Vetras and his team put a sales kit together and gave Edmark employees -- people in accounting, in technical support, and in testing, many of whom had never sold anything -- a crash course on how to demonstrate and sell a product. "People were blowing out of here on Friday afternoons like commandos. It was a rallying point for the whole company," Vetras says. "Anyone who thought selling was a matter of doing lunch and taking an order got a taste of reality."
Comp USA applauded Edmark's act. Comp USA executives in Dallas called store managers in every location at which an expo had taken place. "We were getting straight A's," says Vetras.
In October 1994 Comp USA placed a $500,000 holiday order and agreed to carry every title in more than 80 stores.
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Before the holiday buying season closed, Edmark hit the 5,000-outlet mark. Traditional merchants such as Egghead Software kept the orders coming. In addition to Comp USA, Edmark had scored new distribution in Office Depot, Costco, and Wal-Mart. Those were high-stakes prizes. Category killers and other mass merchants stocked "long and deep," Narodick reports.
In return, those retailers expected products to turn over quickly and virtually sell themselves. There were few opportunities to advertise or merchandise in the stores. Products that failed to sell through in 30 days would be yanked, and then either cast into an even deeper discount bin or promptly shipped back to where they came from. "If we let the product stay too long on the shelves," explains Narodick, "they'd ratchet down the prices and clear it. That could kill us."
To ensure sell-through -- and alleviate buyers' primary worry -- Edmark had to offer retailers, especially the mass merchants, a "value" proposition they could sell to customers. Shrink-wrapping frisbees or sunglasses with the products, as Edmark had done, wasn't going to cut it. Instead, the company sacrificed KidDesk, its first product, to a holiday promotion. It bundled that product with all its other products and gave it away free. A classic two-for-the-price-of-one ploy, it would seed the market for KidDesk but cannibalize sales. "It was a tactical risk," says Vetras. "But we had to punch the other products through."
At the same time, inside the box, Edmark offered a simplified registration card and a new incentive -- a chance at a $10,000 savings bond -- to encourage more users to offer their names and addresses.
The strategy worked. Tens of thousands of registration cards poured in over the next few months. By mid-October reorders were streaming in. They were still coming in November. They flowed in through December. The company sold nearly 250,000 units, for sales of $6.6 million that quarter, including $1 million to schools. It was a 275% increase over the previous year's holiday quarter, and more than the company had posted in most full years. Edmark's still-minuscule market share tripled from less than 1% to 2.7%. Wall Street rewarded the performance with a 50% jump in the stock price in the weeks that followed. Analysts upped their projections for Edmark to $20 million in revenues this year. "We were on a high that just kept going," says Narodick.
Not that the distribution battle is won. Competitors aren't exactly surrendering: Microsoft's Magic School Bus is roving the streets. Disney's Lion King is roaring off the shelves. Most of Edmark's rivals are posting robust growth, planning more products, and plotting better promotions. Does Narodick understand what it takes to keep both sets of customers -- the ones who "SKU" her products up for retail sale as well as the ones who boot them up for a preschooler to play -- faithful to her fledgling brand?
By her reckoning, it will take six more successful new products this year and a couple thousand more outlets through which to sell them. It will take new packaging, more advertising, and smarter mailing to a database of registered users, which has swelled to include more than 150,000 names.
It will also take a few hundred fake iguanas and a lot of Yukon Jack -- for the snakebites Edmark will serve at a party touting its new Rain Forest product to retail buyers at this year's Retail Vision show. "We're going to keep those buyers jazzed," says marketing director Cast. And just a tad boozed. "Don't put that in there," says Vetras. "Sally will go berserk."
That doesn't mean she won't buy every drink in the house that night. Or that the bash won't be followed by a surgical strike of a rollout. Although the toy tree frogs and the swinging Peruvian band might soften buyers, they won't bowl them over any more than the whiz-bang products did. The great selling will have to be matched by more great products, made by more great people, funded with more great money -- and even then, there are no guarantees.
Just ask four-year-old Terry Cullen. Only days after his father, Terrence, had bought him Bailey's Book House, he spied Bailey's buddy Millie on the shelves of a Lechmere store just north of Boston. "He enjoys Bailey's," says his father. "He seems to be learning something. And it's better than watching Power Rangers." So he rifles through the shelves for a CD-ROM version of Millie's.
It's out of stock.
The Cullens won't buy the product in another format. And young Terry's not-so-pent-up demand overwhelms him. "Why can't I have Millie's Math House?" he wails, as his parents race for the exit. "How about Lion King?" he bargains. "Don't they have Power Rangers?
"When am I going to get Millie?"
Soon, assures Narodick. "We're working hard to get these products everywhere customers might look," she says. "We're working hard to convince retailers that there are thousands of little Terries out there begging for them." Perhaps, she's likely thinking, it's time to call in the orangutan.
