Small wonders

It's been a long time since a newspaper reporter called our offices asking what we knew about a toy line hot enough to be “saving local businesses” from imminent demise. A call like that will make just about any journalist stop whatever else he's doing and give that question a few minutes of reflection. Best as we remember, it was probably sometime around 1996-97 when that last happened, back when Ty's Beanie Babies—following the surprise announcement that individual SKUs were to be forever “retired”—had shoppers waiting in line in the early morning hours for shipments to arrive at their local specialty toy store. Suffice to say, it's been a while. But now the calls are back, and they're all about the Webkinz.

“We're very happy to be that important to them,” says Susan McVeigh, Ganz's communications manager, of those independent retailers who have found Webkinz to be a must-have line. “We're very excited about how Webkinz has taken off.”

Like the Beanie Babies before them, Webkinz have taken off organically, although not yet to Beanie Babies' level of all-encompassing frenzy.

“We use the analogy that it's spreading 'playground to playground,' because it's definitely by word of mouth through the kids themselves that it's grown,” McVeigh says. “There hasn't been a traditional media blitz or product launches to force it on the public's consciousness, but kids have discovered it, and school by school and city by city it's really taken off.”

While the Woodbridge, Ontario-based company won't reveal sales figures, it will say that 700,000 members and more than 1.5 million pets have been registered on the Webkinz Web site, www.webkinz.com, since the line's debut in April 2005. Today, the line is available at more than 4,000 retailers in the U.S.

The Webkinz plush, purely by the standards of plush, are fairly innocuous. They come in two sizes, the full-scale 8½-inch Webkinz and the 6-inch Lil' Kinz, which debuted shortly after the originals did and are positioned in the Webkinz universe as that lineup's littler brothers and sisters.

So far there have been 33 Webkinz and 14 Lil' Kinz. Two of the original Webkinz have been retired. (“That was more of a retailer decision,” McVeigh says. “It's not a strategy to retire more, which isn't to say it won't happen, but it's not part of the current plan.”) They appeal to both girls and boys, and are available in a mix of animals, most real and a few imaginary. But it's the online universe that Ganz has created for the toys that makes them truly stand apart.

“Webkinz really started with that whole conversation about 'where are our kids spending their time?'” McVeigh says. “Of course, the answer is that kids are going to the Internet. So, with our background in creating plush toys, we thought, 'What does plush need to do to interact with today's kids?' You look at things kids traditionally love to do—they love to collect, they like to build, dolls that they can dress up… so you learn from that and give them a site where they can build things, dress things, interact with each other, and do the nurturing side of things.”

And most appealing of all—for parents, at least—is that Webkinz World is a place that's safe for their kids to go to online, a virtual community that's not prowled by pedophiles and soft-drink marketers. Each Webkinz plush comes with a unique access code that gets a child onto the site and allows her to officially “adopt” her particular pet and choose its name and gender, and then lets a digital version of that plush toy “live” there in its own virtual room in Webkinz World that's exclusively the child's space to customize. Out in the greater World, they can go to the arcade to play games—alone or in tournaments with other children's pets that inhabit the World—or visit a trivia area to earn “'Kinz cash” to splurge on pet treats or room accessories.

This summer, kids were spending anywhere from a half hour to three hours at a time on the Webkinz site, according to McVeigh.

Outside of Webkinz World's popularity, what's most impressive about the site itself may be that Ganz designed it all internally. “We built it entirely from the ground up, and that's probably part of its success, too, that we didn't buy a pre-made site and try to put our thumbprint on it,” McVeigh says.

Why this particular version of the common concept of an online community for kids has worked, McVeigh believes, is because, “there's such diversity when you're on the site. You can focus on the educational element, or you can play in the arcade; if you have a child that likes detail-oriented activities, they can be designing their room and moving furniture around. We've really managed to capture the independence of the Internet where kids control what they do instead of being told what they do.”

Plus, there's the fun of the toys themselves, McVeigh adds, collecting or trading them. “Even if you focused just on collecting one kind of animal, like cows, each one is a little different (online). You don't find out your pet's bio until you register the new one and see that each has a different personality.”

For the next year, Ganz plans to release new Webkinz approximately every month, although the actual number of additions “may vary a bit,” McVeigh says. And it's working to extend Webkinz from a single product line to a larger brand. The company has already begun offering accessories, such as purses and backpacks that kids can use to carry their pets.

“We're certainly exploring a lot more customer-demand driven accessories,” McVeigh says. “We're looking to develop that side of things—both things for the pets and products for the kids themselves.”