#283: 3 Costly Mistakes That Toy Creators Make with Factories
I’ll never forget the time I asked a factory to “just move the pen and scissors down a little” on a packaging layout. What came back? A sample where the entire arrangement was totally rearranged and the design I’d worked so hard on was completely off.
Communicating with factories is one of the most exciting parts of the toy-making journey, but one vague email can lead to total toy-making mayhem.
If you’re not specific, clear, and intentional with your feedback, even tiny comments can snowball into major delays, color mismatches, or products that completely miss the mark.
In this episode of Making It in the Toy Industry, I’m breaking down the three most common mistakes new toy makers make when working with overseas factories and how to avoid them with confidence.
Inside this episode, you’ll learn:
Why vague feedback like “a little shorter” can lead to big problems (and what to say instead).
The reason Pantone colors are your best friend in product development.
How rushing to approve samples from photos or video can completely backfire.
What a pre-production sample is and why it’s absolutely essential.
If you’ve ever felt unsure about what to say to a factory, how to give feedback, or when to say “go,” this episode is your crash course in clear communication and smart production practices. It’s packed with tips that will save you serious time (and money) as you scale your toy business.
Listen For These Important Moments
[00:01:05] - How using Pantone colors protects you from costly color mismatches and miscommunication with your factory.
[00:09:52] - Discover why vague comments lead to bad samples and how to give clear, factory-friendly directions that save time and money.
[00:14:37] - Hear my story of how one vague request wrecked an entire product layout and how you can avoid the same frustrating (and expensive) result.
[00:16:55] - Find out why approving samples from photos or videos is a huge risk and what has to happen before you say “go” to production.
[00:21:10] - Learn how hands-on sample reviews reveal hidden issues with materials, weight, or function and how this one step can prevent bad reviews, safety issues, and recalls.
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This episode is brought to you by www.thetoycoach.com
Ready to work with Azhelle? JoinToy Creators Academy.
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[00:00:00] Azhelle Wade: You are listening to Making It in The Toy Industry, episode number 283.
[00:00:10] Azhelle Wade: Welcome to Making It in The Toy Industry, a podcast for inventors, entrepreneurs, and makers like you. And now your host. Azhelle Wade. Hey there, toy people. Azhelle Wade here and welcome back to another episode of Making It In The Toy Industry. This is a weekly podcast brought to you by thetoycoach.com. For today's episode, we'll focus on three main mistakes that most new toy people make the first time that they work with a factory.
[00:00:43] Azhelle Wade: By the end of this episode, you will walk away with the knowledge on how to avoid these mistakes, knowledge that will make your communications easier, save you money and sample making, and help you show up like a pro. So let's not waste any more time and dive right in. So mistake number one today is going to be.
[00:01:05] Azhelle Wade: Not using Pantone colors. We've gotta start this conversation with a lesson on the importance of utilizing Pantone colors when communicating with an overseas factory. The importance of having a Pantone booklet by your side has grown exponentially in the past year since we're spending more and more time working with one another virtually.
[00:01:31] Azhelle Wade: Globally, Pantone colors aren't only for communicating with your factories, but they're also a must when communicating with freelance designers that aren't with you in person. But you may be wondering right now. What in the world is a Pantone and why on Earth is Azhelle so excited about it? Well, Pantone is the worldwide standard for choosing and matching colors, and it's used across many industries, fashion, home, and of course.
[00:02:03] Azhelle Wade: The toy industry. Now, a Pantone book can include over 2000 colors, all named with Pantone or pan, followed by a series of three to four numbers and ending with a letter either C to represent coded U to represent. Uncoated or M to represent Matt, and all of those end letters represent finishes of those colors.
[00:02:31] Azhelle Wade: So coated could be glossy and uncoated is not glossy, and Matt is even more un glossy, I guess. Uncoated is a little bit like Satin and Matt is completely uncoated, like someone just printed on a piece of plain printer paper. That's kind of what matte Pantone looks like. Now an example of a Pantone color that you might find in the Pantone book is Pantone 1 1 4 C, which that color, that code actually represents a bright, sunny, yellow color that reminds me of a favorite dress I had while growing up, and I have forever been trying to replace in my adulthood.
[00:03:13] Azhelle Wade: Now, if I wanted to create a toy doll wearing an outfit of that same yellow color. I would tell a factory or even a freelancer that I'm working with, make that dress Pantone 1 1 4 C or Pan 1 1 4 C. And the factory or designer that I'm communicating with would know exactly what that means because they would cross reference, check it with their own Pantone book.
[00:03:44] Azhelle Wade: Now Pantone sells Pantone paper fan books. They sell Pantone paper, swatch books. There are cotton swatch cards and Pantone chips. All of these different things that you can buy for all of your color matching needs. Now, the cotton swatch cards are actually designed for textiles. So in the example I'm giving of a dress, if it's a fabric dress, you might use the actual cotton swatch cards to choose a Pantone color.
[00:04:13] Azhelle Wade: The Pantone swatch books can be used for plastic matching and textile matching. Honestly, sometimes in the toy industry, we don't use the exact right book that you're supposed to use for textiles, so we might just use a regular Pantone book for everything but the Pantone plastic chips, now that's something different, and those are little plastic chips that are colored the different Pantone colors, and I'm telling you.
[00:04:42] Azhelle Wade: Those are the gold standard for plastic matching in the toy industry. In all of my jobs that I've had, those chips were treated like they were just heavenly gold because they are extremely expensive to purchase, so no one ever wants to lose them or misplaced them, and they are the best way to make sure you know exactly what color a plastic piece is going to come back as from a factory.
[00:05:09] Azhelle Wade: Now, aside from the materials and formats that you can get Pantone books in, there are actually also different color categories as well. I know it's a lot, but there are metallic Pantone books. There are pastel Pantone books, there are neon Pantone books, and there's. Even as I said before, Pantone books that are designed for textiles with a completely different letters other than PAN or Pantone.
[00:05:41] Azhelle Wade: But we're not gonna get into that in this episode. Like I said, the toy industry usually just uses pant tones for everything, and that means there are some slight variations in the color when you get it back, but it works pretty well. So we're gonna stick talking Pantone for this episode. Now a little known fact.
[00:06:03] Azhelle Wade: Pantone books actually wear and lose color over time. So if you are working with a factory who hasn't replaced their Pantone books in some time, or if they're working in a poorly lit space, they could very well misinterpret the Pantone colors that you give to them, and you could get back a sample that doesn't look quite like the color that you chose.
[00:06:31] Azhelle Wade: But that is where the importance of pre-production sample approvals comes in. But I'm getting ahead of myself. That is one of the mistakes we will cover today. So we will get to that a bit later. My friends. Now some Pantone books also include CMYK values of each of the colors, right next to the Pantone color.
[00:06:54] Azhelle Wade: And CMYK is an acronym for Cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and it represents printer color values. So having the CMYK color equivalence, when you're designing something and you're choosing a specific Pantone color can come in really handy. When, let's say you want to match the skirt of a doll's dress to a color that's going to be printed on the packaging.
[00:07:21] Azhelle Wade: Having the CMYK values of that Pantone color allows you to create that digital equivalent really quickly without too much guesswork. The CMYK values built into the Pantone book can help you get that headstart on that matching process. And the longer you work in the toy industry and you continue to work with Pantone colors and CMYK values, you'll likely start to gain familiarity.
[00:07:52] Azhelle Wade: With these colors and values, and you could even get to the point where if someone says they want a fire engine red, your mind automatically thinks 180 5 C. Or you could see a blue graphic and say that. Just looks like there is just 10% too much yellow in it. I'm serious. I know it sounds crazy and you think I could never, I'm not that visual, but it happens.
[00:08:22] Azhelle Wade: It's really cool. It's like developing a superpower. If you work with Pantone colors and CMYK values enough, this will happen to you. Now talking so much about Pantone colors and CMYK values actually reminds me of a fun story. One time I was at a job interview where the owner of the company pointed at a bright orange wall they'd actually painted in their office, and the orange was the company's brand color.
[00:08:54] Azhelle Wade: So that's why it was filling this wall. And the owner asked me in my interview as part of my interview, questioning to name the CMYK values of that wall. And that was the scariest moment in my life. If you're wondering, I did not get it right, but scariest moment of my life. Most absurd question. If you're interviewing for any job out there and you're a designer, toy designer or not, do not expect to be asked that question.
[00:09:24] Azhelle Wade: It was a bizarre experience and I don't believe my wrong answer was held against me because I did still get the internship. It was an internship at the time. Now let's get into mistake number two when it comes to mistakes that most toy people make when working with factories. And that mistake is using non-specific language when requesting changes in product samples.
[00:09:52] Azhelle Wade: Now when you're developing a product with an overseas factory, getting back that first sample of your idea is really exciting. At first, like when you first see it, you first see this idea that you had in your head come to life in full 3D tangible form, you can't help. But get excited and think, oh, it's perfect.
[00:10:14] Azhelle Wade: I'm a genius. It's done. It's gonna sell millions. But once that initial excitement and a euphoria wears off, you are bound to see the flaws and you'll start analyzing your product and noticing mistakes. In the samples. You might notice things like. Parting lines in the plastic where they shouldn't be, or embossed text that's too small to read.
[00:10:42] Azhelle Wade: Or you might notice a paint color that's too dark, a little bit darker than it's supposed to be, and I just want you guys to know that seeing those small problems with your initial samples is 100% okay. It's okay to request changes to them. Changes are expected from the factory. Honestly, you'd be foolish to approve the first or even second sample that you receive, but when you are working with a factory.
[00:11:12] Azhelle Wade: You might find yourself in a situation where you're getting back samples and you're rushing to give responses, and you might ask for your changes in nonspecific language. So you might say something like, make that embossed text just a little bit larger. Or you might type an email that says, make the color a little bit brighter.
[00:11:40] Azhelle Wade: Or you might say something if you're talking about a doll, make the hair just a little bit shorter. But all of that non-specific language is absolutely no good when working with a factory overseas. The factory that you're working with. Typically is going to want to keep you happy, right? So they're gonna say, yes, no problem to all of the requests that you send in, but in reality, they can't actually read your mind and.
[00:12:14] Azhelle Wade: They don't know what's going on in your head. They don't have your eye that you have for this product. So while it's natural for you to start to feel like they're a partner in your business, like they really are a partner in your product, just because they produced a first sample, you have to understand that they really aren't, they don't really know what you want.
[00:12:38] Azhelle Wade: They don't really know what's best for your product. They aren't you. They don't have your eye and they don't know what you want, so you've got to be specific in all of your change requests as reviewing samples, you've got to use measurements. Preferably centimeters. Whenever you're talking about changing sizing, you've got to use Pantone colors.
[00:13:04] Azhelle Wade: If you are talking about changing colors, even if you feel like the change is so subtle, they could just add a little pink or make it a little bit brighter and be done with it. No, you've got to pick a new Pantone color. And if you want a piece of plastic to potentially be more or less flexible, you've got to explain what you want that piece to be flexible enough to achieve.
[00:13:33] Azhelle Wade: So that might mean making an illustration, showing a doll or a fidget toy, bending a certain way, even if it's a faked Photoshop illustration. You wanna show what your end goal is so they can come up. With a solution to meet that end goal for you. Now, there was a time in my toy career when I was working on a stationary set, and that set was just filled with over a dozen separate little decorative pieces, so you could create a journal and decorated and put pictures of yourself in it and all of those pieces.
[00:14:14] Azhelle Wade: Were really strategically organized under a blister, which is the clear part of a packaging that kind of goes over, uh, your product to hold it in place. So all of the product was organized underneath this blister so that all of it could be showcased and look beautiful and the product window and show high value, but.
[00:14:37] Azhelle Wade: After receiving sample after sample and after I was running out of time and be, I became so overworked with several projects, I gave an email comment back to a factory saying something to the effect of, just move the pen and scissors down a little bit, please. They're overlapping. And when the next sample came back, they were moved way too far down and they actually misplaced all of the other pieces that had previously been below it.
[00:15:18] Azhelle Wade: So the entire layout of the product completely changed when all I wanted was really, I think it was like a half an inch move of one or two pieces. Now, needless to say, that sample created on that. Non-specific comment that I gave was a waste, and I had to go back to the previous sample and give more specific comments with specific measurements and specific instructions on how and where to move each piece.
[00:15:51] Azhelle Wade: Sometimes it helps to throw in the why, but in this particular situation it was more about how, where, what measurement. Where did things need to be? And I needed to be super clear on that. My lesson was learned on that day, years, and years ago, and I hope with this story and this advice from this episode that you can avoid needing to learn that lesson the hard way entirely, and that you can just learn from what I'm teaching you today.
[00:16:25] Azhelle Wade: Never give a factory an unspecific comment in regards to reviewing a sample. Now, the third mistake that I want to cover today, the third biggest mistake I see new toy people making with factories is not reviewing a pre-production sample after any change, before approving an item for production. Now, I have to be honest with you here.
[00:16:55] Azhelle Wade: There are times when toy companies will rush and do this and trust their factory partner to approve a small change that shouldn't affect the item greatly, but. Half the time when that happens, the toy company ends up making an adjustment to the produced items to either fix the packaging or change something that was missed because a pre-production sample was never prepared.
[00:17:29] Azhelle Wade: Now, the product development process is very time consuming and expensive. Typically, it takes about a year. To develop a new item, six months if you're gonna rush it. And the absolute biggest mistake that you can make in the entire process is rushing the approval. Approving an item for production when you haven't actually seen the pre-production of the item in your hands is a really risky move.
[00:18:01] Azhelle Wade: Pre-production samples should be the closest to the real material that your product will be made of. Sometimes you won't be able to get exactly the same material before going to production, but you should get as close as possible and you can always get reference samples for the correct material from another toy.
[00:18:22] Azhelle Wade: Now, when you start working with a factory and you start making change after change on your items. They might start sending you pictures or video of your product and request your approval based on the pictures and the video, but I really have to. Encourage you to not approve anything via video or picture.
[00:18:49] Azhelle Wade: If you can avoid it in any way, you are almost guaranteed to miss something, and when you miss it, you will have to fix it in production and it will cost you so much more. In my toy career, I have distinct early memories of reviewing photos of products and videos of products that I was working on and thinking, oh, this looks perfect.
[00:19:18] Azhelle Wade: We should go right to production. But luckily, I had a mentor who would just insist much like I'm telling you right now, that I wait for the sample to come in before I make any comments at all. And 10 times out of 10, getting that sample would reveal something that you just simply could not evaluate by looking at images and video.
[00:19:47] Azhelle Wade: And sometimes that thing is just the feel of the product. Sometimes it's the finish of the material. If it's a harder material, sometimes it's the weight. Sometimes the weight of a product could be. Cost prohibitive, and you might not realize that by looking at pictures and videos. Other times, it's actually a problem with the function.
[00:20:13] Azhelle Wade: You may believe that your product will work because the factory created it, and it looks just like your drawings or your 3D models. But when you get that sample in your hand and when you attempt to play with it, you might discover flaws in your own design. Yeah, you might find that your initial design itself was flawed.
[00:20:40] Azhelle Wade: Now, another benefit that I've experienced when evaluating a sample in person is that I often can identify areas where we need to cost, reduce the sample. The process of developing your sample with your factory, learning about their processes, explaining your product time and time again, that process actually helps you see your product from a brand new perspective and every sample that you get in your hands.
[00:21:10] Azhelle Wade: You'll start problem solving them. You might notice features or details that could be removed from your toy product that would not affect the overall play pattern, but would reduce the overall cost. You should make sure to build into your product development process. Time to review pre-production samples.
[00:21:35] Azhelle Wade: Yes, there will come a time when you must rush an approval to make a shipment date that was moved up a few weeks, but be aware of the risk of doing that. A poorly designed product could fail testing, suffer a recall, or simply receive really poor reviews on public marketplaces like Amazon. So before I jump into my summary of today's episode, I'd like to take a quick break and give a shout out to Salsa 88.
[00:22:10] Azhelle Wade: Who I am guessing is a salsa dancer like myself. Salsa 88 says, can't wait for more. I had so much fun listening to the Toy Coach. A gel has an incredible wealth of knowledge about the toy industry, and she presents the information in such an approachable way. I'm looking forward to more episodes and what else is to come from the Toy Coach.
[00:22:31] Azhelle Wade: Bravo. Well, thank you, sso. I really appreciate that review. Thank you so much for that wonderful review. Salsa 88, and maybe I'll see you on the dance floor sometime. Who knows Now if you love this podcast and you haven't already left a review. What are you waiting for? I love seeing new reviews come in. It puts a huge smile on my face and keeps me motivated to keep putting out great toy advice each and every week.
[00:23:02] Azhelle Wade: To wrap up today's episode, we are going to recap the three biggest mistakes you must avoid when working with a factory overseas. Mistake number one, not using Pantone colors. You should be always using Pantone colors to select the colors of your toy products and even your packaging. Pantone colors take a lot of the guesswork out of color selection and can save you a lot of money.
[00:23:30] Azhelle Wade: If you don't already have a Pantone book, get yourself one. Hey there, toy Coach Podcast insiders. I have a little bit of information for you exclusively. If you want to get a Pantone solid coated and a Pantone solid uncoated book, you can actually get both of them as a set at the time of this recording of the podcast.
[00:23:54] Azhelle Wade: Now, those two books are a pretty good general starting guide that you can use, even if you're designing some fabrics to go along with your toy as well. Yes, there are specific books for fabrics, but when you're just starting out, you don't need to invest in all the different types of Pantone books. Not even every factory has all the different types of Pantone books.
[00:24:18] Azhelle Wade: Now, at the time this episode is being recorded, the Pantone solid and. Solid uncoated books are available as a set on the Pantone website for 183 US dollars. Not a bad price at all. You can find the link in the bonus content section of your members area. Use that link to grab the bonus content from episode 79.
[00:24:44] Azhelle Wade: Mistake number two that you should avoid when working with factories that we covered in today's episode is avoid using vague language when requesting changes in factory samples. This means use measurements, percentages, pantone colors, whatever specific information you have to describe your desired changes with clarity.
[00:25:07] Azhelle Wade: That leaves little room for error. And finally, mistake number three that you want to avoid when working with factories is you want to be careful and not approve your product for production based on photos and videos. You want a pre-production sample of your product in your hand before you approve it for mass production.
[00:25:31] Azhelle Wade: It can be tempting to rush the process and approve from a picture or a video when all you have made were small changes. But keep in mind the ripple effect that a small change could have on your product as a whole. Trust me, request another sample before you approve. For production. Production approval is huge and the bigger the toy company, the more layers of people you have to go through to get that approval.
[00:25:57] Azhelle Wade: So take your time with it, even as, as. Solo entrepreneur. Okay, toy people. Your action item for this week is super simple. I want you to listen. To this episode one more time. Yep, that's it. There is a lot of information here that I wanna make sure you really absorb. So even if you're not ready to develop a toy idea just yet, these are concepts that I want.
[00:26:24] Azhelle Wade: To be sitting in the back of your mind so you can avoid the three mistakes that I outlined in today's episode at all costs. Once you've given this episode a second, listen, post it as a story on your Instagram and tag me to let me know. I hang out on Instagram a lot, and I will respond to you and cheer you on.
[00:26:47] Azhelle Wade: As always, thank you so much for spending time with me today. I know your time is extremely valuable and that there are a lot of podcasts out there, so it means the world to me that you tune into this one. Until next week, I'll see you later. Toy people. Thanks for listening to the Making It In The Toy Industry Podcast with Wade.
[00:27:10] Azhelle Wade: Head over to thetoycoach.com for more information, tips, and advice.
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