Debbie Sterling: Price Isn’t Everything

So GoldieBlox is flying high and every retailer wants to carry it. I mean, the brand is so hot. And sure enough, Walmart calls and Walmart is begging for GoldieBlox. I mean, imagine being in a situation where Walmart is begging for your product. And so in order to sell at Walmart, we were told by, you know, a lot of the toy industry veterans that you have to have products at 999, you have to have low price point products. That's what sells at Walmart. And so our whole focus for the year was, okay, we're going to go big. GoldieBlox is going to hit the mainstream and everybody drop everything. Let's figure out how to make toys that are 10 bucks and make a lot of them, because we have to have a lot of products to fill up a lot of room. So we had a really small team, still about 15 people, and we are just bending over backwards under insane timelines. And all we're thinking about is hitting that 999 price point and hitting the shelf date on time. What ended up happening was we worked as hard and as fast as we could. We went from six products to 18 products in less than a year, getting out as many products as we could at the cheapest prices that we could. And as a result, those cheap products very quickly went on clearance. We had kind of forgotten the most important thing, which is if GoldieBlox is going to be successful, we have to design for the girls every product. It doesn't matter how much it costs. If it's not a product that excites and gets every girl interested in wanting to build more and more, we failed.