How Pressman Toy Shaped The Business Of Play

Pressman Toy is a uncommon toy model that may declare it has made toys for each technology from the pre-depression Best Era by way of child boomers, millennials, and Gen Z, and remains to be promoting toys as we speak.

The corporate, greatest recognized for promoting traditional board video games like checkers, Chinese language checkers, chess, and backgammon in its signature brilliant purple packing containers, was based in 1922. Pressman was promoting toys 20 years earlier than Hasbro
HAS
(1942), 23 years earlier than Mattel
MAT
(1945) and 10 years earlier than Lego (1932).

Throughout its 100-year historical past it noticed toys change from easy picket and cardboard playthings made domestically, to plastic and digital toys made abroad. It additionally noticed toy advertising and marketing evolve from newspaper advertisements, to radio, to tv commercials, to YouTube and social media as we speak.

Pressman Toy was among the many first toy firms to promote licensed toys, with its Orphan Annie bubble pipe in 1937 and its line of toys that includes the 1938 Disney hit Snow White. It was an early adapter of the transfer to plastics, shopping for an injection molding machine in 1947. And it was fast to dive into TV promoting, when youngsters tv reveals grew to become the essential method to drive gross sales within the Sixties.

That historical past unfolds in a brand new guide by founder Jack Pressman’s son and former Pressman Toy Chairman, Jim Pressman, and his spouse Donna, together with author Alan Axelrod. The 232-page guide, A Century of American Toys & Video games, The Story of Pressman Toy, is a coffee-table measurement quantity loaded with classic photographs, previous commercials, and tales concerning the advertising and marketing moxie of the corporate’s founder, and his spouse, Lynn Pressman.

“The story simply informed itself,” Jim Pressman mentioned of the guide.

Because the A centesimal-anniversary of the toy model approached, Jim and Donna Pressman determined to jot down concerning the firm’s historical past. They started trying by way of previous Pressman catalogs and archives, and looking by way of many years of photographs and paperwork on the Robust toy museum in Rochester, N.Y. and determined there was sufficient materials there for a guide.

Jim Pressman, 73, who appeared as a three-year-old mannequin in a 1952 advert for the corporate, began working at Pressman Toy in 1971, and have become president in 1977, mentioned he found issues about his household toy legacy that he hadn’t recognized earlier than.

“We began to seek out all these advertisements from 1923, and photos of my father in his first workplace along with his Zellophone,” Pressman mentioned. “We didn’t know that was certainly one of his first gadgets, that he constructed his complete enterprise on.”

Jack Pressman based his toy firm after working in his father’s selection retailer on the Higher East Aspect of Manhattan. The shop bought sweet, and varied odds and ends, together with toys. By means of the shop, Jack Pressman grew to become acquainted with toy suppliers. After serving in World Warfare I, he grew to become a toy salesman for a Brooklyn toy producer, and in 1922 joined a toy wholesale firm as a associate, and the corporate was renamed J. Pressman & firm.

One of many new firm’s first toys that attracted consideration was the Zellophone, a picket xylophone that bought for below $1.

One of many firm’s first hits got here in 1935, when Jack Pressman encountered a German marbles sport that he helped change into a traditional often known as Chinese language checkers. Pressman guess massive that the sport could possibly be a nationwide craze and he was proper,

The guide notes that in 1938 Playthings journal reported that fifteen million Chinese language checkers video games had been bought between 1935 and 1938, utilizing a couple of billion marbles. Pressman Toy wasn’t the one toy firm promoting the sport, however it “had a first-mover benefit, which it exploited to the hilt,” in line with the guide.

The corporate additionally benefited from the truth that Jack Pressman had invested in a toy marble firm simply earlier than the craze took off.

The guide is organized in chronological order and teams the corporate’s improvements and toy hits by many years.

It tells the backstory behind Pressman bestsellers from the Let’s Go Fishin’ toy, born within the Thirties and nonetheless promoting hundreds of thousands yearly, to the Nineteen Nineties hit Gooey Louie, and the Who Desires To Be A Millionaire licensed sport, which was the bestselling board sport on the planet in 2000.

Jim Pressman bought Pressman Toy to Goliath Group in 2014. Goliath Group continues to promote toys below the Pressman Toy model identify.

Pressman Toy additionally was an innovator within the toy world due to the function of Lynn Pressman, who grew to become one of many first high feminine executives of a toy firm after Jack Pressman died in 1959. Even earlier than his loss of life Lynn had labored alongside Jack, main the advertising and marketing campaigns for the corporate.

Lynn was recognized for what the guide describes as Barnum-style publicity stunts, just like the time in 1960 when she introduced a child elephant to Toy Honest to advertise a brand new reminiscence sport.

An image of that stunt seems on web page 105 of the guide, and Jim Pressman mentioned his reminiscence of that occasion helped led to the guide’s creation. He knew {that a} photograph of his mom Lynn with the elephant at Toy Honest existed someplace, however he didn’t know if he might observe it down. He found the Robust museum had archives of each concern of commerce journal Playthings, which had a narrative concerning the elephant stunt, with a photograph.

When he discovered the photograph there, he mentioned, “I knew we had a guide.” The top end result was a guide that could be a nice learn for followers of historical past, Americana, toys, and the toy business.