hong Kong operations. I used to do some licensing as well, along with Dawn Lavalette and Ewan Gibb, but we’ve got a new licensing person: Lucy Wynn-Jones is joining us in March, which is great. So now my job is to conduct and orchestrate people; get them to a place where we can get some great ideas coming out. But you know, Deej, we’ve got incredible guys on the team…

Who’s on the team?
There’re a few! Jim Wyatt, Teddy Edwards, Steve Carpenter, Ross Coffield, Rob Harrison, Kin Au, Grame Bell, Victoria Brown, Nikkie Elwood, Dave Mapp, with Andy Tarrant and Zakk Haslam on the packaging side… I mean, they’re brilliant people; they’ve got much, much better ideas than me. So part of my role’s been to help understand in which areas we want to play; like enabling environments… But where I do the basic stuff, the churn of the product, Graeme does the kind of mad, tricky projects. Anything that’s technology driven; he works with Jim Wyatt and Mark Gasson and the guys we’ve got in the USA. We also have an amazing product development team in Hong Kong and China, headed up by Marco and Kenneth. They add loads to the party!

So yes, Graeme, Mark and Jim do the kind of hyper-brainy stuff that I’m nowhere near educated enough to do. So that’s really my role. And that role’s changed a fair bit. When we started off, it was a bit of a scattergun approach. You know, we just did whatever we did… Also, since Dawn came on board about five years ago – first as commercial director, now as our MD – I think it’s a lot more structured. We still innovate, but we innovate within and around the core pillars of the business – which is a lot more doable!

Having parameters channels the innovation?
Right. Because innovation can drive you crazy – and it’s expensive and difficult, and you do make mistakes. So we’ve got to have some crazy innovation, but we’ve also got to have stuff that keeps the lights on. Today, I think we’ve got a nice mix and match of both of those things.

And that’s one of the things that’s changed? The nature of the craziness?
Yes, because – going back 10, 12, 15, 20 years – we’d do some crazy stuff, and with crazy timelines. It was very high risk because we didn’t really know the outcome before we started… One year, I remember we did amazing profit-wise, but then almost everything we did was late so we ended up air freighting it. Ha! No profit! So I think that’s the problem with crazy innovation and no critical path. And when we started off, Richard had some business knowledge, but Graeme and I were just a couple of biologists. We didn’t know anything about business!

Let’s talk about that! You’re a biologist: what kind? What’s your background?
I started out doing marine biology up in Aberdeen; a BSc. After working a little on the west coast of Scotland, I did a master’s degree at Stirling Uni. That was as part of the environment group; it’s where I met Graeme before we became flatmates. Work-wise, I was doing environmental studies of fish in fisheries; fish farms and stuff. So that was fun! At the same time – because universities are so badly funded – I got working, on and off, on a job in Bangladesh…

Heck of a commute!
Ha! Well, it was a CAGES project, so Cage Aquaculture for Greater Economic Security. They were amazing at acronyms! Anyway, I’d never been to Asia before, so it was unbelievable. We’d go out to Bangladesh, Vietnam or Thailand for a few weeks to work in these big development projects… Amazing work – really interesting. And they were funded by the DFID – the Department for International Development. After about two years of that stuff, the coordinator of the CAGES project in Bangladesh left and I applied for the job. When I got it, I totally shit myself… Ha!

Ha!
Ha! I’d been in charge of little research projects – fine – but I’m now in charge of this huge development project… I was only 28 and I had to go to Bangladesh and work full time. I turned up there with a rucksack and a Denon stereo. The HR woman met me and said, “Ah, Kenny! When’s your container coming?” I said, “My what, sorry?” She said, “You know; all your furniture and stuff…” I said, “I don’t have anything. This is it.” Ha! She couldn’t believe it…

Ha! She’s expecting Mister Kenneth McAndrews; you turn up with a pole and knotted hanky! And, you know, I was just trying to work out how we segue from these roles to your first product, the Arse-Face Towel… So here goes: “So: you say you shat yourself?”
Ha! Aye, Deej man! Ha! Actually, Graeme and I invented the Arse-Face Towel before I headed off. We were flatmates by then and we just used to scribe down any ideas we had in this thing we called The Book of Truth…

The Book of Truth?! Loving this!
Basically, we’d come back from the pub and start writing things in The Book of Truth. One time when I came back from doing research in Bangladesh, I said to Graeme, “Bloody hell, you should see the state of the towel in the guesthouse…” Because – there’s no way of putting this gently, Deej – there were skid marks all down this towel, right? And I’m saying, “This is disgusting. I’m not gonna touch that bloody towel!” So I had to drip myself dry – and I’m quite a hairy guy! So that’s how it started: we said what we needed to do was draw a figure of a man: head, body, legs, arse; stuff in the middle…

Oh! The original had a picture?
Right. But this was at a time of kind-of minimalist music; Massive Attack and all that sort of stuff had just come out… So we quickly realised it needed to be much simpler: it’s either arse or it’s face. That evening, after we’d scribed it down, we did the Arse-Face Towel within a couple of hours. Then we made it in Belgium at the cost of 12 quid each – with no packaging, because we didn’t know about packaging!

Or marketing, presumably?
No, no marketing because we were scientists – scientists with no clue! But we put little adverts on the back of Private Eye and Loaded Magazine at the time. And we got a few creepy phone calls… “Could you talk to me about the towel?” “Uh… No!”

The only big order we got was from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia. They bought 50. They did a whole wall of words and contemporary art – they sent us pictures of it. We did feel a little bad in some ways because people would sell their souls to get into the Museum of Contemporary Art… And we did it because of our nonsense Arse-Face Towel.

And it got decent exposure, didn’t it? Because it was very visual and funny.
Right. It was on Shameless and we gave some to the radio hosts Mark and Lard; Mark Ratcliffe and Mark Riley. But we did it all ourselves and just for fun, really. Then Richard came along…

And made it hard work! Ha! Spoiled it all! How did you meet Richard?
Well, by that time I was working full-time in Bangladesh but coming back for some trade shows. I’d come back to the UK for the Harrogate Trade Show. Well, Harrogate’s so prim and proper and lovely; the show had all these beautiful designer stands; people showing lovely little cups and handmade candles and stuff. And there we were, me and Graeme, with our wallpaper table and our Arse-Face Towels. It was like punk rock coming in during a classical concert!

Ha!
Anyway, Richard saw the stand and – you can imagine: “What the hell is this?!” So we explained it to him and he just said, “I want this on the front cover of Boy’s Stuff magazine.” He still had Boy’s Stuff at the time, which was going great guns online, and when he said he wanted to put it on the cover and sell some, Graeme and I were thinking: ‘Shit, how are we gonna do that?’ Because they cost 12 quid, and he’s wanting to buy them for, like, $5, you know?

Oh, yes! Because you’d been doing it for fun; you hadn’t got that cost down!
Exactly. Luckily, I played football with this Italian guy in Bangladesh called Stefano. He was into garments. So I brought him a sample and asked if he could make it… And he did, for something like three bucks. And that’s it: off we went!

But before we joined Wow! Stuff, Graeme and I worked with Richard and his team at Boy’s Stuff. He had a vision to create a distribution company, but he asked us to invent some products and – for about three or four years – we worked purely as the product development team for Boy’s Stuff…

I didn’t know that! Fantastic. Do you remember any of those products? What came after the Arse-Face Towel?
We were lucky, actually… We had a little thing called the Toilet Nanny. That was a little gadget that went underneath the loo seat. You couldn’t see it when the seat was down, but when you lifted up the seat up, it said, “Excuse me, sir! Please try to urinate in the toilet and not on the floor… And put the seat down when you’re finished. Thank you!”

Ha! A way to nag bachelors!
We sold that to a US distributor, Max Ker-Seymer at Westminister Inc. He gave us his agent to work with, James Chang, because we were making these things in Taiwan. We started working with him – he really was a star. You know, it’s really important to get the right people in any sort of business…

Christ! Don’t let Billy and Adam hear you say that, Kenny; I’ll be out on my ear! Ha! So James Chang was a good agent?
He was just great. We worked with him for 15 years or so. And Max also did the Butt-Face towel in the US; he sold well over a million pieces; maybe two million – I can’t remember the number. The thing is with the towel – and you just mentioned this – it’s very visual, so it was in catalogues a lot.

And how quickly did you become friends with Richard?
Oh, very quickly! As you know, Graeme and I were really good friends anyway, but with Richard we also genuinely developed a really close, tight friendship. And that’s something that’s never wavered; it’s always been very clear that we would never do the dirty on each other, no matter how tough things got in business. We knew that implicitly; it was solid as a rock. And if you’ve got those foundations, that’s everything. Does that sound a bit cheesy?!

No, no – not at all. Something like that only sounds cheesy if you don’t mean it or someone doesn’t believe it. But I can tell you mean it – and if someone doesn’t believe it, they’ll be projecting their cynicism. And as you must know, Richard speaks very highly of you… People can read a recent interview with him here. In it, he says that you’re “…a scientist by background and an inventor by nature.” Is that about right?
Well, I love innovation, yes, and I think good science looks to push boundaries… I also think what helps it is using a logical thought process to try and get there. Because although great science is very logical, it needs a spark of innovation. You can go through the process, but you still have to start off thinking in a different way to other people to push those boundaries…

So I love the process of product development in terms of saying ‘Okay… This is what the competition’s doing. But what can we do better? And I think we’re pretty good at bringing things in – from outside the toy industry… Because we don’t come from the toy industry. We don’t have that inbuilt thing that says, ‘This is the way it has to be!’ It’s more interesting for us to think of something and then say, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if…” And then work out how to get there.

Shall we talk about a couple of examples of that?
Absolutely! One good example is from about ten years ago… Just before Anki did a slotless car-racing track, we developed one which we ended up selling to Mattel. They did it as Hot Wheels AI. And I know Carrera is doing one now, but I think we did it first. Well, that came about because Graeme, Jim and the team were talking about Scalextric… We were saying how slot racing is good, but not great because you can jump off the slot and this and that… The things we didn’t like.

Picking fluff out of the slot, never leaving the middle of the road…
Yes, exactly. So that came from there: “What if we make it slotless? How can we go off the track and give it a bit of stickiness? How would we go about doing that?”

Are you all together in one room saying this? Brainstorming?
Yes. We all have our different brainstorms, but we get together every two weeks to have a review as well. So it’s a continuous process. But then you have to have some action, obviously! It’s all well and good us having some sort of intellectual chat about it. But then you’ve got to go away and build one to prove it; there has to be proof of concept.

Next time we talk, we must dig into how scientific disciplines are useful to creativity. Fascinating! Now, you mentioned Private Eye earlier, so I’m confident you’ll understand this reference… When Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett teamed up to do Beyond the Fringe, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller were hagridden with doubt… They were torn between their career options… Jonathan Miller: “Should I be a doctor? Or shall I go into comedy?” Alan Bennet: “Shall I be a playwright? Shall I go into comedy?” But not Peter Cook and Dudley Moore: “We’re going to do comedy!”
Ha! Right!

So, now… Do you ever look back and think to yourself, “I’ve robbed the world of a brilliant marine biologist… Fisheries would’ve been better places for having me in them…”
Ha! Well, not really; no. But I did have my crossroads moment; I did have a big debate with myself… There was a moment when I’d just finished the project in Bangladesh, and I was working for CARE International, the biggest Non-Government Organisation in the world. My boss had prepared the next job as the sector coordinator of agriculture and natural resources in Zanzibar. It was all ready to go, and I thought it would be amazing to do…

Meanwhile, things hadn’t quite taken off with Richard, but there came a time when it was debatable: do we carry on with this small business that’s doing okay? Or do I go on to this amazing next job with CARE International in Africa? It was one of those genuinely soul-searching moments… And yes: I do occasionally think, ‘Oh, I would’ve loved to have done that.’ But, you know, you make your choices and I’ve had a great time; really great – so I don’t regret it.

Fascinating! Kenny, I’ve loved every second of this, I’m so glad you joined me. To wrap this up, I’ve got two questions… I’m going to do my last question next and my next question last! So next, my last question… What’s the most interesting thing in your office or on your desk?
Oh! Let me turn the camera around here so I can show you what’s in the room…

Awww! Is it the dog?
It’s not the dog! That’s Bagel the Beagle sleeping there. And I’m sorry to say that Mr. Tickles isn’t with me… He’s my cat! Mr. Tickles is quite well-known in the industry because he always comes up to me when I’m on calls, but he’s out today. We’ve got a lot of pets in this house: two dogs, a cat, a rat, a hamster, two lizards and four snakes.

Four SNAKES?!
Right! It’s literally a zoo here. My daughter loves reptiles… So this is the most interesting thing on my desk. It’s a sloughed off snakeskin from a Kenyan sand boa. It’s just been shed… The sand boa’s right there in that tank. That’s the only reptile in the room. The rest are outside.

I should bloody well hope so! Well, I’m pretty sure that was a first… A sloughed-off snakeskin is the most interesting thing on your desk! Ha! Alright! So, to wrap things up: what happened to the Book of Truth?
Ah! I think Graeme Taylor’s got it in Portugal. I need to get it off him because there are some wonderful scribings in that book. Some of the Book of Truth is scribbled ideas, but the majority of it is actually quizzes…

Oh?
We always do a game called ‘percentage chance’. So I might say, “What’s the percentage chance of us selling $100,000 units?” And so you and I each write down a number in private… And then, when we get together, we swap answers. So it’s fun, but it’s also good for tweaking things out… Because if I say, “Ah, 100%!” that means we already have orders for that number. We can manufacture on time and all of that… But a whole load of stuff comes out in the wash! So we do some on product stuff, but it can be anything you want… What’s the percentage chance of Scotland winning the Six Nations?

Mehhhh…
Ha! Not that high, then? So the Book of Truth has a lot of that in it, because Graeme and I think it’s a fabulous game to play. We last played it in Nuremberg… The two of us always take an Airbnb. It’s a sort-of Men Behaving Badly scenario. We’re away from all the sales guys and everything so we don’t need to worry about all that stuff; we’ll have a bottle of rum or whatever and play a game of percentage chance.

Brilliant! Well, maybe on our next call, we can get Graeme Taylor on board and kick off with a game of that. In the meantime, Kenny, thank you so much.

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