Interview: Adfuncture’s Eddi Yip & Designer Toys

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May 30, 2005

When Eddi Yip moved back to Shanghai a few years ago from Torronto to work in his family business, he decided to continue pursuing the interest he had developed in Designer Toys as a side project. Slowly, he begun to collaborate with artist and designers and build strong relationships with a network of Chinese factories.

Today, Designer Toys are a boom – bought by a growing number of adults weened decades earlier on the original Star Wars toys. The Designer Toys made by Eddi’s company, Adfunture, are sold in global hotspots including Paris, London and Tokyo. Distribution is growing as collectors open their own boutiques in new cities and in the longer term, Eddi Yip believes the trend will influence the mainstream.

Last week IF attended a salon hosted by Wooster Collective. The event was rammed as lots of young NYC hipsters who, like us, wanted to listen to a live interview with Eddi Yip. “The Designer Toy is where art and commerce has come together,” he started. Many of the items sold through stores like New York’s Kid Robot display a Hip-Hop/Street Style mentality.

Eddi believes that for the mainstream to truly pick up the product, Designer Toy makers need to overcome three serious issues: safety, quality and quantity. As the products are often produced in runs of 2,000 or less and sold to an adult audience, they ‘toys’ are actually used as figurines for display – rather than a childish romp behind the sofa to explore a new mysterious world with plastic figures in hand. As such, they don’t adhere to the quality controls regions like the EU require. Chinese factories, also, tend to expect a minimum run of 200,000.

Eddi Yip is a dream maker for many young artists: He brings his skills, talent and network to bare, to develop Adfunture collaborations Despite the low run, Eddi can get a toy proto-typed in 2 to 4 weeks and then produced in 2 to 4 months – with an investment.

The other service Eddi provides is a solution for (or at least a weapon against) counterfeiting. In a country renowned for its factory based reproduction skills, Eddi is keen to ensure that he minimizes any opportunity for the counterfeiters. He gets the mold made in one company, and then each piece of the Designer Toy made at separate factories – that way, no one factory has a complete set. The he and his team pack the toys in boxes that are made in their office. This way, if he sees an Adfunture product for sale in a store anywhere in the world, he can tell it’s genuine if it’s sold in its box.

Eddi has recently been expanding and offering opportunities for brands to develop their own toys. Comme De Garcon developed a range and he’s looking for more to feed the demand.

Where is the market going? Eddi told the Wooster Collective salon audience that on a creative level he was hoping to see more projects where you would get surprises in the box – you wouldn’t quite know what you were getting until you opened the box (a tradition in Asian toy making). In regards to an industry trend, Eddi said, “More designers catching on, more choices, better accepted, more collectors catching on, more art collectors catching on, and, of course, Designer Toys catching on in the mainstream.”

How could your brand get involved in Designer Toys? Could you do a range, a collboaration? Could you sponsor a young artist to realise his or her dreams? Contact Eddi and he’ll help you out.

Eddi Yip is Creative Director of AdFunture – eddi@adfuntureworkshop.com

Designer Toy References
www.kidrobot.com
www.critterbox.com
www.dalexart.com
www.scarygirl.com
www.tado.co.uk
www.visionaireworld.com
www.monsterism.com