It was Mattel - I was one of four directors of product development in the early to late-ninties before and after we bought fisher price (from quaker oats of all people). I was working with several groups from Wham-O to Hot Wheels to Swimways to Fisher Price to you name it - anything non-Barbie and Ken. A really really fun time. Many roads have passed under my feet since then, but it was the best job I ever had. 'Twas I who pushed for FEA. (so much cheaper to "break things" in a computer than wait to find out a $100,000 mold yields a flawed design).
I was at the now closed Mattel Standard Plastic Products plant in Plainfield, NJ in the early 70's. It was way too short a time to get vested in the pension plan but I made some good cake anyway. We were wheels and wings, games, and vinyl-stay-vinyl products, so basically all the doll cases plus two of the cash cows; the Barbie House and the Barbie Camper. We also had the world's largest volume screen printing presses. Crikey, I still remember product numbers after all these years! Examples; 1002 was the two doll case and 4961 was the camper. Wow. I used to go out to Hawthorne for occasional meetings and was a regular at the Toy Show in NYC every year. The stories I could tell, but won't.
The toy business, it wasn't all fun and games.
I started as a QC Engineer, got into product reliability and the early stages of statistical QC stolen from the Japanese who stole it from us. I gave a talk at Princeton one evening that ended up changing my entire career arc, and ended up in NH in a totally different field. Life.
So I know a bit about product development , and a lot about plastic molding and what can go wrong. I see what is happening with shell cracking as no more or less than has happened with many other products. Cars included.
DJI can be expected to deny and stall, to admit nothing, and be not the least bit pro-active in resolving the problem. Right now the public ships containers full of USD to China and DJI furiously tries to keep up with demand. It's by no means a mature industry and they are riding a wave. How many products can you name where price has been so strictly controlled? Let's see, Rolex, Ferrari...OK, help me out.
Here's the agenda from the last DJI Executive Meeting:
1. New product development
2. Product line enhancement
3. Production increases
4. Production increases
5. Production increases
6. What to do with billions of USD
Our cracking problem has probably been assigned to some green manufacturing engineer and is item 12 on his priority list. We think it's the biggest thing and they look at it as a hiccup. It's just the way it goes in the real world. .
