Hasbro: a peek inside the toy chest

“Here we bring magic to life.”

In this episode, we’re taken into the enchanting world of Hasbro, a toy and games company. Guided by Chris Whipple, Senior Design Engineer and Justin Pringle, a creative force behind the beloved brands such as Potato Head and Furby. In Rhode Island we uncover the magic behind some of the most iconic toys ever created.

We hear about a pivotal moment in toy history during the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting how story-driven play became a major trend and we explore the breakthrough release of Furby in 1998. Chris and Justin explain how Furby’s design allowed for almost all of its movements to be controlled by a single motor, making it an affordable robotic toy. 

They take us down ‘Memory Lane,’ a treasure trove of Hasbro’s rich history, spanning over a century. From the original Monopoly game board to the latest innovations, this episode is a nostalgic and fascinating journey through the world of toys.

Find out more about Hasbro here.

Find out more about FlexPLM here and OnShape here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and X for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Clarissa Maycock. Location recording by Georgia Wright. And music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where we're opening up the toy chest to talk Furbies and action figures.

I'm your host, Paul Hames from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology. In this episode, we're getting an exclusive behind the scenes look at one of the world's most beloved Toy and games companies Hasbro ever since Hasbro launched Mr.

Potato Head in 1952 it's been keeping children and adults entertained with some of the world's best known toys But staying ahead of the game to put the must have toy on the shelves each year requires some serious innovation. Our producer, Georgia Wright, went to visit Hasbro's HQ in Rhode Island to meet senior design engineer Chris Whipple, and give you a glimpse behind the curtain.

Welcome to Hasbro. My name is Chris Whipple. I'm a senior design engineer on the Nerf brand. I've been at Hasbro for over 11 years now, but the majority of that time I was actually an animatronics engineer. 

And I'm Justin Pringle. So we work on a lot of iconic brands like Potato Head, Peppa, uh, Furby of course, uh, My Little Pony.

So we're excited to talk to you about more, um, our roles and how we bring magic to life.

Uh, so we'll actually, the first place we're going to enter is, um, an area that we call Memory Lane. Uh, it's full of a bunch of artifacts and displays from Hasbro's history. So Hasbro itself is 100 years old, but we have some of our subsidiaries that are actually much older than that. So over here on display, you'll see we have the Checkered Game of Life.

This was released by Milton Bradley, one of our subsidiaries, in 1860. So, long storied history of creating toys and games. 

Off to our left here, we see a lot of these display cases with a number of different artifacts from Hasbro's history. Uh, we've got, starting with, um, Potato Head, which was the first, uh, TV commercial advertised toy. Uh, so fun fact about that. Uh, another fun fact about the original Potato Head brand, uh, the potato wasn't included.

The box just came with the accessories so the eyes, the ears, the mustaches. And, as you can see, we've displayed them on, uh, some, looks like some foam on there, uh, because we don't want the potato to be in there long term. But the original toy, you were expected to bring your own potato. 

B Y O P.

Exactly, yes. Um, and behind us, we actually have the original, Monopoly game board, which was made in 1933. And as you can see, the display actually has the corner of the board curled around, because it was originally made on a tablecloth. So we wanted to showcase that it was made on a tablecloth. So that's been preserved.

That's the original from 1933. 

You can see the pieces are actually hand carved wood, even including the die. So it's really cool to see these more vintage materials. How they brought this game to life.

Yeah. So I studied robotic engineering. Uh, so I built robots my whole life. I was always kind of into that, into that space, uh, went and studied robotic engineering. Um, I was torn between. Going into the different disciplines, I was finding during my job search, after I got out of college, that companies wanted you to be a mechanical engineer or an electrical engineer or a computer scientist.

They really didn't know what to do with somebody who had all three. That was still pretty early in kind of the development of robotics engineering as a career. Um, and Hasbro was one of the only companies I talked to that said, Hey, we actually encourage you to do the programming and do the mechanical design and do the electrical engineering on your products.

And I was like, sign me up. I personally love to influence the brands that I loved as a child. Uh, so, working on Nerf now especially, like, I loved Super Soakers as a kid, I love Nerf. Uh, so the fact that now I get to come into work every day and even when it's challenging, even when it's, you know, it's a, it's a, it can be a grind sometimes.

You just look at the, the wall of my, my desk and I'm just like, wow, I actually get to like, I have an excuse to play with these and just go out and just kind of have fun and just kind of decompress even just for five minutes and just come back and everything just kind of melts away.

Do you ever have Nerf wars in the building? 

As a matter of fact, we do. As a matter of fact, you can see some evidence. If you look over here, um, there's a couple of darts that had the suction cup. They've been stuck on that window for probably seven or eight years. Um, and there's a couple stuck in the ceiling too.

The 1970s and the 1980s, there was a big shift in terms of story driven play. So we went from having, you know, the potato head, which, you know, You know, didn't really have much of a story behind it. Um, we we've created the lore as we went. Um, but for brands like G. I. Joe and transformers, we had comic books.

We had Saturday morning cartoons and that elevated your. your play experience because you weren't getting, you weren't going to the store and buying a generic army soldier, you were buying Duke. And I saw Duke do all these amazing things on the Saturday, on Saturday morning on the cartoon, and I read about all these amazing things that he did in the comics, and I'm applying that to my play.

Uh, so the kids, so kids of that era were entrenched in that storytelling, and they were getting it from the comics and the TV shows. Same thing with Transformers. You weren't getting a toy robot. You were getting Optimus Prime leader of the Autobots, right? Like there's, there's some gravitas to that. And then you get the whole Cybertron and all of the backstory from the comics and the, and the, and the.

Uh, the TV spots and, uh, that really elevated the toy space. And that's really the ethos of kind of our design thinking pretty much since then. We've always tried to lean into the entertainment, kind of exposing our brands to as many of those different avenues as possible. 

 A lot of the animatronics that you see at the BWT that we were just, we were just visiting, um, all of those products, uh, really. started with the original Furby, which was released in 1998. Actually, we have one right here. So that's this guy. If you were around in the 90s, I know I had, I had one. I was, I was eight years old when these came out.

I had one under the Christmas tree, uh, that year as, as did my sister. It was the hot toy we sold. a ton of them and there were, I remember news stories about the Furby craze, uh, and that really kicked off the entire kind of robotic toy space. And the real key to the success of Furby was the fact that there were kind of three things that kind of coalesced to allow this product to exist.

Uh, it was a really simple mechanism. The toy itself will rock back and forth on its base. It opens and closes its mouth. It opens and closes its eyes, and it can wiggle its ears. Uh, so all of that motion and all of that can, uh, be almost independently controlled by a single motor. And that was a huge, uh, kind of breakthrough in efficiency that allowed us to cost reduce this down to a point where it was a consumable robotic toy.

So that was innovation number one. Innovation number two was the dedicated electronics that we use, uh, to pretty much to this day that had the onboard audio processing capabilities to produce the sounds, uh, and also integrate with the sensors, uh, that allow us to interact with the code. And the third piece, uh, that was the ability to wrap all of that into a small package that was covered in fur to kind of hide the mechanism and kind of, um, give a facade to kind of in the same way like you, if you go to like a live magician or even a stage show, we show you what we want you to see.

But there are stagehands in the back that are, you know, distracting you and doing things. Uh, and it's, we equate it more to theater than, than we would to anything else. Uh, there's a lot of art to that. So while the mechanism is doing things, we distract you with sounds. We distract you with other different movements.

Uh, like I said, I think the best analogy, um, is theater or even that live magician.

So yes, the Furby, the 2012 Furby and the 2013 Furby, uh, both had a significant departure from the earlier Furbys in that we included LCD eyes. Uh, so they were very expressive, we could create all different types of, you know, eye effects, uh, all different kinds of animations inside the eye and it really brought this to life.

Um, and again it communicated with the app and the eyes were pretty critical in that communication link. Um, It actually used what we call audio watermarking to talk to the app. Uh, so it wasn't Bluetooth or anything like that. It was still too early for things like that to have come down into the toy space.

Uh, so what it does is it actually, um, sends a bit pattern in really, really high ultrasonic speed. Uh, chirps that in theory humans can't hear, but that was the most, uh, um, efficient way to get communication with an app.

The real aim of Furby and kind of the essence as we went through multiple iterations of concepts and then tested those concepts was we really wanted this Furby to be the most interactive best friend you could have. Um, so this thing's basically a party in the box. It's fully loaded. It's got lots of different cool music soundtracks.

that were sung by Furby, um, it's got the lights, it has the motor movements, and it really has so many different interaction points that allows the child to interact with Furby in a really meaningful way. I think one of the big features is the voice recognition piece, which allows the kid to talk to their Furby and unlock new modes of play that you wouldn't be able to access otherwise.

Hey Furby! 

Oh ho ho, Furby hear you! Now we best friends forever! Okay Bestie, let's play! Press heart gem and say, Hey Furby! 

Hey Furby! 

Now say, Dance party! 

Dance party! 

 Hey Furby! Ask Furby 

questionula!

Hey Furby, are you hungry? Shake 

Shake Furby for answer! Furby say Nah! 

Yeah, so one of the cool features about Furby is the copycat mode, so Hey Furby! Copycat! 

Say something to Furby, and Furby say it back! 

I love the third angle. 

Space cadet! I love The Third Angle! 

Catch Furby's head, Chipmunk. I love The Third Angle! Shake Furby to record again.

Robot, beep boop boop beep. I love The Third Angle! 

So we actually unlocked the new, the more that you play with Furby, then you're going to get additional phrases. So it really encourages the child or consumer to keep coming back to Furby so you can get some newness.

Yeah, so my 12 years at Hasbro, this was by far the most rigorous, intensive amount of consumer testing and insight gathering that we've done for a product. It's really amazing because that means as a company we're investing in our consumer to understand what it is that they want, how do they want to play with our brands and what is valuable to them.

But the thing that I love about it as an engineer, it takes a lot of subjectivity of the decision making process and really lean into what it is that the consumer wants. Um, so that is kind of our North star and how we do that. Develop and make decisions around the product offering. 

I personally love just how diverse the, the skill set is under the roof we have here.

Uh, just look at how much different things that go into the Furby, right? You have the soft goods engineers we have. We have electronic engineers, we have animatronics engineers doing the robotics, and the mechanical engineers doing the CAD work, and the voice actors, there's all, uh, the programmers, the designers, like, doing the patterns that are going to be printed on the plush, and they're so incredibly talented, everybody here, um, they're all very specialized, but they all do their job really, really well, they're all amazing people, and it's been an absolute blast to work with all of them on all of these products.

And it never ceases to amaze me how much talent is under the roof of this building.

A big thanks to Chris Whipple and Justin Pringle there for giving us a glimpse inside the fascinating world of Hasbro. Now it's time to meet our expert, John Hirschtick from PTC. One of the biggest benefits Hasbro saw from transitioning from SolidWorks to Onshape Was the direct import of mesh files significantly reducing the conversion time compared to traditional CAD systems, and this resulted in an immediate access to workable files.

So John, how else has Onshape improved efficiency and innovation in product development for companies working with complex models? 

Each brand within Hasbro has its own engineering team, its own marketing team, and its own budget. Each operates like an independent company under the Hasbro umbrella. The deployment of Onshape enabled a few things.

One, improved design workflow. By streamlining the importing, conversion, and editing process of meshes, and even allowing the mixing of mesh data and precise data in a single part model, With the same set of modeling tools, Onshape does that. Their old system did not. This means their Hasbro engineers have more time for design innovation.

It enables the use of existing components and leads to faster time to market and more successful product launches. The second, real time collaboration. Onshape's cloud native platform allows multiple engineers to work on the same model simultaneously, regardless of their location, ensuring that everyone is always working with the most up to date version.

Third thing, instantaneous feedback and iteration. Team members can instantly see changes made by others. Enabling quick feedback, iterative improvements, which speeds up the development process. Hasbro is a great company that brings childhood memories flooding back for all of us. Few companies have such a rich heritage on which they can draw.

I remember being a young kid playing Monopoly. My own children growing up with Star Wars toys and what those meant to them. Not just as recreation, but as inspiration for technology and, uh, and creativity. Today. And when you grab a Star Hasbro, it gives you a feeling of adventure and fun and memories of the movies.

And to think that these future innovative toys will be just a little bit better because of the contributions that PTC Software has made. Makes me feel just wonderful about what we do. It's what my colleague John McElhinney calls our emotional paycheck

Thanks to Chris and Justin from Hasbro for showing us around such an iconic company Please rate review and subscribe to our bi weekly third angle episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow PTC on LinkedIn and X for future episodes.

This is an 1860 production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Rema Mukenna. Location recording by Georgia Wright. And music by Rowan Bishop.