“It’s something we really believed in”: JMP Creative’s Jim McCafferty on the origins of Sticki Rolls

Jim, it’s always lovely to chat – we’re here to talk about an invention from JMP that has took off like a rocket, Sticki Rolls. In case anyone hasn’t seen this yet, how would you describe it?
It’s wearable, sharable sticker-play. There are craft activity elements to it and it allows you to share sentiments and fun things with your friends. And that’s actually where the idea stemmed from – the project name was initially: ‘Share the Love.’

Ah! Yes, talk me through how it came together.
We were sitting around saying: “The world is so negative at the moment… Is there some way to share some positivity with your friends, your kids… What could you give them that’s a fun little positive thing?’ It might say: ‘I like you’ or ‘You’re special’. How could we make something that we can wear and share? How could we make a craft activity that also had this unique shareable twist.

It’s a terrific idea and a great product. How did that idea take shape into these bracelets with little sticker rolls?
We tried a lot of things! We had very clunky dispensers and very rough concepts that weren’t practical – as we all do when we start an invention process! But we knew it had to be aesthetically pleasing and that we were limited with materials. We looked at tapes and a lot of different materials to help us with the prototyping process.

So the team just tried a lot of things, but when they hit on the sticker itself becoming a bead, that was a big revelation that was very exciting. We didn’t have the ability to make these beautiful foil custom graphics in the prototype, but we did our best to show a direction of how it could go. And we showed the function of it on the wrist – that you could pull from it, and it would tear off at the spot at each increment one at a time.

We’re big craft activity fans and we were excited because you could put them on anything. The stickers were very symmetrical and it created really cool patterns. And we’ve got to give a lot of credit – more than a lot of credit – to the team at Sky Castle. The collaboration has been amazing and they just ‘got it’.

I’m always curious with smash hits like this – was it very popular during the pitching stage?
We pitched this to a lot of people and a lot of very big companies passed on it. Maybe we didn’t present it in the right light, maybe it was bad timing for some, maybe we showed them something else in the meeting that was more exciting to them… You never know! But Lev Nelson and Josh Loerzel from Sky Castle loved it the moment they saw it. It was love at first sight! They saw it and said: “We want to do it”. They embraced it and they put in the hard work to make it what it is today. I mean, doing 1,000 stickers in series one! I don’t know if another company wouldn’t put that kind of work into this. It’s been a fantastic collaboration.

And this product has been one of our favourites. It’s something we really believed in and it was so exciting when it resonated with the Sky Castle team. They’ve done a wonderful job with it. And they’ve been very strategic in how they’ve built their partnerships and distribution channels with people on this. I’m excited about all the great people that are involved with this product. Jazwares, Character, UCC. These are wonderful strategic partnerships. We’re lucky to have them as team-mates helping to make this product what it needs to be. It’s exciting to see that flexibility and creativity in business as well as in the product.

And it’s been such a success and has played a role in creating an important moment for Sky Castle. That must be a lovely thing to play a part in.
It is. I really enjoy working with small to midsize companies because there is a significant passion there. That said, you always need a champion, whether it’s a small company or a big company. It just happened to be that the champions at Sky Castle were the guys who founded the company. That helped quite a bit! But they’ve put so much time and effort into it – it’s been a well-earned success on their part. We’ve been delighted at every step of the progress.

Did you have a gut feel that Sticki Rolls could take off in the way it has?
We always loved this product. We thought it was perfect – and it was something that was very cost effective. It’s a good price point. That said, the feedback from a lot of companies was: “Well, maybe it’s not big enough. How can we make it into something more?” That was the great thing about Sky Castle – they were very open to explore that differently than most.

So we always thought it would be very well received – and as inventors, you always hope you’ve created something wonderful that will be enjoyed… The challenge for inventors is that once you finally get something great, there’s a lot of people that go: “Hmm, that’s interesting – let’s do something very similar!” As inventors, you hope you get an opportunity to enjoy the success with your partners. Some companies promote that they are creative, but unfortunately they do a lot of parallel design. They seem to think this is a good idea until there is a legal issue or someone copies one of their products.

Yes, I imagine that’s frustrating.
It amazes me because there’s such a wonderful inventor community out there. Why not collaborate with these talented people to create something new and exciting instead of being a “copycat” company. It only devalues your brand.

Absolutely – you’d hope a lesson to learn from Sticki Rolls’ success is to work with inventors. Now, delving into the development process behind turning the concept into a fully-fledged range – what were some key decisions that shaped the line?
It was fun to share ideas back and forth – and lots of those will come out as time goes on! We’re already working far ahead on a lot of fun ideas. We would send sketches over and it was a nice back and forth. We’d talk about can a kid pull a sticker off after they put it in their Sticki book – is that important or not important? How sticky is it? There were a lot of details that Sky Castle took really seriously – and those are the things that sometimes get forgotten about… But these extra little details really make a difference. Lev lived in the factories for a significant amount of time. Finding those partnerships to make sure that these details were paid attention to was key – because glue is a very interesting material to work with.

Then there were discussions around the look and feel of the brand – it’s very contemporary, has a hip coolness to it, but is very friendly. And that’s not done by accident.

Absolutely. And it’s such a smart touch for the pages in the Sticki Book to be stickers themselves. So if you put a sticker in it, you still have the option to take it out and use it as a sticker again.
Absolutely – and it helps the trading aspect too. Kids may never collect all 1,000 stickers – I mean, maybe some will, but some won’t – but they can own an entire category… They might collect all the BFFs, or the Pets, or the Creepies. I love this grouping of cute sayings or themes. By clustering them in groups, it made collecting very achievable – and now it’s great for trading.

Absolutely. At what point did you know that Sticki Rolls was resonating with people?
Well, we started to get some good feedback during the shows – Sky Castle had the little secret room and were bringing in the right people to see it. There was significant enthusiasm. Then we did VidCon and there was an incredible reaction and excitement around the brand. Once it was online, I can’t remember how many hundreds of millions of views we had very quickly – but it was significant. Getting the data around how engaged and enthused people were about the product – when it wasn’t even available yet… That started getting us kind of giggly and excited.

That said, you always try to temper that until you actually know. It’s better to just feel ‘Hey, you know, it’s got a good chance!’ We didn’t want to jinx it, but we were getting excited at that point. Since then, it’s continued to progress and we’re really excited about it. It’s a very fun, cool product that we are proud to be a part of it.

When you have a success story like this, does it shape what you look to create next in any way?
We try not to overlap. Obviously, we don’t want to compete with ourselves. Instead, we try to think about other ways for us to create a platform for something that is extendable. We try to learn from every product that we do. We look at things that we were surprised about and also thoughts of ours that were confirmed.

And when we are pitching other concepts to toy companies, we do want to stress that something has qualities of something else that we may have done that’s been successful. You know, ‘Here’s a learning from this product that we’ve put into this…’ or ‘This has some of the same strategic thinking as this product.’

We also highlight how a product is TikTok-able, YouTube-able or Instagram-able. We showcase the ways you can hack it, have fun with it and engage with it in a different way beyond ‘Here’s my product and here’s what it does’. That’s not the way to do it anymore. You have to show how consumers can engage in that product in a very personal way. That’s something we’ve learned over the years. And we’ve learned a lot from Sticki Rolls because it was a viral hit prior to it even existing on the shelf.

We sometimes get asked in meetings now: ‘Can you give us the next Sticki Rolls?’ I laugh because, for a couple of companies that have asked me that, I did show you Sticki Rolls!

Ha!
And it’s okay because we have the perfect partner. The stars aligned the way they needed to for this product. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Sticking with pitching for a moment, what makes someone great at the role of inventor relations?
I think the IR person needs to be very creative. I feel like too many times toy companies see that role as being fit for an administrative person. Order-takers that simply go out to fill their slots or orders requested by their team. The reality is that they need to be good creatively to see how something can be positioned or applied – and sometimes give that feedback to the inventor. Then they must also be great salespeople because they have to sell our concepts within their organisation. We’ve met with many, many IR people and brand managers and the best ones share great insights and give us access to their team members.

What is the value in having that kind of access?
Well, we’ve got guys here with 20 or 30 years’ experience in the toy business. We have more experience sometimes than the inventor relations person! Having those unique expertise means we can be of value. We can share insights that can prove yourself to IR execs when they share concepts with the internal teams.

We also have specialised skillsets that can be useful to internal teams when it comes to solving problems around our concepts. We’ve done so many craft activity items and we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work. Those skills and experiences are valuable, and each inventor group or individual has unique expertise. So having access and that level of collaboration can be key. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Some companies get it, other see as more like TikTok and that’s a scary thing. We focus on companies that truly collaborate.

What is it about how JMP operates that’s ensured you’ve been top of your game for so long?
Well, the industry has changed a little over the years. I don’t want to say ‘this is the hardest time ever’ because I’m sure every era of inventors says: ‘This is the hardest time ever.’ But I do think the process has changed… There’s been a lot of standardisation within our industry that I think hasn’t always been for the best. The portals might be turning us into just entertaining TikTok-style content creators – and I don’t like to blindly submit. We spend a lot of money on a pitch, and we’d like the courtesy of interacting with the company and their teams to learn and get a better idea of how we might present or not present – or how we might alter a product.

The key, for us, is listening and really figuring out why they do or do not like a concept. And these discussions are a great opportunity to collaborate and to make the product different and better. We always push for that because we feel it’s important to be very closely connected with the companies. We’re lucky enough to have many great relationships that operate in this way.

Whereas, if you’re only engaging with inventors’ concepts through a “Minimal Contact Portal”, it’s like a bad smorgasbord. They’ll start at the salad bar and go down through all this wonderful stuff, but by the time you’ve seen a thousand people’s submissions…you can lose that great sense of flavor. You can imagine what that must be like. You really want to establish an intimate relationship if you can, and that’s been the difference for us. We’ve pushed hard for that.

The other thing is that we’re flexible. We scale up and down like a movie studio. Today, you must be smart in how you run the business because they’ve tried to standardise options and advances. I think that’s a mistake. I don’t think it’s reasonable that a rubber band, tape and a piece of string gets the same advance as something crafted in 3D that the guys have spent three months finessing. So there’s challenges, but I feel like if you push back with respect and explain how you want to engage with companies, then inventors can do better – and do well – in this different world that we’re working in. Look at the movie business and the music business – the business models are changing. The same is true here. We’re flexible and we are having to reinvent how we invent.

Before we wrap up, we’ve been talking about one of your recent success stories, but is there a past JMP product that you feel is ready for a new audience to discover? We can give it some love here!
Another one of my favourite inventions from our team is the pre-school game Catch the Fox. It’s been a staple on the market for many years, developed in collaboration with our friends at Goliath. The inspiration for this game actually comes from my earlier career as a comedy magician, where surprising an audience was key.

The game is simple yet very engaging: players place chickens into the fox’s pockets and press the trigger. At just the right – and unpredictable – moment, the fox’s pants vanish to reveal hilarious cartoon shorts, and the chickens go flying everywhere. What makes it magical is the speed of the action… It happens so fast that even when you’re expecting it, it still surprises you! It’s that blend of humour and surprise that keeps kids – and adults! – laughing.

I feel like Catch the Fox Game has all the ingredients to become a trending hit again – fun play, a bit of mischief, and a lot of laughter!

Great pick. Jim, this has been a pleasure! Big congrats again on Sticki Rolls – let’s catch up again soon.

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