Art Toys For All

One on one with Paul Budnitz, founder of Kidrobot

When Paul Budnitz started Kidrobot, there were just a few artists and companies in Japan and Hong Kong making art toys. In the West, there wasn’t much available. Mostly you had to search on eBay, and maybe get lucky finding an interesting handmade piece of toy art. Lucky was a relative term, of course. The good stuff was perhaps rightly priced in the stratosphere. Good art always is.

Budnitz started Kidrobot because he wanted to make these kinds of toys, and he wanted to make them available to more people. Fast forward a little over a decade and art toys are more than a movement. They’re an industry exemplary of the sort of DIY entrepreneurial effort that is bringing starving artists out of the shadows, and into the middle class.

But it all started with a few hungry artists and an idea. On the eve of the release of I Am Plastic Too (which you can win over on our Facebook page) Budnitz talks about the art toy movement, and where it’s going.

GeekChicDaily: Your Dunny toy has become an icon unto itself. What was the genesis of selling a blank toy?

Paul Budnitz: What happened was that we were making Dunnys. People were buying these eight-inch Dunnys from us and then repainting them and selling them on eBay for hundreds of dollars. It became its own art form. People still do that, and I think it’s totally amazing. So I decided to make a toy that only came blank, that we never painted. That became Munny, and now MunnyWorld. So the fans really inspired it.

GCD: That sounds like new-market thinking. Old-market thinking would have said, “You can’t buy our stuff, repurpose it, and sell it on your own”.

PB: I think all old-thinking is “you can’t”. People think they have to be an expert at something to do something, and there are lots of reasons why you can’t do it. I generally have no idea what I’m doing, and then I go do it, just because it’s fun, y’know?

GCD: Art toys are mostly for adults; have you seen any interest among kids?

PB: There are a lot of kids that are really into our stuff. They collect alongside their parents. Kids are really into the Munny toys that we do. The bigger toys are a little too expensive. We think about designing for adults, but occasionally, there’s stuff that’s perfect for children. We have a line called Yummy that kids really get into because they’re just a tiny bit twisted.

GCD: You took a big risk in starting the company.

PB: Right. I had this other company that I was running. We were selling mini-disc players with customized microphones because I got into sound recording for some movies I was making. This was before iPods. They were the best thing to use for digital recording. It was a little company that turned into a big company. It enabled me to keep up my filmmaking habit. I sold that company because I saw the iPod coming, and took the money to start Kidrobot. What I didn’t know was that it looked to me like someone was stealing money from me.  When I thought I had a quarter of a million dollars, I actually had a quarter of a million dollars in debt, which I found out four or five months later when we did the accounting. Within a few years, I was in debt three or four times that.

I didn’t grow up rich. My father’s a professor. So that was all kinds of intense. It kind of was a blessing because it forced me to make Kidrobot successful. If it hadn’t, I would have gone totally bankrupt. Sometimes, getting yourself in really deep sh!t is useful. You have to dive into the deep end in a way that you might not have if you were able to get out.

GCD: Has the gamble in Kidrobot paid off? Are you still running the red line every month in terms of profit? Or are you at a place now where you can make artistic choices free of financial pressure?

PB: It’s kind of both. If you’re making a hammer, it’s not that hard to go find a factory that will make you a million hammers. Especially if you’re always making the same hammer. Since we do limited edition toys, if you do a limited edition of two hundred toys, you have to make that mold, and then you have to never use it again. Which kind of sucks. You don’t get economy of scale. And there was no distribution channel, so I had to open my own stores. Then we had to find our own factories. No factories in China wanted to deal with us because they want to do a gazillion million purple Barney toys. Finding factories and agents was tough. I think it’s always a struggle, and it always will be. But now that we’re getting a little bigger, we can do things from the heart, like the two-tone Dunny set that just came out.

GCD: How do you assign a price-point to a toy? Do you take advance fan interest into account? There must be a lot of variables…

PB: It’s very scientific. We sit down in a big group and say, “How much do you think we can get for this?” And then someone says, “Uhhh…well…” [Laughs]. There’s actually a goal to keep the price point accessible. Yes, we’ve got some toys that are three hundred, four hundred-to-a-thousand dollars. Yet I’m purposely trying to use limited mass-production to create accessible art. If the stuff’s too expensive, then it’s not really accessible to the people who are really our fans, because they’re not all rich. At the same time, if it’s too inexpensive, it’s cheapened in a way, and we go out of business. So we always try to reach that balance. I can’t say there’s a science to it at all. If something’s impossibly difficult to make, you can charge a little more for it. That kind of thing.

GCD: The market for this art seems to have sort of popped out of nowhere.

PB: It’s a small community. Artists and fans and collectors all know each other. I was just in New York, and there were people lining up to buy our new Dunny, and it was nice because I could just go out and talk to them. These were people I had seen before. If you look at our message boards, the artists are out there talking. They’re often customers, too, because everyone gets mixed up and they love each others’ work. It’s not a giant world. You can participate.

GCD: Micro-markets seem to be the way of the future. Artists aren’t making tons of money. But people who hustle can put the daily bread on the table and have a good time making stuff.

PB: There’s this big whining in the music industry about the music industry being dead. My response is “Fu!K the music industry. I have a lot of friends who make a decent living. They’re not rich. They’re middle class. But you couldn’t do that ten years ago. You were either super-successful and got picked up by a label and the label put you out there, and you either made it or you didn’t. And you generally got screwed anyway. I have a friend who sold half a million albums his first time out and didn’t make a dime because Geffen kept all the money. In my experience now, if you hustle, and you’ve got good music and you can make sales on iTunes, you can get by. If you look at it statistically, people are spending more money on music. But it’s diversified, and it’s going to the actual musicians.

It’s the same thing with toys. People fly to Asia and make their own stuff with factories over there. Jeremy Mad is a really good example. Tristan’s done his own stuff. Huck Gee is fantastic. He got a mold machine, and makes his own molds in San Francisco.

GCD: If you had to grab one art toy from your burning house, which would it be?

PB: It would change every week. There’s a new set of toys by Shelterbank. They used to be called Spanky. They look like little M&Ms on LSD (pictured above left). They’re amazing. If this building was burning, I’d grab them and run.

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