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Toca Boca Studio: Toca Boca (a subsidiary of Bonnier Group) Founders: Emil Ovemar & Bjorn Jeffery Apps: 22 Offices: Stockholm & San Francisco Employees: 28
It is sometimes difficult to remember a time when tablet computing wasn’t the norm, but in 2010, the iPad was still a new device that consumers and digital product developers were only just beginning to understand. During this period, Emil Ovemar was on paternity leave and couldn’t help noticing that his children played with the new devices as if they were toys. As it happened, Ovemar and his friend Björn Jeffery were already at work developing new products for the iPad, so it was only natural that they began to discuss ways of adapting these touchscreen devices for use by small children.
And So It Begins At this time, both Ovemar and Jeffery worked in Research and Development for the Bonnier Group (a family-owned multinational media corporation), which had begun an internal initiative called Bonnier Digital. According to Jeffery, he and Overmar “looked at several different possible concepts but thought digital toy apps for kids had the most potential. We presented our plan, did research for a few months, and then got funding from Bonnier to pursue it as a project.” As their idea for digital toy apps developed, it became its own company (while remaining a subsidiary). Even for Bonnier, this was 24 Casual Connect Winter 2014
an unconventional beginning. “Bonnier employees can always pitch new ideas,” Jeffery explains, “but I think it is safe to say that our story is an unusual one. Bonnier tends to grow through acquisition, but Toca Boca was developed 100% internally.” As the company began to grow, there were certain characteristics Ovemar and Jeffery wanted it to have. For starters, the pair wanted a company name that was easy to pronounce, fun to say, and easy to spell. They eventually settled on Toca Boca— a derivative of toca la boca, which is Spanish for touch the mouth. They also decided right out of the gate that their logo would be “a face with a big mouth”—and that every app they built would include an intro that played with the logo in one way or another. They also wanted to retain the focus on digital toys.
Digital Toys Although Toca Boca may look like an app and game developer to any outsider, Ovemar and Jeffery view it more like a company which specializes in making toys that happen to be digital. While it is easy to for some to confuse “digital toys” and “games,” Jeffery feels that they differ in three distinct ways: “First, what makes them toys (as opposed to games) is that