Inside the Smartest Little Company in America

Tweet

Immersion in the company philosophy begins at every new employee's orientation and persists through every meeting, where decisions are benchmarked against a CHIFF checklist. Employees will assure you that anything leaving Cranium Central -- every game piece, every press kit, even the letterhead -- is CHIFF. At a recent development session for a card pack celebrating New York City, a young man gyrated in the manner of a patron of Studio 54, a woman drew the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade with her eyes closed, and a third employee mixed up the letters of YELLOW CAB so someone else could unscramble them. The first two activities passed muster, but the last one just wasn't CHIFF enough. "There wasn't anything inherently special about a plain yellow taxi," says Alexander.

"What makes this place so different is the attention to detail," says editorial director Fisher. "There's a concern for getting it right all the way down to how flexible the paper is on the drawing pads. You wouldn't believe how many factors we considered just to choose the clay for [children's game] Cadoo. Which felt the nicest? Which smelled good? Which formulation wouldn't stick to kids' clothes?"

Cranium's partners -- from fringe theater groups who write game questions to the company's advertising agency -- have also been indoctrinated, which, Tait says, helps them to focus, prioritize, and identify flaws. When Alexander told a Chinese manufacturing partner about a purple plastic game piece he envisioned putting together with glue, the manufacturer said, "Not CHIFF," and came back with a design for using injection molding that would both make the piece look better and reduce manufacturing steps. "CHIFF," says Tait, "is a way of life."

Winning

Cranium's focus on CHIFF and its reliance on "moments" are helping Tait and Alexander extend the brand. When contemplating Cadoo, a child's version of Cranium, for example, they refused "just to create a junior version of the same thing," says Tait. Instead, Tait and Alexander, both of whom are fathers, recast the Cranium experience through a youthful prism. Cadoo fits in a backpack (although it also has a handle for carrying around), has been reformatted for two players (since kids generally have just one friend over at a time), and encodes answers in a red field that can be penetrated only with special plastic glasses. Originally forecast to sell 12,500 copies, Cadoo won the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio's Best Toy Award in August and was launched in October with orders for 200,000 units.

"If someone had told you that two guys from high tech would use a software-development process to create a hit board game, you would have said they were crazy."

More ambitiously, Tait and Alexander are trying to redefine the act of game play as a daily activity. "Cranium might be played every few weeks," says Tait. "We saw other companies like Starbucks that might touch a consumer one to four times per day." The two wanted to create a game with what Web-site designers call "sticky" features: characteristics that bring customers back often and tempt them to stay. The result was Cosmo, an office game that can be played in just a few minutes by employees needing a break. "This brings the Cranium brand touch to the customer every day," says Tait. Other new products also target the corporate market, including an "icebreaker" for meetings that the partners hope will open a distribution channel through corporate trainers.

With their flagship game gaining popularity, Cranium's founders have begun experimenting with mass-market retailers to increase sales. Their first forays are with the relatively hip Target and with Toys "R" Us. Inexperienced in the ways of such partners, Tait and Alexander hope to learn as much as possible from those two relationships before signing with additional national chains.

But new relationships make it harder to keep older relationships special, and Cranium's founders want Starbucks to stay happy. So rather than waiting for a two-digit anniversary to release a deluxe edition, three-year-old Cranium has already launched one, for Starbucks and Starbucks alone. That not only reinforces the primacy of Starbucks as a partner but also helps keep the product pipeline primed. "We think of distribution like a pyramid," says Tait. "We start at the top with a few stores, and as the distribution gets wider, we feed new products into the top of the pyramid and start all over again. It keeps the brand fresher at all levels."

As Cranium enters more channels and engages the corporate market, Tait jokingly speculates that it could become even more like the Redmond giant. "Will we create 'solution providers' like Microsoft has and establish a cadre of certified Cranium professionals?" he muses, smiling. It may not be as ridiculous as it sounds. After all, "if someone had told you that two guys from high tech would use a software-development process to create a hit board game, you would have said they were crazy. But we've done pretty well.

"Can we do this all over again?" asks Tait. "We have no idea. Call us in 2003 and see if we are really that smart after all."

Julie Bick is the author of several books, including the best-selling All I Really Need to Know in Business I Learned at Microsoft: Inside Strategies to Help You Succeed.

Copyright © 2002 Julie Bick

Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Sales and Marketing Newsletter

Email Address: