A Market Worth Fighting For

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Another key extension was Toy Wishes, a semiannual toy-buying guide, aimed at holiday shoppers, that has become something of a bible to the toy industry. The magazine is sold to consumers on the newsstand, but much of its circulation of 400,000 comes through Toys "R" Us, which distributes copies to shoppers. Every fall Shamus holds a major press event and trade show in New York City to announce the magazine's Holiday Hot Dozen toys list, as compiled by his editors. Every year, he gets the CEOs and top executives of all the major toy companies, along with representatives of major press outlets, to attend. They have little choice: In addition to nearly half a million shoppers, his list is picked up every year by about 100 TV shows, over 500 newspapers, and all of the wire services. "Probably 80 to 90 percent of the press you see over the holidays on what toys are hot originates with us," says Shamus.

The One That Got Away

In many ways, despite the dramatic growth, little has changed at Wizard Entertainment Group. Shamus still owns the company debt-free and with no outside investors (his brothers have small stakes). Not only hasn't he sought investors for Wizard, he's even turned them away, including Bernie Tenenbaum, a former associate director of the Wharton School's entrepreneurship center and a former toy-industry exec now associated with a venture capital firm. "I bet on jockeys, not horses," says Tenenbaum, "and I saw the potential in Gareb and tried to invest money with him, but he has kept it private."

And even as they've matured, Shamus and his staff have continued to enjoy their childhood pursuits. Shamus's office is in midtown Manhattan with his advertising sales staff, but the heart of Wizard's operations is the 35,000-square-foot facility he owns in Congers, New York, north of the city, where Pierce and most of the company's 80 employees are based. Most of the offices there are stuffed with toys, posters, comic art, and games. Pat McCallum, the editor in chief overseeing all Wizard publishing, has a giant TV in his office wired for the video games that he often plays with other employees. When boxes of new product arrive, which happens constantly, employees stop what they are doing, rip them open, and check out the newest toys or books, even sitting down and playing games for an hour or two in the middle of the day--behavior Shamus and Pierce encourage. "It was very important to me to build the kind of company that I would want to work for," says Shamus. "We have a product that is fun, we write about a lot of fun things, and if the people internally are not having fun at what they do, it will come across. At the end of the day, the magazines have to get out, but we have a lot of fun doing it."

Pierce's job continues to be to keep things running smoothly so Shamus can search for the next big thing. "Gareb has hundreds of ideas," says Pierce. "One day our CFO said to him, 'Gareb, you have a lot of good ideas, but they're not all good. So let's pick two a year that we are going to go after.' " That's what they do now.

In the early '90s, shamus passed on an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the Pokémon craze because he didn't want to put his cash-cow magazines at risk.

Back in the early '90s, the idea Shamus really wanted to pursue was Pokémon. "When Pokémon came to the U.S.," he says, "I knew clear as day it was going to be huge. It had all the attributes of something that could be successful here, and it was already a monster hit in Japan. It had the breadth and depth of a property that was already a proven success, yet you could ask a hundred people here in the U.S. and a hundred had never heard of it." Shamus had the opportunity to get in on the ground floor by manufacturing licensed products for the mass market retail industry--Wal-Mart, Toys "R" Us--but back then he had fewer resources. "It was much larger than anything we had done," he says. "At the time I just had the three magazines and didn't have the conventions and the leverage and connections I have now. It was going to take a lot of dollars, and it would have risked a lot of what we do. It wasn't worth risking everything, but I knew the reward would be there." Ultimately, he decided to pass.

Like Pokémon, mixed martial arts fighting is hugely popular in Japan, where enormous arenas routinely sell out. Once again, Shamus feels he is ahead of the pop culture curve with a proven product that has great potential, and this time he is not going to let the opportunity pass.

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