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The Lessons Of The Robosapien And Christmas Selling
Esquire did a timeline of the top-selling Christmas toys by year. If you click through it, you’ll notice three main themes: first, Elmo toys have won the entire market about three or four times; that’s probably best explained in this article. Second, most of the toys that won years even back into the 1990s still resonate today, be it XBox (which is undergoing a bit of a revolution) or Beanie Babies (I myself haven’t interacted with a Beanie Baby in years, but I’ve seen ’em around and assume they still resonate with people). Then there’s one toy, which won the world in 2004, that seems to resonate less these days: the Robosapien.
Mark Tilden — who was a robot consultant for the Lara Croft films — was the designer of the toy. Exact sales figures are hard to come by via Google, but this press release indicates over 5 million Robosapiens were sold. It was the first commercially-available biomorphic robot, which by my best estimates means something along the lines of modeling design elements on naturally occurring patterns. I’ll get to…
