Company Profile
KAP Toys
What the Fuzz is going on at KAP Toys? Cover star KAP Toys, which this year celebrates its 5th anniversary, has unveiled a major step forward in its company expansion plans – its first own-brand plush range, Fuzzballs. Rachael Simpson-Jones spoke to Nat Southworth, managing director at KAP Toys, about kawaii cats, Stranger Things fans and why a ‘nice thing’ can be everything to a child in challenging times.
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roudly adorning the front cover of this month’s Toy World, Fuzzballs is the brainchild of graphic designer Marc Sach. The property leans heavily into the trend for all things kawaii, pet-themed and popculture, with its adorably rotund characters, mainly cats, engaging in a variety of activities (eating and sleeping play a key role) and generally being cute. In their original comics, viewable online at Fuzzballs.co, the Fuzzballs share aspirational life hacks such as how
to make a salad – ‘Get a salad bowl; Replace lettuce with pizza; Yeah! Pizza salad’ – and how to stay cool this summer (hint: it involves clearing space in the fridge by eating its contents), drawing fans into their consistently charming, inclusive and amusing world. Yes - KAP Toys appears to have once again picked a winner. KAP Toys works quite closely with the specialist music and entertainment retailer HMV, which in recent years has been making serious inroads into the pop-culture category, much to the delight of its increasingly ‘geek’ consumer base. KAP’s Harry Potter ranges have done very well in HMV, as has Among Us and, of course, Stranger Things. And it was the retailer itself that tipped KAP off to Fuzzballs, which has now become the company’s first own-brand range. “People communicate via emojis so much nowadays, and in 2019 Fuzzballs released its own social media stickers on Instagram, Facebook, IMessage, Line and other big platforms – and there have been over 1b downloads since,” says Nat. “HMV took on Fuzzballs merchandise in its stores in 2021 and it’s performed really well. HMV’s head of Pop Culture, Gary Williamson, told us we should consider the property when I said we were looking to acquire the rights to something new and step off, as it were, into a previously untapped area for us.” Nat will have product on-shelf in time for Christmas.
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The initial range will focus on the core characters before broadening out in 2023. Price points will range from £5-£20, focusing strongly on the collectability element and featuring some of the most popular characters from the comics: the cat in the dinosaur costume (‘rawr!’) gets my vote. Waves of product will drop at regular intervals to keep fans coming back for more. Nat says: “The property already has a huge fanbase, which is lovely from our point of view: we’ll be producing toys for existing Fuzzballs consumers and we’re sure they’ll be very happy to spread the word on social media. Marc [Sach] is so tuned in to what the fans want and can tweak the content according to emerging trends. But he manages to do so much more than that too, hitting multiple trends all at once to ensure Fuzzballs resonates with a global audience that spans a huge age range. Following our Toy World front cover, we’re really going for it. KAP Toys, Fuzzballs = big things. Conversations with retailers can begin now the cat is out of the bag, pun intended.” KAP has made its name as a successful distributor, most recently with YuMe Toys’ Stranger Things Mystery Capsules. Sales of the blind-box toys based on Netflix’s phenomenally popular original series, which hit shelves four days before season 4 was released, have been incredibly high, and they’ve become something of a social media sensation too. Fans have been seen
