Hasbro: A Peek Inside the Toy Chest

Hasbro is a leading toy and game company, initially founded in 1923 by Henry and Hillel Hassenfeld. Hasbro delivers engaging brand experiences for global audiences through toys, consumer products, gaming and entertainment, with a portfolio of over 1,800 iconic brands including Magic The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, NERF, Transformers, PLAY-DOH and Peppa Pig just to name a few. Hasbro’s mission is to entertain and connect generations of fans through the wonder of storytelling and exhilaration of play.

After first producing pencil boxes, as well as toy doctor and nurse kits, Hasbro’s first big hit was their “Mr Potato Head” toy which hit the shelves in 1952. But, the company has been making toys for their subsidiary companies for even longer than that. Senior design engineer Chris Whipple explains further: “So Hasbro itself is 100 years old, but we have some of our subsidiaries that are much older than that. So over here on display, you'll see we have the Checkered Game of Life. This was released by Milton Bradley, one of our subsidiaries, in 1860. Off to our left here, we see a lot of these display cases with a number of different artifacts from Hasbro's history. Starting with Potato Head, which was the first, TV commercial advertised toy. The potato wasn't included. The box just came with the accessories so the eyes, the ears, the moustaches.”

As toys began to evolve, other kids’ media like cartoons and comic books started to have an impact on how children interacted with toys. “[In] the 1970s and the 1980s, there was a big shift in terms of story driven play. We went from having, you know, the potato head, which didn't really have much of a story behind it. But for brands like G. I. Joe and transformers, we had comic books, we had Saturday morning cartoons and that elevated your play experience because you weren't going to the store and buying a generic army soldier, you were buying Duke. And I saw Duke do all these amazing things on the Saturday morning on the cartoon, and I read about all these amazing things that he did in the comics and I'm applying that to my play. Same thing with Transformers. You weren't getting a toy robot. You were getting Optimus Prime leader of the Autobots, right?”

Originally released in 1998, Hasbro’s Furby toy went through a period of being a "must-have" toy following its holiday season launch. Over 40 million Furbies were sold during the three years of its original production, with 1.8 million sold in 1998, and 14 million in 1999. “It was THE hot toy. We sold a ton of them…and that really kicked off the entire kind of robotic toy space. It was a really simple mechanism. The toy itself will rock back and forth on its base. It opens and closes its mouth. It opens and closes its eyes, and it can wiggle its ears. So all of that motion and all of that can be almost independently controlled by a single motor. And that was a huge breakthrough in efficiency that allowed us to cost reduce this down to a point where it was a consumable robotic toy.”

Hasbro puts a lot of work into engineering it’s toys. Chris Wipple expands upon this and why he loves working at Hasbro: “I personally love just how diverse the, the skill set is under the roof we have here. just look at how much different things that go into the Furby, right? You have the soft goods engineers, electronic engineers, animatronics engineers doing the robotics, and the mechanical engineers doing the CAD work, and the voice actors, the programmers, the designers, and they're so incredibly talented. Everybody here, they're all very specialized, but they all do their job really, really well, they're all amazing people, and it's been an absolute blast to work with all of them on all of these products. It never ceases to amaze me how much talent is under the roof of this building.

Onshape is the first and only cloud-native product development platform that delivers professional-grade CAD capabilities with next-generation product data management (PDM), powering agile design processes at lower costs. “By streamlining the importing, conversion, and editing process of meshes, Hasbro engineers have more time for design innovation. Real time collaboration… allows multiple engineers to work on the same model simultaneously, regardless of their location, ensuring that everyone is always working with the most up to date version. Team members can [also] instantly see changes made by others. Enabling quick feedback, iterative improvements, which speeds up the development process.”