Kidrobot’s Secret

Behance sat down with Kidrobot founder Paul Budnitz to figure out how he turned a tiny niche business into a success. How did a small shop selling limited edition, expensive vinyl toys to adults become a worldwide phenomenon? Some of his methods are surprising:

• Trust your feelings. He loves what he does, and he uses it as an indicator of if the company is doing the right thing:

“I love what I do and the things I make. So if the things we make start sucking, or even if our office gets too messy, I get really upset. It’s sort of a self-regulating system. Like breathing and eating.”

• Delegate as much work as possible:

“Personally, I do everything I can to give away as much work as I can to someone else. If I don’t have anything to do, and everything seems to get done anyway, then I know I’m being effective…I see my role as guiding collaboration. It’s up to me to know what’s good, what isn’t, and who to ask to work on what.”

• Make customers jump through hoops to get your products -make it hard to get:

“I decided to take the opposite marketing approach from most other successful companies. Generally, in order to buy something that you really, really want from Kidrobot, we make you jump through a very high hoop. For example, we’ve forced people to take a picture of themselves holding their favorite junk food in a convenience store, and send that in to Kidrobot, and if the photo was good enough, we’d let that customer buy a toy. We’ve also had toys that were only sold in a Dim Sum parlor on the Lower East Side, or in a Laundromat in Seoul, Korea. Rather miraculously, this suicidal marketing strategy has served us well, as we’re still in business.”

Behance Magazine: “Paul Budnitz of Kidrobot – Concept becomes Culture”