Bulb Girl knows how inspirations can be undervalued. Wearing an oversized bulb on her head, the cartoon character created by Yeh Shin-hung, better known in the business as A-Lei, wanders around the illustrator's fictitious world retrieving inspirations embodied as bulbs abandoned in a garbage dump by those who fail to develop them into great ideas. What she will do with these discarded ideas nobody knows, for while Yeh has worked on his graphic novel centering on the inspiration collector for more than a year, he has yet to figure out how it should end.
Yeh is not going to give up; like Bulb Girl, he is aware of the value of creative ideas like his as yet unfinished and unpublished book. Last year the bespectacled 31-year-old illustrator, who is working full-time as an art designer for a publishing house, tried to further explore his creativeness by adding a new dimension to the half-finished story. He decided to produce another character--On On, a dog with a boxy body carrying a light bulb on its back--as the protagonist's companion. Not only a flat image, this new character is also a three-dimensional toy figure, which took first prize in the first Taiwan Designer Toy Awards last year. Yeh hopes that one day all the characters in his book will have their three-dimensional counterparts.
Yeh's interest in making designer toys is shared by many other illustrators, commercial art designers and cartoonists, as evidenced by the launch of the competition. According to the Designers Association of Taiwan (DAT), the organizer of the event, more than 200 contestants submitted blueprints for toys to the competition last year; the finalists had to actually make real toy figures to prove the feasibility of their blueprints before the winners were selected.
Welcome to the rapidly expanding world of designer toys. Whereas all toys need a designer, not all toys are designer toys. Most toys are, in fact, manufactured in their millions by giant toy companies, many of them as tie-ins with blockbuster movies and TV shows.
Designer toys, on the other hand, are created by real artists who see toy figures as a new medium of artistic expression. They are usually made by small companies, often in limited editions, and as a result can be far more expensive than their mass-produced cousins. They can also embody strikingly original, even subversive, concepts seldom found in mass-market figures.
The trend for designer toys started in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, says Mark Chang, owner of a Taipei shop designing and selling toys. "Back then Hong Kong designers such as Michael Lau for the first time brought toys into the art world. They blurred the line between artworks and toys by exhibiting them in galleries." When a Hong Kong toy retailer organized a quarterly toy exposition called Toycon, starting in 2000, the former British colony soon emerged as the world center for designer toys.
"The popularity of capsule toys in this period helped the rise of designer toys in Taiwan," Chang says. The concept of selling cheap, small toys from vending machines originated in the United States in the 1920s. But in the 1980s the Japanese started putting the toys in capsules--often egg-shaped. Over the past three years capsule toys have made phenomenal inroads into Taiwan. The marketing strategy of giving small toys as free gifts to customers adopted by Taiwan's ubiquitous convenience stores in the past two years has also had a dramatic effect on the development of designer toys. Together with capsule toys, Chang believes they help enhance people's interest in collecting toys, including designer ones, which are both more sophisticated and more expensive.
In the eyes of toy designers, the figures they create are not toys in the traditional sense. They are not playthings for children, but collectible items, mostly made of vinyl, with unique designs available on the market in a limited number. "In this field, top designers are like stars, capable of attracting a large following," says Sway Huang, vice chairman of DAT.
Frequently the design elements and motifs have their roots in pop culture and street art. Some of the figures have jointed limbs and are posable, therefore also falling in the category of action figures. The designer may create a model with a single appearance, but sometimes he or she uses it as an embryonic form on which various versions with different hairstyles, accessories and costumes are based. These various avatars, each of them a unique work with a different value, can be the creations of the model designers themselves or the result of cooperation between the original designer and other designers, artists or illustrators.
"They're actually for grown-ups, or 'kidults,' an adult who enjoys being a child by collecting toys," says Chang. Sometimes called urban vinyl because of their popularity in urban areas such as Hong Kong, a designer toy has a production run of only a few hundred or thousand. Unlike mass-produced toys, their values vary according to their age and their creators' name recognition.
"I prefer to call them 'concept models'; they're art works, not toys," says Chiang Chen-tai, a Taiwanese cartoonist well-known for his science-fiction comic strips, who uses the pen name Push. In 2000 Chiang launched his first "concept model" and is now working with Flying Cat, a Hong Kong company which helps produce and market designer toys by two Taiwanese, including Chiang, and 13 other designers across the globe. So far Chiang has designed seven models, all of them with looks reminiscent of his two-dimensional work.
Whatever such figures are called, Mark Chang soon saw their appeal was growing, as did others. After several visits to the toy fair in Hong Kong, Chang, an architecture major, finally set up his own company in Taipei in 2004. Originally an amateur toy designer, he now not only retails imported designer toys in a Taipei shop but is trying to build his own brand. Cooperating with designers based in Malaysia, Singapore and the United States, as well as those working locally in Taiwan, Chang is now promoting PhalanX at home and abroad, one of the few Taiwanese brands in this field.
Gamania, Taiwan's major on-line games publishing and operating company, is also aware of the business potential of designer toys. In 2004, the company launched a new brand, Gama On My Back (GOMB) and started to design and market three figures modeled on the characters of Hero: 108 , an animation produced by the company in 2003 based on the classical Chinese novel All Men Are Brothers. GOMB is now becoming Gamania's sub-brand for these figures and those to come.
Chiang, whose creations are currently being sold in markets outside Taiwan through Flying Cat, is planning to start his own brand, Push Comic. At present, his concept models are available in Taiwan only as freebies given away with products such as printers and fashion magazines.
As designer toys have gained more attention in Taiwan, two events have given the genre a significant boost. Through the efforts of Monster Taipei, a toy retailer run by Jen Huang, and a group of seven toy aficionados like Huang and Mark Chang, the first Taipei Toy Festival took place in 2004 and the following year saw the first Designer Toy Awards.
This year more than 40 designers from around the world participated in the festival, along with several leading foreign creators and retailers of limited-edition boutique toys such as Medicom Toy from Japan and Kidrobot from the United States. "Their participation means the fair is starting to attract attention from outside Taiwan," Huang says with pride.
Can Taiwan become a major player in the designer-toy market? Back in the 1970s when people started to dub the island Kingdom of Toys, Taiwan's toy manufacturing sector reached its peak. It has declined rapidly as China rose as a global manufacturing center in the 1990s. Now Taiwan has a chance to recover some lost ground, since the value of designer toys lies mostly in their creativity--although the vast majority of designer toys are, again, manufactured in China.
But the road to success is still quite bumpy for local designers like Yeh. The illustrator has yet to join those in his planned picture book who leave their underdeveloped inspirations in the dump, but he is afraid of losing passion for his interest sooner or later because of an over-investment of time and energy with--so far--too little return.
Yeh's concerns are hardly exceptional given that locally designed figures account for less than 3 percent of the total value of toys sold by Mark Chang's company. "The domestic market is expanding, but very slowly," says Chang. "Taiwanese love mass -produced figures with a cute appearance, but they have yet to appreciate designer toys, many of which have a strong character, rather than cute looks." His PhalanX productions perform better in international markets but designer toy collectors, no matter where they are, still tend to go for big names, and big names, Chang says, are few in Taiwan, though given the short history of the genre here, this is no reason to give up hope.
The key is brand-building; the simple business equation of the limited-edition toy is the greater the brand recognition, the higher the price at which the toys can sell.
Bearing this in mind, Chang is careful when deciding to cooperate with designers. "Their works must be very impressive at first sight. And there should be depth to these toys. This means the designer must already have established his name as, for example, a graphic novel author, so that the collector can find more fun in the toys by appreciating the designer's style in his other creations," he says.
Meanwhile, Chang uses strategies to increase brand exposure and highlight the uniqueness of his productions. For instance, he displays models in his shop like works of art, standing alone on elevated platforms. Every six weeks on average, his shop serves as a platform to which designers from home and abroad are invited to exhibit and interact both with each other and with local toy lovers. Chang hopes he can thereby effectively introduce his brand and Taiwanese designers to local and international toy fans.
Yeh Shin-hung needs to finish his graphic novel so that its characters' flat images and their corresponding solid figures can jointly enhance their creator's name recognition and heighten each other's values. "The toys are lifeless if you don't develop a good story for them. You have to make the market anticipate them," says Sway Chang, presently an advisor to Pumpkin Creative, a company responsible for promoting the illustrator and other designers in various fields.
Chang points out that Taiwan has many untapped resources from which to create unique designer toys with a rich cultural content. For example, there are the cartoon characters created by corporations to promote their products. "Some have tremendous recognition, accumulated over decades, such as the doll of Tatung Co. (which produces home appliances). They have cultural resonance as yet unexploited by toy designers."
As Jen Huang notes, the rich human resources in Taiwan's design industry is another reason for optimism. "I'm often impressed by the creativity of young designers. But they tend to feel inadequate in the face of big names from Hong Kong and Japan. They should be more confident," says Huang.
Indeed, in the creative industries, self-confidence is the prerequisite to success whereas lack of it usually leads to blind imitation. "Taiwan's designers still tend to create works with features resembling those of Hong Kong toys," Yeh observes. Aware of this phenomenon, he often reminds himself of the unconscious tendency to follow other people's lead. "A good designer doesn't necessarily have rich experience, but his or her work must have a strong personal style."