Budnitz has always known how to craft an image. Rather than advertise, he guerrilla marketed. Kidrobot managed to seem exclusive while being inclusive—by staging the retail stores (there are now five) as museum shops but staffing them with attractive, friendly people, by putting on exhibits to display certain toy series, and by exciting a universe of buyers who happened to be exactly the people who jumped early at blogging, social networking, and photo and video sharing.
Kidrobot also piggybacked on the street cred and marketing clout of larger brands through targeted collaborations. In some cases, the company would design Kidrobot limited editions, as in the case of a line of snowboard gear for Burton, or a one-off car for Volkswagen, but more often designers would lend their names and talents to vinyl toys. Marc Jacobs, Dries Van Noten, Pucci, Hermès, Louis Vuitton—they all provided twists on Kidrobot toys, which lent credibility to both brands and provided each name with the opportunity to cross promote to a new audience.
All of these efforts combined to entrench Kidrobot in a community of aesthete retailers who can operate in the very upper echelons of exclusivity, as well as down amongst the common folk in the bargain bin, without the brand's reputation suffering. It's clever stuff—and nobody does it better than Nike, which sells extremely limited quantities of collectible Air Jordans at specialty boutiques that require you to buzz for entry, as well as millions of $29 high-tops at Foot Locker. Budnitz says that most of his inspiration comes from smaller companies like Supreme skateboards and Oliver Spencer clothing, which make sought-after, quality products that are "not out-of-reach expensive." Nike, however, he says, "is the object lesson in a giant company pulling this off. Nike makes great products for the niche market. And that trickles down to Kmart two years later."
There Is No Such Thing as Too Specific an Idea
During this particularly fecund, halcyon period of his life, Budnitz has started so many different companies that he forgets about some of them, and they slip out into conversation only when something reminds him of one. For instance, we were eating sushi below the Kidrobot offices when he happened to mention that he started and still owns one-third of the most successful nonmusic ringtone company in the iTunes store.
He was attempting to explain why he would have the nerve to start a bike company, having absolutely no history in bicycles. "I have a lot of ideas, and I just pursue a bunch of them, and they don't always work out," he said. And then he launched into a story.
Budnitz was an early buyer of the iPhone, as you would expect, and being the kind of person who would want his phone to ring in a peculiar manner, he was frustrated that it came "with, like, eight ringtones." And when he looked to buy more, the only option (then) was to turn a song from iTunes into a tone for a dollar. "I wanted beautiful sounds or funny sounds," he explained. "The only way I could figure out how to do it was to put out an album and then buy my own album." So he went into a friend's music studio, "made an album of all these pretty little tones, put it up [on the iTunes store], and they started selling a little bit." Then he realized: "I could make some money off this."
Being a hacker, Budnitz manipulated the site's search engine and ensured that his albums ranked at the top. This not-at-all-thought-out company he had started on a whim quickly began "making tens of thousands of dollars. It was awesome. I put a few more albums out, and I was doing pretty well, and then I got busy." He offered to cut in two friends who lived in Montana and had a band. They would keep making albums of tones, some based on his ideas, and the three would split the money. Today, he has little involvement, other than to occasionally suggest a theme—sex sounds, barnyard sounds, barnyard-sex sounds—and the company is humming along, adding cash to his bank account while also allowing his friends the financial freedom to play in a band.
Another thing that irked him about his new device was that it required so many steps to call his wife. The truth is, it doesn't require that many steps, and to complain that it takes three taps of the screen on your pocket computer is the very definition of a Privileged Person's Problem, but that doesn't matter; Budnitz is a cool geek, and he knows what cool geeks want. And it was an easy problem to fix. He hired a guy in India to design a one-click app called Call Home. It was simply a button that said, in a bold sans serif font, Call Home, and it cost 99 cents. He added Mail Myself, SMS Home, and more than 80 others: Call Your Mother, Call Your Brother, Call 411. And this simple idea worked. "I sold I don't know how many thousands of dollars' worth of those apps," Budnitz said. "They just sort of sell."
The idea, in these cases, seems to be: Get it started, provide direction, tweak the styling, let it run itself. (His latest tweak is: Spend other people's money to do it.) "All these little things add up to making a pretty good living and also having a lot of fun," Budnitz says. "And the secret is, if you hold on to one thing really tightly, then you don't get to do the other stuff. Everything's a big art project."
