By the early 1990s, Lowe's generation was rediscovering the toys they thought they had outgrown. In those pre-eBay days, the bible of this loose society of arrested adolescents was a magazine called Toy Shop, filled with classifieds featuring goodies from the preceding 40 years or so. Reading it, Lowe noticed that a lot of the stuff he had played with when he was a kid was selling for big bucks.
That demand looked like one hell of an opportunity. Take Hot Wheels, for example. Introduced by Mattel in the mid-'60s ( You can tell it's Mattel. It's swell!), these little die-cast cars were engineered to roll freely and fast. They were a sensation -- and still are. Although new Hot Wheels are on store shelves, some versions from the '60s command hundreds of dollars each.
Down in his mother's basement lay all the toys Lowe had discarded back when he discovered girls, including about 50 Hot Wheels and 8 cars from the Johnny Lightning line. He initiated a trademark search. Mattel had a death grip on the Hot Wheels name, but the Johnny Lightning name had been abandoned years before.
"Polar Lights is very special to me. ...You've rekindled the joy I once felt when buying these kits. ...You're the only company who I feel a part of." --Lou H.
Through an ad in Toy Shop, Lowe says, he bought a collection that included 30 original Johnny Lightning cars. He brought the swag to Wal-Mart, notorious for being tougher than the A-Team when it comes to taking on new products. "Whattaya got here? A flea market?" the buyer roared. "I'll give ya five minutes."
Lowe explained that he was going to re-create toys from the '60s. "I was there for an hour and 15 minutes, explaining what my plan was," he says.
Wal-Mart bought in. Toys R Us did, too. Lowe was ready to rock. He sent his original Johnny Lightnings to China with a simple directive: copy these. And in 1995, Safe Care was reborn as Playing Mantis, a name he chose to be clever and kid friendly. "I always liked playing with praying mantises when I was young," Lowe says, illustrating the difference between a Cass native and, say, some kid from Brooklyn.
Lowe has always had one measure for deciding which products Playing Mantis will pursue: "If it isn't cool, we won't do it," he says. He means it, too. This is his company all the way; he owns it free and clear. There isn't even any long-term debt ("Just a working line of credit," says chief financial officer Randy Miller), so the company has the resources to choose and develop its own products. "Being private is an important advantage. We can do what we want," Lowe says.
What he wants to do is to diversify enough to fight off challenges from the Hasbros and Mattels of the world. (Playing Mantis has already survived trademark-infringement litigation with Mattel. The suit was settled out of court.) He now has 2 solid brands; he'd like to build up to 10.
And he has two secret weapons. The first: customers such as the guys on the bulletin board, gleeful pseudo-grown-ups who share his child-of-the-'60s sensibility. The second: his company's ability to spin on a dime and give those guys what Lowe knows they want.
That's how he decided to revive a line of monster models originated in the '60s by a company called Aurora Plastics Corp. In those years, Aurora models were bigger than Star Trek. Aurora produced model kits of classic monsters (like the Wolf Man and the Mummy) as well as characters from television (like Batman and Superman). And did they ever sell! "Those guys were easily putting out 200,000 or 300,000 units at a run. I'm sure some of the best-sellers, like Frankenstein and Dracula, were up there with sales of 2 million or 3 million apiece," says Thomas Graham, professor of American history at Flagler College, in St. Augustine, Fla., and author of Greenberg's Guide to Aurora Model Kits. "At the time, plastic models of all sorts were sold everywhere -- in candy shops, drugstores, bicycle stores -- and I even found mention of one mortuary. They were easy to find, they were inexpensive, and pretty much all your friends were building them."
By the 1980s, Aurora was gone, a victim of bad business decisions. With it went the entire market for monster models. The models weren't missed until their original fans grew older and started searching for the icons of childhood -- a pursuit that Graham claims is healthy. "The people I know who are living long and prospering are those who still enjoy playing," he says. "Playing with toys in particular."
Take Lowe, for example. He built Aurora models as a kid and remembered one with special fondness: the haunted house from The Addams Family TV series. "I loved it," he says. So in 1995, under the name Polar Lights (Get it? Aurora? Polar Lights?), Lowe had the kit re-created, offering it as a $60 exclusive at the high-ticket FAO Schwarz toy-store chain.
The collector's market went nuts. Original Addams Family house kits were selling in Toy Shop for at least $500. A year later, when the remade kit went into wide release at less than $25, a new market was born. Make no mistake: the days of 300,000-unit runs of a monster model are over. Most Polar Lights kits are produced in runs of 15,000 units. Yet Polar Lights has been successful enough for the line to be expanded to include 60-odd kits. To date, the most successful is a new original done in the Aurora style: a model of the Jupiter 2 spaceship, the interstellar Winnebago featured on the TV series Lost in Space.
Playing Mantis launched Polar Lights just as intelligent life was being discovered in cyberspace. In late 1995 and early 1996 -- through bulletin boards on Prodigy, America Online, and other services -- collectors, craftspeople, and genre fans were discovering whole communities of like-minded souls.
Lowe and his managers caught on to the phenomenon -- sort of. In 1995 they stuck up a quick site, just some early brochureware. But for serious marketing, Playing Mantis held fast to traditional methods -- newsletters and print ads. Part of the reason for going slow on the Web was that Lowe was no fan of online customer interaction. "I would do chats and look at boards on AOL, but I found that I didn't get a lot of new ideas from them," he says. "Besides, there are some vicious people out there. Some of the employees who left would get on the boards and say things that just weren't true. There were competitors who got on there just to screw around with you. I might go on to see what's being said, but in terms of being Tom Lowe on the boards, I don't do it anymore."
