00:00well Terry we are so excited to hear more about your business and can't wait for you to tell us
00:16more so go ahead and jump in okay thank you so when my kids were little I remember how all of
00:25my mom friends and I would get when we would find a great black toy we would call each other saying
00:30hey girl guess what I found when we came across winter window plings that had a black family on
00:36them or toys and books that represented our kids when we found those things we knew we had found
00:41something special that would also make our children feel both special and seen whether in the toy owl
00:47or the toy box black children deserve to see themselves possibly represented in these spaces
00:53hello my name is Terry Nichelle Bradley and I am a mother of four equity and play advocate and the
00:59founder and CEO of brown toy box we create educational products that center and celebrate
01:05black children ages 4 to 11 because the toy box is where children first begin to develop their
01:11imagination and belief about who they are and what they want to be I wanted to create a business that
01:18encouraged them to explore learning but through fun and play we're building brown toy box to
01:23compete with the 27 billion dollar toy industry of which blacks spend five billion dollars annually
01:29and yet remain virtually unrepresented in almost every category except for dolls launched as a steam
01:35kit in 2017 now brown toy box is evolving into a full-scale toy company this fall we launch our
01:42first line leading with characters our families have come to love from our kits that a DC Academy crew
01:48of toys include early learning games impulse buy activities and books that DC means curious in
01:54Swahili and we are proud to create amazing products that cultivate curiosity while your parents will love
02:00this getting kids offline off laptops off the phones and just playing on the floor we expect this year to
02:08close around 260 thousand dollars those cells are primarily from our DTC subscription steam kits that sell for
02:1534.99 with the launch of the games and books now the market expansion the repackaging of the kits for
02:21retail and the plastics we currently have in prototype uh now for a spring release we are projecting revenue
02:28just under half a million dollars for 2021 we plan to super serve the southeast and grow our presence in
02:34the top 10 black markets we are planning an aggressive marketing we have appearances on QVC HSN and a feature in
02:41Inc magazine all for Q4 we are taking the DC Academy toys to New York Toy Fair in February to meet with
02:48retailers and toy licensees we just landed our first major investment uh which we plan to hire where we
02:54have some gaps and with this capital we plan to invest in product development testing and packaging we have
03:02an amazing team great advisors and we're moving the needle we are growing exponentially and we hope to soon be the
03:08reason that the moms and dads that you know are calling each other saying hey guess what i just found in
03:15target thank you all right thank you i i heard that at the end look what we found it thank you appreciate
03:28the shout out um we're gonna go into some questions now and before that i'd just like to say i love how you
03:36led with black children deserve to be seen as special and seen in the toy aisle and beyond so first and
03:44foremost like passionate about that passionate about seeing us in the aisle so great there um talk to
03:53me more about your forward-looking vision for your brand you mentioned target so you mentioned math but
04:01what what are you thinking about in terms of scaling over the next let's say two to five years and where
04:08you want to see your brand yeah absolutely so i definitely see um so so right now our our product is
04:16sold um just through our own channel through our you know our marketplace and through our kits and those
04:22kind of things we definitely see ourselves going into specialty retail we see ourselves also going into
04:28education supply stores wholesale and then the thing that i'm most excited about is licensing right so
04:36one of our key advisors is the president of licensing international and she's really helping us think
04:41through how do we license out these characters um and our and our products for media for all of these for
04:48games and all of these different avenues where there's just so much white space when it comes to
04:54representation for black children and we want to be the company to be there first we've been in this
04:59work since 2017 so we're not new to this because of the social unrest we're not new to this because of
05:05you know coba 19 we really crafted um crafted carved out a really um an important space here for us and
05:13our parents believe in what we're doing and we just want to be able to amplify our visibility and our work
05:19uh terry amazing presentation i'm extremely excited about your product this speaks to me personally
05:28and my mom was one of those moms for sure uh calling all the other moms uh my question is around your
05:35team trying to understand who all is uh in the su in the soup with you so who do you have on your team
05:41and how do they uh function and add value to your team absolutely so um you know i think first and
05:49foremost we're probably where a lot of small businesses startups are you know we've got to
05:54get people who are super passionate about our vision on board on our team because we don't have
05:59a lot of money to pay them right but with that i was able to build the most phenomenal people so we've
06:06got um a one of my toy designers he has worked with mattel and hasbro and horizons and you know his
06:15thing was when i reached out to him i was like i don't know if you know what we're paying
06:18he's like i don't care i've been wanting to do this work and all the experience that i've had
06:23has led me to this moment um and where we have some of the other gaps we've really been able to
06:28um mitigate with reaching out to um universities so i've got mit working on a team of students at
06:36mit working on some of our technology that we're infusing into some of the instance some of the um
06:41coding and um game development of character games i've got emory university helping me with the
06:47marketing i've got georgia tech working with supply chain so wherever i can't do it myself i find
06:54means to get the right people in place and people are just really passionate about this work and they
06:59really believe in the vision well uh i certainly believe in the vision too uh my wife and i have
07:07worked uh for a uh for for a very long time very hard to make sure that uh our uh our daughter and our
07:14sons see themselves in the right spaces in the right places so uh i couldn't uh i couldn't i
07:19couldn't be more enthusiastic about what you're building um tell me about tell me about uh the
07:25curriculum how are you uh how are you thinking about uh what should go in the boxes what the sequence of
07:31learning is how does that how does that inform the experience yeah so um we base our kits on common core
07:41we have a um we have a curriculum advisor that helps us so if we're doing something around
07:47architecture our um our curriculum advisor will say this is the standard for this age group so it's
07:53very it's very much standards based and then as we grow it go into toys we're taking our same advisor
07:59and she's helping us really to kind of say at six years old these are the things if we're going to be
08:04talking about architecture these are the things that the kids should be learning these are the skill set
08:09these are the things about a child's hand or you know the the cognitive abilities all of that so we
08:15are working with educators on building out our products so i can say this is cute i love it i love
08:20it but i want it to really be something educational so we're super proud of the of the first wave of
08:26toys that we've got coming out we're introducing introducing children to you know black art that you
08:32know they should know like famous artists we're going to introduce the marine biology and all of this stuff
08:37is really going to be standards based so super excited about that yeah thank you you're welcome
08:46so unless there are any other questions from my fellow judges um i think we'll wrap up but as as we
08:52conveyed uh this is phenomenal um what you were building how you are building it the passion that you
08:58are bringing to what you are building um is what the world needs not just our children but what the world
09:03needs and so uh an experiential experiential education uh is absolutely going to be how
09:08people sort of connect uh not just seeing themselves in spaces and places but seeing what
09:13they need to know and and and and engaging with it very differently so um you're off to the races uh
09:20we we wish you nothing but uh luck and success and uh i can't wait to buy one
09:24one well thank you and i i i i can't wait for you to see what we have in stores that's amazing love it
09:32good luck all right thank you all
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