I think I’ve found the next big… or I should say, little thing. Allow me some background, or none of this is gonna make sense.
It turns out there is this whole generation of people called millennials who, by definition, are younger than boomers and Xers. Apparently, they have unique qualities and traits that can be generalized in order to lump them all together into a singular group for the purposes of psychoanalysis and critique. It’s rather a lot of fun.
Anywho, this millennial grouping, who were born between the early 1980’s and the late 1990’s, are currently going through a whole nostalgic thing at the behest of corporate entities intent on profiting from said nostalgia. From movies about Mario and Luigi to the resurgence of Polly Pocket dolls, the typical nostalgic time frame has been escalated via a perfect storm of pandemic boredom, disillusionment with society, and corporate greed. So, instead of waiting patiently until their children are grown in order to be nostalgic (like the rest of us had to, or at least until you’re downwind of fifty-years-old for the love of all things decent!), these so-called millennials are embracing nostalgia during the prime of their lives (and the prime of their buying power).
All of that to say there has been a resurgence of toys targeting adults who grew up back before everything went to shite after the turn of the twenty-first century. Let’s face it, everything since 2011 has sucked the big suckity suck suck. Of course we all know the reason is the smartphone, but that’s a topic for another day. (Curse you, Steve Jobs! and Zuckerberg! and Bezos!… ehem, I mean, I respect my robot overlords. Now where were we?)
Oh yeah, it is now okay for adults to play with toys. It’s healthy. Or something like that. And within the world of dolls, it turns out there is this thing where dolls need to have their own dolls. So if, as an adult, you have a 1:3 scale smart doll, that doll needs to have let’s say a 1:12 scale doll to play with as its own toy. (I know, this all gets very meta.) If your 1:6 scale doll needs a doll of its own, then it has to be even small. Yaddah, yaddah, yaddah. You get the point.
Within this emerging market, there is a growing demand for super tiny things…including books. That’s right, super small books written for dolls. That’s the new thing. Just think of it, I could become the foremost author of doll novels written about doll protagonists, based in doll universes, produced at doll scales, to be held by and read by dolls. We’re talking about original content here. Legible (with a magnifying glass), actual stories written for dolls by dolls. Uh…well, not that last part. They would be written by me.
And I have a close millennial friend who swears people would buy these books. She even knows the market well enough that we were able to run the initial numbers in order to price the first-generational product (what we call in the business a “prototype”). Nineteen dollars a pop (for the physical doll book along with a QR code or downloadable PDF file) would allow for significant profit margins while falling well within the “affordable price range” for artisanal doll book customers on the world’s largest marketplace for tiny doll books (ie. Etsy).
Working with a 1:12 scale, and a decently chunky mini-book with 40 pages, I could tell a 5,000 word story. Thats around 30 minutes of reading for most folk (dolls read at the same rate as humans it turns out). That’s a very doable length for a single episode. Create a series consisting of ten episodes, and we’re talking about a full length novel’s worth of content. But each episode could be sold for almost $20.00! Are you kidding me? That’s $190 for the entire series. Even the bundled price of $130 for all ten episodes is $110 dollars more than I could make selling a single print novel for actual people-sized people!
And word on the street is that dolls are the most loyal of readers. I’d have a guaranteed audience. I’ve already been dreaming about the types of adventures that dolls’ toys would embark upon. I’ll tell you one thing, if you thought the hidden life of your toys was wild, you should check out the hidden life of your toys’ toys. It’s pure unadulterated madness. Just my cup of tea.
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