Spin Master Turned Toy Novelties Into Durable Story Worlds

Ronnen Harary describes Spin Master’s history as a progression from products that caught a moment to franchises that could sustain a child’s attention—and, eventually, to an organization meant to create new ideas without depending on its founders.

The early products were often simple mechanisms with a strong first encounter: grass sprouting from a nylon head, a spinning stick that could be manipulated into tricks, a plane whose wings could survive repeated crashes. Those products could sell in enormous volumes, but they were vulnerable to the same force that made them successful. A novelty works because people have not seen it before; once the surprise has been experienced, demand can fall away.

Bakugan and Paw Patrol changed the operating model. Both began with physical play patterns, but neither relied only on the mechanics of the object. Bakugan made a transforming marble part of a battle system with named characters and animated stories. Paw Patrol integrated toy design, animation, character development, and episodic storytelling from the outset. In each case, the product could become an entry point into a world rather than a one-time surprise.

That distinction matters because a toy’s commercial life is not necessarily the same as its life in a child’s imagination. Harary says the scale of that difference became vivid during a holiday in South Africa, when a 22-year-old tennis instructor returned with 25 Bakugan he had preserved in mint condition from childhood. Spin Master had created and sold the figures; the child had lived with them as part of a fantasy world for several years.

Harary estimates that perhaps a billion Bakugan have been produced. The number is less important than the premise behind it: a successful children’s property can compound when a mechanism, a game, characters, and stories all give one another additional meaning. A marble that snaps open is interesting. A marble that becomes a recognizable character with powers, relationships, and a place in an ongoing narrative invites a different kind of attachment.

Paw Patrol applies that logic to preschool viewers. Its characters are puppies with distinct capabilities, vehicles, and roles, led by Ryder in Adventure Bay. A problem creates a mission; a selected group of pups transforms into mission-ready form and resolves it. Harary calls them “mitzvah pups”: characters who do good, solve problems, and collaborate.

The series is not presented as virtue education in place of entertainment. Its appeal, Harary says, is built into the pace and ritual of the action: the call to the tower, the elevator, the specialized backpacks, the mission briefing, the slide, the vehicle transformation, and the eventual solve. The repeated grammar gives children something familiar to return to. The action and individual missions provide variation within it.

The business lesson is not simply that every product should become a media franchise. Harary’s account suggests a more specific distinction. A product can be exciting because it creates a new sensation. A franchise becomes durable when it establishes a stable system in which each new encounter can deepen the value of earlier ones.

Spin Master’s earliest successes show both the value and the limits of finding a product at the right cultural moment.

Harary’s first major product, Earth Buddy, was a softball-sized nylon form filled with sawdust and grass seed. A child soaked it in water and, over about seven days, grass grew from it as hair. The product had originated elsewhere—Harary had encountered a related version, called Grassheads, through an Israeli newspaper story—but he believed there was an opening in North America because no one appeared to be selling it at comparable scale.

At 23, he and his business partner Anton had to reverse-engineer the item. They had no established formula or supplier. They bought pantyhose, sourced sawdust and grass seed, and worked out how to manufacture it. Their first run of 5,000 did not immediately create a market. They sold on street corners, tried flower shops, and moved only a few hundred units.

The useful part of the story is not that persistence inevitably wins. It is that Harary acted before he had the credentials, preparation, or infrastructure conventionally associated with a large retail sale. He drove from Toronto to Kmart’s headquarters in Troy, Michigan, carrying a box of Earth Buddies in his mother’s car. He had no formal presentation and initially pitched the wrong buyer. Once he found the horticulture buyer, Adrian Zaks, he adjusted his wholesale price from $2.60 to $1.65 per unit after seeing competing grass-growing products in her office.

The product cost roughly 70 cents to make. Zaks placed an initial order for 48,000 units and indicated that a larger Christmas order could follow if it sold. Harary believes the price mattered, and he also believes that showing up in person as a visibly young, committed founder helped persuade her to work with him.

Harary’s interpretation of that sale is broader than the familiar advice to “take risks.” He argues that young people often assess risk too narrowly by concentrating on the possibility of losing money. The less visible risk, in his view, is spending years doing work whose long-term upside accrues principally to someone else. He calls that “renting your time.”

That does not lead him to say that everyone should start a business. He says he wrote No Experience Necessary in part to help people make a more conscious case either for taking a risk in business, art, or another pursuit—or for deciding not to. The point is to resist allowing parental pressure, social expectations, or fear of visible failure to make the decision by default.

Harary also argues that passion can reduce practical risk. Someone deeply committed to an idea may bring more energy and endurance than someone who has merely reasoned their way into an opportunity. He sees youth as an advantage in this respect: older people may be inclined to help a young person who is trying seriously to build something, offering their experience and responding to the energy of early ambition.

Earth Buddy, however, also established a constraint. Its magic was inherently short-lived. A child could be delighted by grass growing from an improbable ball of sawdust, but once that surprise had been experienced once or twice, it could not be recreated indefinitely. Harary says Spin Master understood it had caught a moment and began looking for the next one.

Devil Sticks offered a related lesson. The product was a three-piece juggling set: two sticks held in the hands and a weighted central stick, often decorated with tassels. Players strike the center stick back and forth, causing it to spin and allowing them to perform tricks.

Harary had known the object from high school and associated it with older teenagers, people in their twenties, and the Grateful Dead scene. What interested him later was seeing 10-year-olds making and playing with them in schoolyards and parks. The signal was not only that the sticks could be manufactured. It was that children were already using them socially, watching one another, sharing tricks, and making the object part of a visible group activity.

Spin Master used its factory to make prototypes, packaging, and a retail-ready version. It sold about 1.5 million Devil Sticks at $14.99, according to Harary. But he does not attribute the result mainly to quality, price, or packaging. Children saw other children playing with them and wanted to participate. The product benefited from what he calls a moment in the zeitgeist.

The company tried to amplify that visibility. It hired college students, sent them out in vans to demonstrate the product at schools and universities, made its first commercial, and pursued television, magazine, and newspaper coverage. In contemporary language, it leaned into earned media. Harary himself appeared on the side of one of the vans.

The promotion could extend and accelerate a craze, but it could not abolish the underlying cycle. Harary compares Devil Sticks to yo-yos: they remain available after their peak, but sales are far below the period when they are everywhere in children’s conversations and play.

Air Hogs supplied a different principle. The reusable toy plane was more demanding to design and manufacture than either Earth Buddy or Devil Sticks. The central challenge was what happened when it landed. Its wings could fail on impact.

The solution was not to make the plane impossible to damage. It was to make the wings pop off so they could be put back on. Harary says early shipments required quick modifications, but the company ultimately solved the problem through engineering and design. Roberts says Air Hogs sold 35 million units in its first nine months.

The transferable logic is simple: when a failure is inevitable, a product may be better served by making that failure cheap, reversible, and compatible with continued use. A wing that pops off is preferable to one that breaks beyond repair.

Together, the products show a distinct approach to opportunity. Spin Master looked for evidence that children were already responding to an object or behavior; moved quickly enough to participate in the moment; used promotion to make the activity more visible; and tried to remove practical friction from the play experience. But the company also learned that a novelty cannot become permanent merely through better marketing. To endure, it would need something beyond the initial mechanism.

Ronnen Harary says Bakugan began with an idea from a 23-year-old inventor: an action figure inside a marble. Spin Master licensed and developed the concept, then took it to Japan, where Harary believed companies had particular strengths in toy mechanisms and in combining toys with animation.

Tomy and Bandai declined the proposal, he says. Sega Toys accepted it and added the feature that made the product distinctive: a magnet and spring inside the ball, paired with a metal element in a laminated card. A child rolled the marble onto the card, where it popped open and transformed into a creature.

The toys also operated as a game. Characters had point values, cards contained matching symbols, and players could battle one another. The mechanism created an immediate sensory payoff: a compact object suddenly became a figure. But the game system made the transformation repeatable, rather than merely decorative.

Harary had already learned the cost of missing a potential franchise. About five years before Bakugan, he had turned down Beyblade, the battling spinning-top property that he says became a multibillion-dollar toy line through Hasbro. When another opening appeared, he wanted Spin Master to create a franchise of similar ambition.

The Japanese model was central. Harary describes Beyblade and Transformers as properties in which animation and toys existed in the same imaginative and commercial universe. He proposed making a 52-episode Bakugan series. Sega Toys estimated the production cost at $12 million and asked Spin Master to contribute $6 million. Harary took the proposal to his partners, and Spin Master ultimately agreed to proceed.

The animated series changed what a child encountered in the physical toy. On screen, the Bakugan characters transformed into creatures that could grow to 100-foot monsters. Children could develop favorites—Harary names Drago as the main character—and carry those attachments back into the game. A child rolling a ball onto a card was not only triggering a mechanism; they were activating a figure with an identity and a larger story.

That is the reinforcing system Harary believes Spin Master eventually learned to build: a play pattern gives the story physical expression, while the story gives the object emotional and imaginative meaning.

Paw Patrol took the same integration further. The original concept came from Keith Chapman, the creator of Bob the Builder. Spin Master had asked five creators to develop preschool concepts related to transformation. Chapman supplied the basic premise and character archetypes. Spin Master then brought writers, animators, and toy designers together to develop the property.

The process was intentionally cross-functional. Toy design is not simply visual styling; it involves the feel of an object, its transformation, and the play pattern it enables. Animation and writing require a different craft: making characters legible, likeable, and emotionally meaningful. Harary recalls Hot Wheels designer Eric Churny drawing over animators’ vehicle concepts, while the animators drew back over his work.

That friction was productive because it prevented the franchise from being built as a sequence of handoffs: story first, merchandise later; or toys first, narrative added afterward. By the time Paw Patrol launched, Spin Master had spent 19 years making toys. Harary says the company tried to bring what it had learned about children’s aspirations into the story itself.

The resulting structure is stable but not static. Paw Patrol is now in its 13th year, Harary says, with 52 episodes a year, annual specials, and a third film scheduled for August 14, 2026. Spin Master’s internal aspiration moved from “Paw for five,” to “Paw for 10,” and then to “Paw forever.”

Harary’s explanation for that durability is not endless escalation. He explicitly rejects the idea that the franchise should “jump the shark.” Paw Patrol will not go to space, he says, because that would take it too far from the premise that made it work. The coming film will involve an island with dinosaurs, new vehicles, and a new mobile headquarters, but the established pace, comedy, character dynamics, and mission structure remain.

He compares the approach to a song: the melody stays in place even when musicians can improvise around it. Paw Patrol’s first, second, and third acts retain a stable structure. The voice actors are children and age out when they reach puberty, but Harary says the characters maintain the same pitch and identity.

A franchise, on this account, needs a narrative grammar. It has to give its creative teams enough room to introduce new missions, settings, toys, and stories, while preserving the rituals and emotional promises that made the property recognizable in the first place. The stable elements are not a constraint on creativity; they are the framework within which the audience can accept variation.

Harary’s account of Spin Master ends not with a particular toy but with a question of organizational design: can the company continue to produce magical products when the founders are no longer the people generating them?

He and Anton stepped down as co-CEOs about five years before this discussion, though Harary remains chair. He says he still gets more excited by toys than by the business in the abstract—“I’m stuck at seven forever”—but he regards the company’s ability to create products without his direct involvement as a higher achievement than any individual invention.

Hatchimals is his example. Introduced in 2016, it was a character inside an egg that responded to the warmth of a child’s hands. Holding the egg activated the creature within; it pecked at the shell and turned inside it. Set the egg down and the process stopped. Leave it dormant for months, Harary says, and it could resume when picked up again. Eventually the creature hatched, after which the child could interact with it outside the egg.

Harary says he had nothing to do with the product, despite being co-CEO and still involved in product work at the time. That absence is what makes the product meaningful to him. It suggested that the creative culture could reproduce itself through people other than its founders.

He describes business as an artistic medium for that reason. Business carries negative associations, he says, because it is tied to money, power, and cases in which people treat one another badly. But he sees a restaurant, service, recipe, gym, financial offering, or children’s franchise as a creative act when it brings a new experience into the world.

The medium differs from painting or songwriting because its materials are people working in coordinated fashion. The work is not only the final product; it is also the arrangement of the human capabilities required to make that product possible.

That belief shapes Harary’s unusual view of meetings. A good meeting, in his account, is not principally a reporting mechanism. It is a setting in which people generate ideas together, the energy in the room rises, and a useful direction becomes visible to the group. He compares it to a symphony or a jam band.

Harary says his learning disability may have influenced this style. He does not rely heavily on PowerPoint presentations or extensive written preparation. Instead, he tries to recognize, in real time, who might add something useful to an emerging idea.

In Spin Master’s early years, that could mean starting with two or three people and then paging another employee over the intercom. His business partner eventually stopped the practice because Harary was disrupting the office. He then asked his assistant to find the relevant person and bring them into the conversation.

The underlying principle was not spontaneity for its own sake. It was that useful insight may sit outside formal rank or the scheduled attendee list. Harary emphasizes diversity of thought and says he particularly likes bringing introverts into discussions because they may have strong ideas without naturally volunteering them. At Spin Master, he says, someone can begin in shipping and become a senior vice president because the company values what a person can contribute.

His approach also rejects standard meeting discipline in one respect: he says he will not end a productive meeting merely because its allotted time has expired. Nor does he cancel recurring meetings simply because participants say there is nothing urgent to discuss. The meetings with less immediate pressure, he argues, can be the ones in which unexpected ideas surface. They also create relationships that matter independently of the formal agenda.

This is the organizational counterpart to the company’s product strategy. Cross-functional friction made Paw Patrol stronger because toy designers, animators, and storytellers could challenge one another’s work. Pulling unexpected voices into a meeting serves the same purpose at a wider scale: it creates conditions in which a new connection, mechanism, character, or product can emerge from the interaction rather than from a single executive’s plan.

Harary’s standard for success is therefore not simply that Spin Master produced Earth Buddy, Bakugan, Paw Patrol, or Hatchimals. It is whether the company can continue to bring stories and products into the world after the people who started it have moved away from day-to-day control.