Let's try, Eichen thought. Let me try.
And if people don't like it? If people whisper, "What the hell's gotten into Eichen with that little toy company of his? Why'd he give up?"
Well, if that's what people want to think, then let 'em, right? Eichen thought. Who cares, right?
Right?
The true and only heaven
Five years later, early on a recent morning, when the sun was shining in Encinitas, Calif., just north out of San Diego through the coastal villages and beach-plum thickets on the bluffs above the Pacific, a morning when surfers in wet suits already peppered the waves, you would have found Paul Eichen in the conference room of the converted warehouse that's home to Rokenbok Toy Co. -- Eichen in jeans, deck shoes, no socks, and with a good haircut, 25 pounds lighter and smiling, his skin looking polished as his people gathered around him wearing their T-shirts and fleece, carrying sand-bucket-size water cups. Eichen and everyone else would be talking about the most important thing there was to talk about just then: what color to paint a piece of plastic railroad track.
In five years Eichen and his small band (27 at last count) have accomplished something noteworthy: they've invented an independent American toy company, establishing a brand that has won toy-industry accolades and is on track to reach $12 million in revenues this year with what Eichen calls "nominal profitability." These days Eichen's daughter, Rachel, is often around the office in the afternoon after she's gone to ride her horse. ("It's quite acceptable at Rokenbok to have your kids there," says Eichen.) His son, Noah, 18, is editing video footage of Toy Fair -- the industry trade show -- for the Rokenbok shareholders meeting. Employees come and go in workout clothes and on bicycles. And though every one of his executives -- Eichen believes -- has been recruited in the past six months by dot-coms and tech companies promising "instant millions," none have left. ("Our executives have chosen quality of life over the seductiveness of instant wealth -- though they wouldn't have done that if they didn't still have faith in our ability to create wealth over time," Eichen says.)
As for Eichen himself, his entire routine has changed. He stays physically active now. He travels infrequently and reluctantly. He works fewer hours and possesses more energy. He spends weekends visiting galleries or rooting for Noah and Rachel at their various sports. Or he reads. Or plays king of the grill. About his commute, he says, "You know, I don't drive that often. I bike. Changes the whole day."
He's in a groove, Eichen is.
And watching him now after knowing how he'd been half a decade before, it is impossible not to wonder, What plan did he follow to reach this place? What tactics did he use?
How did he get here?
And the answer is, he does not know. The answer is, there was no plan. There were no tactics. For all Eichen's grand hope that his experiment would renew his life, it started with no astonishing vision. The modest truth is that when it came to specifics, he set out with only two: he wanted to make a toy, and he wanted not to commute -- two wishes, it turns out, that may have made all the difference. With just those two inclinations about a product and a location in mind, Eichen took the next critical step. He began.
He resigned from Proxima and walked across the street -- "literally across the street," Eichen says. There, he pitched an industrial designer he admired on his idea: high-tech know-how applied to classic toys. Imagine a LEGO-like construction set, he'd said to the designer, with computerized, remote-controlled vehicles. Help me, he'd said.
Eichen raised $330,000 from friends and relatives -- and added $146,000 from his own pocket -- resolving during the planning process not to use more than his own cash if things looked bad. If he couldn't make headway on the little dump trucks and front-end loaders and snap-together buildings and ramps, he'd close the company and give the other money back.
In the summer of 1995 he and his colleagues finally put models of their toys in a room with other toys (from LEGO, Playmobil, and Brio) and stood behind a one-way mirror as pairs of children were invited to play with whatever they wished. Would they even look at the Rokenbok toys? If they didn't, the business was over. But they did. Eichen and his crew had got at least this much right: the stuff they'd made was fun.
Rokenbok's first office was a single room over a travel agency by the beach, two miles south of Encinitas in Cardiff-by-the-Sea. Eichen chose it, he later realized, because it was everything Proxima's location was not. It was close to home instead of hours of traffic away. It felt "real," not sanitized and isolated like the industrial parks where Proxima and so many other tech businesses were set. He could wear old T-shirts and shorts. He could work like hell, then take a nap or a walk, or go around the corner to Pipes and eat breakfast on paper plates with the surfers at first light. "I loved going to Cardiff," Eichen says.
He liked working intensely when he wanted to but having the real world surrounding him when he didn't. And he began to see how a Rokenbok workstyle that evolved "thanks to the happy accident of being in Cardiff" contained a kind of magic. What was at first ad hoc became deliberate -- the casualness, the coming-and-going of Eichen and Rokenbok's creative, itinerant gang, the clarity born of focusing hard on work and life instead of on politics and protocol. And when the kid trials succeeded and the company required bigger, more lasting headquarters, Eichen's first question was, Where do we want to be? And he knew: "Not in an industrial park but in a village. By the beach." Hence, Encinitas, and the rehabbed warehouse a short walk from the sand. Among Rokenbok's sidewalk neighbors are ethnic restaurants and coffee shops, used-book stores and vintage-clothing boutiques, bars, sundries emporiums, and dry cleaners. Ask Rokenbok employees what they think about the office, and one of the first things they'll mention is loving the community around it.
