CEO Björn Jeffery co-founded Toca Boca with Emil Ovemar in late 2010, and within two years, it dominated the children’s app market with over 100 million downloads for its digital toys, which include Toca Hair Salon, Toca Kitchen, Toca Band, and Toca Train, among others. Born out of a big publisher, Bonnier Corporation, Toca Boca was given funding to explore new avenues of digital business when traditional media advertising was suffering. Within two years, they had made a profit and were in a position to pay back the investment.

Newnham: Toca Boca makes digital toys for children. What were you like as a kid?
Jeffery: I think I was a fairly curious kid, and I was definitely ahead of my years. I had teachers telling my parents that I was asking questions that I just should not be asking at that age, like, “Can we work together in groups, please?” I think it’s because I had a good sense of imagination and I hung out with older kids.

We moved to Sweden from the UK when I was three, and I made a lot of friends even though I didn’t speak the language, which was a bit strange. Somehow it worked socially, and they thought I was an interesting person. As interesting as you can be, I guess, when you’re three or four.

Newnham: Who inspired you when you were growing up?
Jeffery: Probably my dad because he was very inventive. He was always
coming up with stuff. I think that also might be from having a shared British heritage, so growing up, nothing was thrown out, always with the idea that “You just never know,” which goes on to this day. I have tried to steer away from that, but it did lead to a lot of interesting stuff, a lot of made-up stuff. He built things, created a lot. He’s a photographer, so he was a creative person from the beginning. I think creation and art and that side of my life have been a lot more prevalent than maybe the more traditional techie stuff, which is engineering-based, or the finance-based stuff, which doesn’t really reflect where I came from at all.

Newnham: When did you first become interested in technology?
Jeffery: We got an awful computer, which was a Spectrum 128K. I remember it a lot and spending a lot of time with my dad trying to get the thing to work, which was challenging. I learned a lot of new swear words, as my dad constantly threatened to throw it out the window because it never worked. It was in the days when you had to load things on to cassette tapes, and it took forty minutes to load something into the memory — and then it didn’t work anyway. There was a lot of frustration going on, but it was the first computer experience I had.

Newnham: How old were you?
Jeffery: I think I was seven or something like that. My dad also did some design work so he bought one of the first Macs that came out — a Macintosh SE which was an awful little thing. It had a black and white screen — tiny — one of those things that they now hollow out and turn into a fish tank. It cost a fortune at the time, so it was a big investment for him because he was going to use it for Desktop Publishing but you could, of course, use it for other things too.

So, this was at home, and I was starting to play games on this computer because it happened to be around. That was the beginning of these things — quite inaccessible hardware, clumsy stuff made for something else. Spectrum I thought was good fun, but my dad, I can see in retrospect, was going crazy just trying to get the thing to work. The Mac didn’t really become a gaming platform before iOS came along, but if you think it was bad now, it was terrible then.

And there was a shareware culture. You know, you bought a magazine and shared stuff? We used to go to user groups where people just met and exchanged floppy disks with each other. It seems completely bizarre today, but that is what we did. It was the only way to get this stuff because there was no internet. So you went to these places and you just swapped stuff around, and that’s how we got some new games and tools back then.

I think I am almost an accidental entrepreneur. I never really considered myself to be an entrepreneur, but I started my first company when I was seventeen.

Newnham: You have always worked with emerging technologies. Can you talk me through your roles prior to Toca Boca and how your experience helped you build a successful “digital play” studio?
Jeffery: It’s not been linear, exactly, but I started a lot of companies. I think I am almost an accidental entrepreneur. I never really considered myself to be an entrepreneur, but I started my first company when I was seventeen. It was a web agency, an awful one. Absolutely disastrous. There’s a theme here of projects that aren’t actually any good. As a learning experience, great, but as a business, a complete and utter disaster. This was one of them.

Together, with three friends, I set it up. I was learning HTML, just from a book, and starting to make websites, basically. We thought maybe we could sell it, but to be honest, we sold very little because, well, we weren’t very good at it and we weren’t very good at selling.

I took a lot of web design classes even though I already knew the subject, so I could do other stuff during that time instead. I just tried to make school as simple as possible so I could spend more time doing what I wanted to do.

Newnham: Did you have many clients?
Jeffery: A few. They were clients that we deserved, so not very good. They might have deserved us, and we deserved them, too. They were friends of friends and friends of friends’ parents. At the same time, I had another job at the newspaper. Before that, I was a youth reporter writing about kids’ stuff like school issues, but it wasn’t adults writing for kids; it was kids writing for kids. This was for the equivalent of The Times which had a school section — well, this was in Sweden, so nothing’s The Times, but it’s the biggest paper in the city I grew up in — again, that’s saying nothing really because it’s such a small place.

Anyway, so I worked there as a reporter, and then I left and they asked me to come back as an editor, so I was an editor for a few years from the age of about seventeen/eighteen. I was a web editor, so I had my own little editorial team with kids that were about thirteen/fourteen, and I was responsible for them and for the website for this children’s section of the paper. It is inconceivable today that you would give the responsibility for a site to a seventeen-year-old. It’s insane, but I built the site myself, and we worked on it together every week. I started at the paper as an intern, which led to the reporter job, and the reporter job led to this job as an editor.

So, during school I worked there just as a side thing, but I learned a lot about the web, and then, gradually, over the course of these years, doing it as an extra job, I managed to swing my first job as a real journalist, actually writing about proper stuff. Of course, I had no idea how to do this. I was frightened to do it, but they thought since I had been around so long, there must be a reason for that. Although, to be honest, it wasn’t because I was a very good journalist. It was more “This is someone who can code a little bit, so we’ll let him take care of it,” but this was serious. This was running the real website, not the silly little kids website, and so I did that for a while.

Newnham: Is this what led to your job at the publishing company Bonnier?
Jeffery: Well, that was ironic. I was working at another newspaper at the time, so I did that, and then I started the blog when I was there because I was so bored. So, I started that and then I left, and then the newspaper that I worked for contacted the blog without knowing I was there, which is a bit ironic. So, they first invested in the blog, then we ran it together, which was actually a Bonnier newspaper then, we both sold it to a third-party publisher. It was the biggest male fashion site in Sweden but, again, that says nothing. You know it was very early, around 2004. I also started a music blog [Discobelle] with some friends that is still running and has turned into a record label and all sorts of things that are still going to this day.

I went to university briefly but got very bored and was very disappointed, so I didn’t complete the course. I was going to go to become a real journalist — that was the idea — but I got this job at the other newspaper while I was studying so it was like, “Should I leave my job to go back to university to train myself to get a job I have already got?” That made no sense, so I left, thinking that I would come back one day. But that doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon.

A lot of the jobs I did ran in parallel because I did a lot of stuff. I lived off Sudoku for a while, too: I launched it in Sweden. After I left that second newspaper, I started a company that was doing basically anything that came our way, and I had done an awful, awful entrepreneurial project before that which was about riddles and selling lateral problems to newspapers. People kept calling me from all over Sweden saying that the riddles were wrong. Pensioners were getting angry and demanding we reprint the whole newspaper — awful stuff.

But that led us to Sudoku, which we lived off for quite a long while. It was a new thing, so nobody had done that before. We started selling Sudoku to the newspapers — it happened because an old boss of mine was reading The Economist and saw that it was becoming a big thing in the UK and asked if I could do it. I said, “Yes, absolutely,” even though I had no idea what it was. I remember the call very specifically. He was like, “You are doing all this puzzle stuff anyway. Can you do a Sudoku?” I was googling Sudoku as I said, “Absolutely” because we had no money so we would have done anything. If you had asked me to come and do the wallpapering, I would have been like, “Yes, I will do that. I will do the wallpapering.” That’s entrepreneurial life in the beginning. You do whatever you have to do.

So, I lived off that for a while, and then it merged into this web agency that I ran for a few years, and it was through that that I got in touch with Bonnier because I was consulting for them, among other things. Finally, I left my own agency to work for the research and development (R&D) unit at Bonnier.

Newnham: You have had quite a career. What lessons do you think you took from these jobs to Toca Boca?
Jeffery: A lot of it was it just wasn’t really thought through before — which is sort of unlike me, in a way. I see myself as an analytical person, and, I had seen, both out of my own experiences and others, stuff that really was just not thought through properly. The riddle thing was one example. It was never intended to become that; it just ended up there, and I just got stuck with it. I had placed myself in a position where I had to keep making up or finding these riddles every day, and, this went on for years. It wasn’t the best business decision I ever made. However, I learned a lot of things there, like understanding how entrepreneurship takes strange routes. It won’t end up where you intend it to, but on the other hand, thinking things through a little more from the beginning certainly doesn’t hurt.

I think a lot of people just throw themselves out there thinking they will find their way — and sometimes you do, but most of the time, you don’t. What happened wasn’t necessarily a disaster, but it’s certainly wasn’t a big success, either, and I had run a lot of stuff that had become quite successful in terms of people liking it but never made any money from it. With the fashion blog, we made some money off it once we had sold it, but I didn’t really make any money during the course of time. And the music blog was the same thing: it’s not a big earner, really. I think, had I thought that through from the beginning, it would have been different, too.

But the biggest learning came from R&D. I was working globally with all our businesses at Bonnier, on different sorts of projects, trying to find out where consumers and technology and media met. What happens at that intersection? What generally happens is technology and consumers meet, so they do a lot of fun stuff, and then media stands on the side and says, “That looks good. That’s what we should have done.” There’s never any initiative, and a lot of reasoning behind that is — or at least it was my experience, anyway — that they only tried to take whatever they already had and just place it on mobile.

We did this time and time again. “Well, they liked the book, so why wouldn’t they like the book on the iPhone? That makes sense.” Of course, it doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense. It’s a first shot: a good book on mobile is probably going to do better than a bad book on mobile, but is that what people want? And there was a dishonesty, I think — not just within Bonnier — but within the whole media industry. It was like, “We’re not really interested in what people want. We’re more interested in just making the most out of stuff we are already doing because that’s what we like to do, so let’s take this book and stick it on the internet. Let’s take this book and stick it on a tablet… and then our job is done.” And, of course, it doesn’t really work like that.

So, what we need to do is to firstly think this through properly. But also start with the consumer. “What does the consumer actually want?” not, “What do we happen to have lying around that we can refurbish?” What do they really want?

The last project Emil and I were working on at Bonnier before Toca Boca was digital magazines. This was before the iPad even came out, so it was interesting. I spoke to Forrester [Research] because I was responsible for research and analysis, and the Forrester guy said, “We’re not seeing any trend where this fits in. It’s either barren ground or has potential.” That was the most positive I could get from him. The thing is, he was right. That’s what was so sad. We weren’t doing digital magazines because consumers were calling for it. It was because we already had a lot of magazines and we wanted to put them on something.

So, of course, once the iPad comes out, we made something that did pretty well. Before, it was hypothetical, like, “If a big-ish iPhone device came into people’s homes, what would they do?” Maybe read magazines, maybe something else, but now, we could see that they were playing a lot of games and watching a lot of videos. So, maybe that was where we should start if we were going to make something new.

It’s easy to think, “Well, what would I do if I was a kid?” which is intrinsically the completely wrong way to think about it.

Newnham: You then co-founded Toca Boca with Emil. Can you tell me more about how the company started and why you chose to specialize in children’s apps?
Jeffery: Well, I met him at R&D at Bonnier. I was the Director, Future Media and Technology. Very serious, but that was basically doing analysis, and Emil was the User Experience Director. So, we were working together on this magazine project, and I sort of knew of him before. We had done some project before but never before in that context. We worked very well together, I thought, but we left that magazine because Mag+ turned into a whole beast of its own.

Emil went on to work with books and social reading for a while, and I went on to work for another part of Bonnier, looking into if we were able to sell digital products, like a digital magazine, something that didn’t have a physical representation but something that could still be sold. This was because a problem at the time was that the ad market had crashed so suddenly that all media companies, including ours, were scrambling around to make money. It was a structural crisis and a financial crisis at the same time.

So, my job was to find something that people would buy, and I thought, “That’s a good start. Let’s start at the right end this time,” and that’s how I carved out this space. I had, just based on my own experiences and things that I had seen, settled on certain criteria — so that if an idea didn’t pass through these points of criteria, I wasn’t going to do it. So, we had some workshops, and a lot of stuff didn’t go through. We also had to choose ideas that fitted into the circumstances that we were in — that is, considering what the owners prioritized, what they wanted, what they liked, and, generally, what would work.

A lot of areas didn’t get pursued because they didn’t fit the criteria, but there were a few areas left, and the original idea was to have a little holding company that essentially acquired businesses that did well in these areas. So, for instance, if we found an area that could be kids apps, we were then supposed to go out and buy a company that did children’s apps. That is essentially what we were told to do back in 2010, but that’s not what we did. We looked and found nothing so we decided to make them ourselves.

Most of the stuff we saw, we didn’t really like. We didn’t think it was very good. There were a few kid apps studios around, but it wasn’t sufficiently big enough for us to do a big acquisition, one that our owners would expect. I remember specifically, I spoke to one developer who we thought was big, but it turned out to be just two guys who sat in basements in two different cities, and they were one of the main players! It was early days, and we realized we could definitely take this on. So, then, we just presented our case.

I called for Emil to come back and work with me and suggested we start with the kids’ stuff because it had potential. It was also the most fun one, and I don’t think I would have got Emil on board had it not been about kids. He’s a kid at heart. He’s got two kids and spent a lot of time with them playing and seeing what they did with technology. We saw the potential and how it was underused; so much more could be done than just sitting there alone with a small screen, using it as a hand controller. There is a time and place for that, but there is so much more stuff you can do.

Emil saw that his kids were using the device as a toy, like anything else. It was a way to play, not the way to play. He saw them being so natural around it. We, as adults, think, “Wow, this is a special thing, it’s very unique,” but they didn’t really treat it that way. I think adults make too much of it; we’re trying too hard, almost. It’s a toy to them, like any other, and it still has to compete with a cardboard box, which is not as easy as it first might seem. Trying to think like a kid again is hard, but it’s all just fun to them — the object, box, wrapping paper. The best way to see what children like is to see them play and see what they do with the device.

So, kids apps made business sense, but also the consumer insight was that suddenly families had access to touchscreen devices that were disproportionately good. Like the opposite of the Spectrum I had, which was awful. Now, it’s amazing what children have access to because these devices are so good. You would not normally buy them for children because they’re too expensive and made out of glass. Normally, you would buy a dumbed-down version, but suddenly you didn’t have to have a dumbed-down version. You could have a great version. Just seeing how children have their first interactive experience makes you think like, “Wow — what could be done on a software layer when these hardware prerequisites are suddenly in place?”

So, we got to work. Emil did a lot of research around toys and play. The economic rationale behind it was an idea I had about digital economies of scale. Your regular economies of scale is the more stuff you make, it gets cheaper and cheaper to produce to a certain limit, and then you get decreasing returns to scale because stuff happens and things start getting more expensive again. Normally, it’s not a straight curve; it goes up and down, but for example, you can make 150 pairs of shoes in a factory, and when you want to build 151, you have to build a new factory — so suddenly, it’s very expensive again. But, if you sell digital products, that doesn’t necessarily happen at all. Theoretically, if you set it up the right way, you’ll never get decreasing returns to scale. That’s taking a lot of big bets into account, but nevertheless, it is theoretically possible to only get a better and better margin all the time.

I was looking at digital products before, just broadly-speaking, and saying, “We need to find a product that actually has some longevity. Something that’s not just like a magazine, for instance.” You know, you read this week’s version of Time magazine — you could read last week’s; you could read one from two weeks back — but, it’s unlikely that you’re going to buy something from six weeks back. So, what areas of digital products actually have some longevity so they’re good today; they’re good tomorrow; and they’re good in a year’s time?

A children’s product is one of those. It has an interesting, economic dynamic. It was designed to get as good, if not better, over time because there are new three-year-olds liking the same sort of thing. So, even if you grow out of the product yourself, which is good, there will be new kids coming along that like the same thing. We had seen this from children’s books. You have a big hit with a children’s book, and can generally sell that for quite a long time because a good book is a good book, especially for children. It has no trends. I mean, I don’t see Fifty Shades of Grey selling for that long, but that was a trend, and, you know, hats off for that.

So, I did some stuff around that and tried to learn about the App Store, and Emil did a lot of work around play. This is the R&D legacy, you know — going back to the consumer and looking at how children play. What is the way in which they play? We then found a few models and one had five ways of playing:-

1. Active play, which is like chasing each other, playing sport, running around.
2. Make-believe play, which is imagination and role play.
3. Manipulative play, which is puzzles, construction, building, Lego, making, creating.
4. Creative play, which is arts, crafts, drawing, music.
5. Learning play, which is games and books — they are defined as learning because they are linear. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Kids like all five of these things, so you take that and you look at the App Store and you see that basically everything for children is in the last category. It’s only based on books and games, and that makes no sense. Why would that be? Because kids don’t like that category more than anything else. And the reason, probably, is because that’s how adults like to play. If you and I play, what do we do? We read books and play games, but we rarely play with dolls anymore. Those days are gone.

It’s easy to think, “Well, what would I do if I was a kid?” which is intrinsically the completely wrong way to think about it. Children are children. That’s actually one of the guiding stars of trying to get these products right all the time: that children don’t really change. You can change the way in which you express something — you can do active play in many different ways — but the fact that you like that sort of play isn’t going to really change. Of course, it varies over different ages and stages, and it varies from kid to kid, too, but generally speaking, all kids like all types, so why is this market only addressing one fifth of what children actually like?

That’s why we decided we were going to go the other end and actually make something that we knew children liked. On an abstract level, at least, and let’s see if we can dig down and actually create products in that area that then have the financial possibility to succeed, have a consumer insight in their foundation or core to say, “It makes sense that kids would like this in this context.” And then, what we had left was “Let’s make amazing products” which, of course, is the thing that takes the most time.

Newnham: As a mobile entrepreneur, do you think your background in research and analysis contributed to your success? Do you think other app businesses could benefit from being more strategic?
Jeffery: I think so. It created a work environment where it’s possible to succeed, and I don’t see all app businesses that way. It feels like sometimes there is the best X, Y, Z app that you can make but no chance that it is a business — and, that’s fine as long as you don’t expect it to be one because, if you do, you are going to be very disappointed.

You look at these outliers and they’re like, “Well, that app did amazing,” and you’re like, “Yes, but that was the only one…in that genre…ever.” There was a weird set of circumstances that happened to make this fart app exceptionally popular during a four-week period — and then that was it, and you can never repeat that. It’s not a business. It’s a nice vacation, but it’s not a business.

So, our research and strategy has helped a lot and has actually created a great environment for our staff because they bought into the business from the beginning. We have created a confined space in our business with very strict parameters. The business is digital toys; it’s not winning, no losing, no stress, no high scores, no rules. It’s open-ended, focusing on creativity; playful, fun experiences. You have to buy into all of these things before you start here.

We do open-ended children’s apps that don’t have any rules, so you have to focus on the fun. If you start at the company and you know that, then it’s completely free because we don’t go to staff and tell them to make it a different color. As long as you buy into the initial constraints, it’s free. In fact, I have designers who say they have never worked somewhere where they have been given so much freedom, which is ironic considering that we have limited down the market so much. But it is very free for them as long as you buy into the idea — and I think that is a result of strategy. It also creates a good work environment because, quite frankly, if I think I could design better than the designer, then I have probably hired the wrong person. If I can’t bet on the designer to know best, then something is wrong.

In regards to other app businesses, I think any business can benefit from being more strategic — but it’s easy for me to say that because that’s the way I think. I am not sure it’s necessarily better than anything else; it’s just the way my brain works, and it works well for me. Sometimes, people get in touch with a business idea, and I think, “This will never work. It’s a nice idea, but if you’re expecting it to be a business, I cannot see this working for you.” Put another way: if you’re expecting to build a business, then yes, go with strategy, but if you are looking for some fun and great experience, then go with your gut 100% because it’s going to be about passion anyway. I am just too cynical to think passion is going to take you all the way. It can, but it’s certainly not a guarantee.

Newnham: What’s Toca Boca’s relationship with Bonnier now?
Jeffery: Bonnier owns 100% of Toca Boca. We don’t have shares, but we have an incentive program so that as the company does well, we’re not completely left out. But the thing is, they are not selling. The business is family-owned, and one of their core values is that they plan for generations, not for quarters, and that was the mindset the whole time. “Let’s not build the best business for the next six months. Let’s build something long-term that can actually be sustainable and work.”

I think, had we been entrepreneurs with our own idea, it would have been a difficult attitude to take when we were burning money every month. It’s very hard to keep a five-year perspective when there’s money running out in August. So, having a financial commitment from the beginning meant we could think big, think long, and it enabled me to make the right decisions — which, in all honesty, I probably would not have made if it had been my own business.

I am pleased, however, that we are already profitable, and last year, we made enough money to pay Bonnier back — within two years of starting the business.

Newnham: What roles did you both take on, as you and Emil are quite different personalities?
Jeffery: Yes, very different. It was a good combination, probably better than we thought at the beginning. It seemed at the beginning that the App Store was a mediocrity to a certain extent. We weren’t 100% sure about that because yes, there is the odd fart app and stuff like that, but it felt like that that was temporary.

It seemed like it’s the quality of the product that was key. It pays to be good. However, there are a lot of great apps in the App Store that never get anywhere, so quality is obviously not the only thing there. There also has to be visibility, and this we realized very early on, so we split the roles like that. To put it simply, Emil does the quality and I do the visibility, and for the first one and a half years, we totally overinvested in product. There was only myself and a community manager doing marketing for that time. We just thought it was so important to get the quality of the product right that we thought it was best to spend our money there first.

The culture is very unforgiving when it comes to things like failure. Maybe, though, the pressure of that causes people to work harder.

Newnham: A lot of creativity and successful design studios come out of Sweden. Can you pinpoint why that is?
Jeffery: That’s a good question. I guess a lot of cold, hard winters, cuddling up indoors — there’s probably an element of that that’s true because there’s very little distraction from October through to March. So, I guess that’s something!

Actually, there are a few structural things that I think played a part. There was a big government-funded computer program in the early 2000s or late ’90s where you could buy a computer through work as a tax break that really moved pretty good computers into the homes of a lot of people. It was called the Home PC, and you could buy it through your company. It was an incentive program to get people to invest in a computer, and they did. I had one, and it was great because suddenly we could have an amazing computer that we could have never afforded before this program. The second thing that made a difference was that we had very extensive broadband from an early stage. We had the IT boom like everyone else, but there was significant infrastructure and there were investments made quite early on that connected a lot of places.

Otherwise, it’s hard. It’s not an entrepreneurial culture, really. It’s creative because it has a strong design heritage and things like that, but the culture is very unforgiving when it comes to things like failure. Bankruptcy in Sweden causes serious social difficulty. It’s embarrassing, and it’s not generally what you would put down as a great entrepreneurial culture. Maybe, though, the pressure of that causes people to work harder. I don’t know.

I also think there’s a high sense of trust. It’s a very trusting society: you trust staff; you don’t sue each other. Things would have to go exceptionally far over there before you sue someone. I don’t think I have even heard of anyone who’s sued anyone in Sweden. I think the high level of trust allows you to focus on stuff that is more relevant. You can take a bit of the worry out of the equation — like if I send you an invoice, I know you are going to pay. If you don’t have to worry about things like that, you can work in a different way, in a different work environment that is beneficial which is not the case in the US.

Newnham: What encouraged your move to the US?
Jeffery: There were a few things. One of them was the proximity to Apple. We already had a relationship with them, but it could have been better. It’s still our main partner by far, and it was important that we could have a close relationship, show them the products, get to know them, find out what they wanted us to do, where they saw the platform going, and all those things.

Secondly, all the other potential partners are in that area — every single service provider that we have, every other potential platform like Google, analytics providers — anything, really, that we need. Stockholm isn’t a stopgap for anyone, so no one’s traveling through it to get somewhere else, whereas San Francisco is different. People are always stopping by, and it just increases the serendipity by a factor of about a thousand, I‘d say. People who like what we do don’t just happen to be in Stockholm, but they do happen to be in San Francisco.

The third thing was talent. Just finding other sorts of people — more sales and marketing-related people that have been working with the children’s market, which is a very specialist area and quite difficult to find. In Sweden, there really was no kids app market before we started. If you look through Sweden’s top kids list, it’s packed with kids apps, but that was not the case before we started, so we have basically driven that market. It also means there’s no talent to draw from, as no one’s done it before, so that was another reason to go to the States

We left all the production, game, and toy development in Stockholm, and then there’s marketing and analytics and things like that in San Francisco.

Newnham: Where does the term “digital toys” come from?
Jeffery: Sure — the term “digital toys” came out of Emil’s research. There had been some stuff written about it, too. It was just the assumption that any digital products for children were games. Games are only one way of doing that for kids. Emil looked at toy design, blockbuster toys from a long time ago — that is, toys that were very successful over time — to see what attributes made the Frisbee still sell today because that was the digital thing we were trying to replicate. The Frisbee is a good example because there is no win or lose. You can make a game out of it if you want to, but you can’t win just by having it. That’s the same with a hula hoop or Play-Doh. You can’t win at Play-Doh. It’s impossible.

If you look at how children spend their time, they play with toys a lot of the time. They play with games, too, but it’s certainly not that much more. So, it made sense for us to follow what kids like and make things that make sense for kids and that they genuinely feel are good fun. We forgot about “games” and just thought about how could we make a digital, toy-like product. It’s not the same as a physical toy.

Newnham: You have clearly achieved great success in a short time. What do you think separates Toca Boca from other studios trying to break into the children’s app market?
Jeffery: The big thing is quality of the product. We spend a lot of time
playtesting from the very first paper idea, and we test with children, too — which I know other studios do also but, for us, it’s a really big part of the process. We don’t assume that because we like it, kids will, too. There are actually projects where we have gone somewhere down the line with them and then cancelled them because they were simply not fun enough, not good enough. We liked it, but the kids didn’t, so there was no point.

It was also strategic at the beginning to bet on a brand as opposed to a product. It came out of learning about the App Store and how difficult it is to find something. If you don’t know what you’re looking for on the App Store, you’re not going to find it, and even if you do know what you’re looking for, you’re still not necessarily going to find it because discoverability is very low. So, we thought, “Let’s make something, as a brand, that both parents and children like.” That was our ambition. We wanted to make a reason for kids to like the brand, so we did something special with the introduction that is unique every time; we took that from The Simpsons. Kids normally swipe screens quickly on an app because they want to be let into it, but they don’t with ours because they want to see the animation.

Parents are stressed out and don’t have time to read through app magazines to find the latest children’s apps, but if there is a time and place to buy a new app, then we believed it would be good if they had a relationship with the brand so, if Toca Boca came out with something new, they would know we were a safe bet. It’s easier to talk about the brand broadly speaking than find something that suits you as a parent or your kids.

Newnham: Toca Boca is like the band that you instantly recognize from the start of its songs. It has an identifiable look to its designs. Was that always part of the plan?
Jeffery: I think it grew in the context of having a lot of creative freedom for the designers — not forcing them into anything other than values. Toca Boca is a nice brand that does good stuff; that’s the intention. If we did what a lot of other kids app developers do, we could be making a lot more money — such as in-app purchases, for instance. We don’t do them because they are very tricky to get right. I think we are getting to the point where it may be possible, as you can now do it in a good way as opposed to a bad way, but when we started, it was so bad that parents were reluctant to lend the devices to their kids. We ultimately chose a nice route and had very clear ideas about what the brand should stand for, and that was to be a genuinely positive thing — something that both kids and parents would like.

So, we were about values — not so much in the specific design but in the fact we don’t make boy toys and girl toys. We make toys for kids, and that’s probably down to our Scandinavian heritage because gender issues are a big thing in Scandinavia. That’s how we grew up, and it’s part of our own value set, so we try avoid stereotypes that go through into the design. You’ll notice themes that are traditionally skewed towards one gender, like Toca Tailor: there’s a reason why that’s not pink and called “Toca Fashion Stylist” or something. That was very intentional because we didn’t want to go down that road. That more girls than boys may use it, I don’t know if that is the case, but it’s not designed for girls and excluding boys, as much as Toca Train is not excluding girls. That’s just part of our values.

It’s very hard to be creative without any constraints because it’s just like, “Come up with something fun!”

Newnham: What’s the working process like at Toca Boca?
Jeffery: It’s a long process that has varied a bit over time. These days, it’s me and Emil that have discussions about product strategy, so we look at different areas that could be, for example, the creative space, then we try and make a brief that starts off very broad. It’s based on creating an output, an image that a user can make, and it should be for certain age sets, so maybe four-year-olds rather than two-year-olds.

Then, we hand that brief over to our play designers, who go through it and take it to the team, who work together and come up with a few hypotheses. Then, we take that, go back, do some research, and return to review how it could look like. It’s a very iterative process. It’s like we’re looking at dragons — but different aspects. So, looking at if the user is a dragon, what if the user fights a dragon? Is it dragons as a family living together? The brief is broad so that we can leave a lot of creative freedom, but again, it’s about the confined spaces. It’s very hard to be creative without any constraints because it’s just like, “Come up with something fun!”

So, then, the next step is that it goes into testing. We have kids concept-test it to see what part of playing with the game they like. Then, we take from that to make a digital toy, as not everything translates very well. The fun part of playing in real life doesn’t always work digitally, so we have to be mindful of that and see what will work. It’s finding something we think will be more fun on the iPad, for instance. It has to work better than a physical product because if it doesn’t, then it’s not a perfect fit. It’s quite a long process, as we spend a lot of time before we even get to developing anything to ensure it’s good and thoroughly tested. Of course, you never know where it’s going to go, but at least by doing this, it feels like it’s got a reasonable chance of doing well.

Time-wise, that process is about six months with the team of four. Before, it was maybe three months, but it also has something to do with the fact that we are now getting copied a lot. One of our criteria was to have innovation in our execution — don’t innovate in the idea but innovate in the execution. And in this context, that means a lot of the innovation is in the interaction design. It works very well with kids, and that’s because it has been thought through and tested a lot, but you can steal that interaction pattern quite quickly. It’s difficult to come up with the thing that works, but once we have done it, it’s then easy to be copied, and that’s why we have to spend a little longer on it now to ensure we don’t get copied on absolutely everything that we do.

Newnham: How do you combat this?
Jeffery: Two things. One is the long-term brand building, consistently delivering good stuff and building a brand through that. I think the strongest thing we can have is personal recommendation. It takes quite a good few products in a row before one might recognize that this brand exists and that it consistently does pretty good stuff. That takes a while to achieve.

The other thing is tactics. Buying ads and cross-promoting works well for us, but that only works if you are already doing well. It’s a spiraling effect, so once you do well, your cross-promotion does even better, and if you don’t do well, absolutely nothing’s going to happen, and everyone knows that. The difficulty is just getting into that upward spiral so it starts working.

Newnham: As part of your marketing strategy, you make your apps free for a period of time. What impact does that have on future sales?
Jeffery: It has a big impact. Generally, giving things away goes against the traditional sales logic — that is, if you give something away for free, then consumers perceive it to be worth nothing because it’s for free, so therefore they wouldn’t want to buy it. That may be true traditionally-speaking, but that’s not true in the App Store. So, that’s a big part of our marketing — being generous. We’re downloaded more than a million times a month, which is quite a lot, but Apple is selling more iPads and iPhones than that, so we’re not even catching up with the size of the market yet. And this is just one platform, so we definitely have room to grow.

We also see a spike in our other app downloads when we do this. I don’t know if that would be the case for anything, but since we have a branded approach, it works very well for us.

Newnham: What does the future hold for Toca Boca?
Jeffery: It’s big. We’re thinking like a toy company; that’s the analogy we use. We are building a big, strong brand that can incorporate a lot of things. We’re looking at a few acquisitions to broaden what we can do — take the learnings we have had so far and see if we can apply them in other areas.

I don’t think we are going to digitize all play, and it wasn’t our goal, either. It’s just a new way to play, so it has its benefits and its drawbacks. Obvious benefits are that it’s portable, so we do very well on airplanes or dinners, for that matter — situations where parents need to occupy their children. Kids get super-bored after fifteen minutes at a restaurant, whereas parents want to sit for another two hours. Bringing your Lego kit to the restaurant is a little tricky, and so maybe an iPad is more convenient. But, of course, there is also a time and a place.

Newnham: You write an annual review on your blog. How do you want it to read at the end of this year?
Jeffery: It’s weird to think anyone reads it! It would be fun if we had manifested in other ways, if we did something else. I would like us to be more international and reach more people in terms of other platforms.

We have to prepare to go up against the big boys. We shall be seeing how digital toy companies grow up and what we can become. It’s a very exciting time for us right now.