🤝 Meet Ronnen Harary. He’s the co-founder and chairman of Spin Master, the $2.2 billion Canadian toy company behind Paw Patrol, Bakugan, and many more childhood staples. We sat down with Ronnen to talk about his new book, No Experience Necessary, the advantages of being an entrepreneur in your 20s, and the lessons you learn from turning down a $100 million movie deal.
How does a political science education from Western translate into building a company like Spin Master?
The subject matter didn't matter at all. But the journey of being in university laid the foundation for the company. If I hadn't gone to Western, the company wouldn't exist. It gave me the chance to test my partnership with [my co-founder] Anton. After first year, we both had to pay for school, so we were selling fertilizer door to door up in London, which was a gruelling job. After that, we started selling posters at school. That built our working relationship and gave us the confidence that whatever came next, we'd do it together.
Our third partner, Ben Verity, was in business school with Anton. All the relationships got formed at university. I'm a huge believer that being able to learn is a privilege, and it gives you more than education. It gives you the ability to form incredible relationships and bonds with people in a low-key, low-pressure environment.
Where did the idea come from for your first toy?
Our first product was called Earth Buddies. I saw a two-page spread in an Israeli newspaper about a similar product that was like a softball wrapped in nylon, filled with sawdust, with grass seed on top, and squiggly eyes and a happy face glued on. Once you submerge it in water, it grows grass for hair — like a new-age Chia Pet. The article said they were selling 300,000 pieces in a population of 10 million. I thought: how much more could we sell in a population of 300 million?
I went to Anton and he thought I was crazy, but it only took me two weeks to convince him. We agreed to make 5,000 pieces for Mother's Day. I got my brother-in-law involved to help figure out manufacturing, and my sister designed the original packaging and logo. We hired people from a homeless shelter, and got the first 5,000 pieces made, and started selling them.
When did that product start gaining traction?
A couple of months later, we got a chance to pitch Kmart in the U.S. I drove down to Detroit for a 9 a.m. meeting — didn't even stay in a hotel to save money, left around 3:30 in the morning. I was 23 years old. I did a 30-minute pitch to the rep and he told me, "I'm not the buyer for this product.” I asked him to just tell me who the buyer was. He came back with a name written on a piece of paper.
I took my box of 24 Earth Buddies and started walking around Kmart's headquarters looking for this person. I finally found her office, did a 30-second pitch, and she gave me an appointment for 3:30 that afternoon. As soon as I walked into the meeting, I noticed seven competitors' products already sitting on the corner of her desk. I immediately made the call to drop my price from $2.65 to $1.65. I gave her the pitch, told her about the first 5,000 pieces, the Zellers order, all of it. She grabbed the vendor book and said, "Fill this out. I'm ordering 48,000 pieces from you, and if it does well, I'll order half a million more for Christmas." Just like that. That set the whole company off. We ended up producing a million pieces that year.
Why do you believe your twenties are the best time to start a business?
First, no one sees you as competition — everyone's rooting for you. I remember calling Alan Hassenfeld, one of the founders of Hasbro, in our early days, and he'd take the call and give us advice, because he was excited about young people entering the toy industry. He didn't see us as competition, he wanted us to win.
There's also what I call the power of not knowing, which I write about in the book. With one of our first toys, Air Hogs, Hasbro and Mattel had actually passed on the product before it came to us. When the inventor showed it to us in the park, I was 25 and having so much fun flying it that I thought: if I'm having this much fun at 25, imagine a ten-year-old. We thought briefly about the downsides, but only for about a minute, and then decided we'd figure it out. There's an advantage to being a little less risk-averse — a little naive. Your brain isn't yet filled with conventional ways of thinking, so you're tapping into your own intuition.
The other thing about your twenties is the zeitgeist. You're practically living it. Your ability to tap into what's happening in culture, music, fashion, and how people spend their time creates white-space business opportunities. Your twenties are also the first time you have real agency to actualize how you see the world, rather than just observing it while living at home and going to school.
Did you ever change that approach as you got older?
I’ll tell you a story about Bakugan. I spent three years trying to get a live-action film made, and finally got Universal to agree to greenlight a $100 million film in 2011. Conventional wisdom in the toy industry said you could relaunch a franchise after it declined if you waited seven years. Ben and I figured doing the film would delay the relaunch by two or three years, and we didn't know if the film would even revive the franchise, so we decided not to do the film. I'm probably the only person in Hollywood who's turned down a $100 million live-action film, and I did that based on conventional wisdom about relaunch timing.
It was one of my worst decisions; the franchise would probably be in much better shape today, maybe with five films made by now. That's conventional wisdom applied with the benefit of hindsight, which is always 20/20.
You've said that part of the success is thinking like a seven-year-old. How do you do that effectively without the obvious drawbacks of thinking like a seven-year-old?
I mean that specifically in the toy industry. When you're playing with a prototype, you have to ask yourself: is there wish fulfillment, a moment of magic, good feedback, something that sparks wonder? But you have to marry that with the science: what's the history of similar products, what's done well or poorly, what's in the market now, what's the competition, can you hit the right price point?
You can have a great product, but if you can't hit the right price, consumers won't buy it. It's art and science together, but you can't get to the science part unless you've tapped into the seven-year-old first. Of course, we've had plenty of failures too. You need that initial magic, then you apply the conventional analysis on top, but the seven-year-old isn't always right.
Your PAW Patrol franchise is now in 160 countries and has grossed $14 billion in sales. What was the secret to the success of that franchise?
PAW Patrol was born at the lowest point in Spin Master's history. We went from a billion dollars in sales down to $450 million in two years. We had to let go of 350 people, and had to restructure and recapitalize the business. That's when PAW Patrol was born. It came from a collective of incredible Canadians — and one British guy — who came together to tell the story and create the characters with love. None of them were thinking about PAW Patrol becoming a franchise in 160 countries, it was about making kids connect with the characters and making them aspirational. I was cautiously optimistic going in, but it exceeded all my expectations.
We weren't banking on it as a silver bullet. Bakugan was our first TV show and did great, but our three shows after that did badly. You couldn't give the products away at retail. So when PAW Patrol came along, we knew we had to be serious about capital and time allocation — attention to detail had to be a 20 out of 10.
My real signal that it was working came after launch in 2013 — I'd check Instagram for how many people were making PAW Patrol birthday cakes for their kids. A birthday cake is one of the most intimate things in a kid's life, so if a family brings your characters into that moment, something good is happening.
What was the inspiration for starting your non-profit Toy Movement?
I'm very passionate about displaced people, because my own family was displaced from Bulgaria in the late '40s. The Nazis and then the Soviet Union took my family's property and businesses after hundreds of years in the country. Both sets of my grandparents lost everything and left with virtually nothing. My parents grew up poor and eventually made their way to Canada. In 2014, at the height of the Syrian Civil War, with refugees pouring into Jordan, I had the idea to get toys over to them. I was on a trip to Israel and Jordan and met the Canadian ambassador, Bruno Saccomani. I told him the idea, and he said he could handle it. We shipped over 50,000 toys for Christmas.
We brought new products — PAW Patrol toys, not close-out stock — and gave them out at shelters, churches, wherever kids could find shelter. I also toured the Zaatari refugee camp with Bruno and learned about "child-friendly spaces" — a couple of portables inside camps stocked with toys, pencil crayons, colouring sets, puzzles, and games, giving kids a place to escape the camp's hardship. We now send kits of toys and activities like balls and Frisbees to thousands of kids around the world through that program. Since then, we've run a mission almost every year — Uganda, South Africa, Nicaragua. I personally led a mission to Ukraine in 2021, and one to northern Iraq in 2018. We've done 25 missions total, giving out millions of toys.
Where do you see the future of play going? Is it less digital than people may fear in the age of the iPad kid?
I think kids still love toys. There's something about physically holding a toy — the feedback you get from it is unlike anything else, or what you can build with something like Lego, taking it from a small block to a whole three-dimensional character. I don't think that gets replaced. If you'd asked me in 2011–13 when the iPad came out, I'd have guessed more play would shift toward it. But over a decade later, the toy market has stayed as robust as it was then. The toy business isn't a growth industry — it has other challenges, like low birth rates — but the desire for physical objects and imaginative play, whether action figures, construction, activities, or plush, is timeless.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
