Up Close: Robot Galaxy
Galaxy's quest: Robot Retailer seeks make-your-own success
By Cliff Annicelli -- Playthings, 1/1/2008 12:01:00 AM
[Editor's Note: An abbreviated version of this story appeared in the January 2008 issue of Playthings magazine.]
There’s a new make-your-own retailer on the scene, and it’s got its eyes set on that seemingly most difficult of kid consumers to capture with a “build a [blank]” concept—the all-American boy.
It’s not that people haven’t tried. From Build-A-Bear Workshop and American Girl to Club Libby Lu, retailers have shown that experience-based stores can work, but by and large they’ve primarily shown that they work for girls. Boys, especially those past the preschool plush stage, have more often than not been left watching from the sidelines. Both Build-A-Bear’s own stab at birthing a boy business, Build-A-Dino, and its investment in the otherwise separately run Ridemakerz (wherein kids customize their own toy cars) have resulted in significantly slower growth than Build-A-Bear’s original rise to prominence, with both efforts resulting in less than a dozen locations between them despite widely stated interest from parents in finding someplace where their sons too can tap into their creativity with a make-your-own experience.
This fall, Robot Galaxy, stepped in to try and fill the void. The New York-based retailer’s opening of its first two locations, both in the New York City suburbs, drew the attention of not only local media, but newspapers as far away as Baltimore and the financial news cable networks. That interest is focused not only on its newsworthy concept, but also of the man who’s spearheading it: Ken Pilot, a retail veteran whose resume includes corner office posts at several national apparel chains, including Gap, J. Crew, Polo Ralph Lauren and most recently, American Eagle, where he guided the launch of the company’s Martin + Osa stores.
“Relative to new concepts that I’ve helped launch in the past, whether it was Rugby at Ralph Lauren or during my 13 years at Gap—or even the latest startup with American Eagle—this was one of the easiest start-ups I’ve ever done,” Pilot told Playthings. “It involved the fewest number of people, which is probably why, but was by far the most exciting, because it was our own.”
'Pillars' of success
The Robot Galaxy plan, Pilot says, is for the retailer to exist on “three pillars”: the first being the core make-your-own retail stores, the second being a related entertainment property—“a story that could lead to a comic book or a cartoon, or even someday possibly a movie”—and thirdly creating a web community, a la Ganz’s Webkinz World or the Disney-owned Club Penguin. “Putting the three together was very compelling,” Pilot says.
With the opening of its first stores, Pilot’s “pillars” are already headed skyward. Robot Galaxy has launched a comic book tie-in with help from IDW Publishing, the company responsible for a host of independent comics and tie-in books based on properties like Transformers, 24, Star Trek and next year’s Speed Racer movie. And a basic website presenting the characters and allowing kids to preview their robot creations is already up and running.
The retailer’s existing locations—in Freehold, N.J., and West Nyack, N.Y.—are built to what is expected to be a common template: 2,000 to 2,200 square feet of space housing all the parts necessary to build each of five main characters, or, more likely, to mix-and-match parts to create robots of a child’s own imaging. Built to look like the interior of a spaceship, the stores’ walls prominently feature the tie-in comic books’ illustrations, reflecting the importance that’s being placed on the characters’ storylines in creating a world that kids will want to return to and interact with after the initial purchase.
“I think that there’s a play factor that needs to go beyond the [toy] line,” says Pilot of Robot Galaxy's efforts to differentiate itself from competitors like Build-A-Bear Workshop. “My impression and experience with Build-A-Bear is that they have an exceptional store experience, one that mostly girls gravitate to, but the challenge is what happens after they leave the store. My daughter’s been to a number of parties at Build-A-Bear, and every time she comes back with another bear, they kind of end up in a bear pile. I think that in lieu of a story or something specific to the bear that they’ve bought, there might be a cuddle factor on the way home. I think there’s a challenge around the play factor. That’s why I think American Girl has done such an incredible job creating a story and a book around each doll, there’s a lifestyle that each girl can really participate in … I think there’s something there that not only the kid appreciates, but that parents appreciate. It’s a great learning opportunity—a soft education, if you will. I think with us, our story, there’s an opportunity for us to do that too.”
The Robot Galaxy experience starts with kids choosing their robot’s torso, or “core” ($12), then adding arms and legs and “fuel cell” powered pieces, each of which vary in price depending on their features. The parts lock into place using a special key. Once assembled, kids use touch-screen computer terminals to “program” their robots—approximately a five-minute process—then “launch” their robot to a glowing, 8-foot-wide Saturn (mounted to a 12-foot fixture with a elevator that lifts the robot), where it’s officially turned on. Each robot also has a corresponding “rover” vehicle. So far, the average transaction is in the $35 to $45 range, Pilot says.
Reaction from Robot Galaxy’s kid customers has been very positive, according to Pilot. “Kids love the fact that they can create one of the characters from the comic, or create their own because all the parts are interchangeable. In as much as each character has one set of ‘extenders’ (legs) that work back to the character and three ‘flexors’ (arms) that work back to the character, multiply that across the number of characters we have and there are over a 1,000 possibilities.
“The kids really enjoy mixing and matching,” Pilot adds. “We’ve seen that a lot of the parents want their kids to stay within a certain color or within character, but the kids are interested in building robots using their favorite parts. The kids are more into creating their own thing.”
To help ensure that the Robot Galaxy experience is memorable, Pilot says the company is “putting more payroll into the store” to better the odds that the customer’s experience with a store's staff is positive. “It’s important," Pilot says, because "we’re in a very word-of-mouth business. A kid comes in and has a great experience, and then wants to have his birthday party there—that will be a big part of what we’ll do. But it’s also about parents telling other parents about how great the experience was. For me, whether you’re spending two, three, four points of sales in marketing, or putting those extra points in payroll, it impacts the bottom line in the same way. But this I know: by spending those extra points in payroll, it goes directly to the customer, and I’m sure we’ll see the benefit of that.”
The stores have already had “a strong birthday party response,” Pilot adds. “We’ll get into that in earnest after the Christmas season.”
To Saturn, and beyond
The company recently presented the Robot Galaxy concept at a major retail developers’ conference to awareness among developers of what the company is doing. As of now, though, Robot Galaxy is “keeping the focus in the Northeast, at least for the next year,” according to Pilot. “Then we’ll open up four or five additional stores. At the same time, continuing to develop the website and its community, and release up to six more comic books in the next year.”
In the years after that, Pilot hopes that Robot Galaxy will have “a great cartoon that kids are totally tuning into. We’d have an interactive website that would be as fun for them as they today experience with a Webkinz or Club Penguin.” And there’d be more stores, including locations further afield than the Northeast. “You [stay local] for a year,” Pilot says of the strategy, “to make sure the stores are performing the way you want them to; there’s better quality control and brand control when they’re closer. After that, go after other opportunities.”
But all that is down the road; right now, the retailer’s busy, Pilot says, accepting praise from parents of boys who “have been thanking us for giving them something to do with their sons."
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