Nov-26-2009

UFC and Jakks Pacific – A Match Made in Action Figure Heaven

By Thomas Gerbasi

You could call it an early Christmas for the big kids, as the release of Jakks Pacific’s first two waves of UFC action figures on toy shelves over the last seven weeks has been greeted with the type of glee from fight fans that is usually reserved for the morning of December 25th.

It was just the type of reception Enrique Ruvalcaba, Jakks Pacific’s Director of Marketing, was hoping for.

“I had really high expectations,” Ruvalcaba told UFC.com. “I knew the potential for the brand was huge, but I was also conservative in our production and forecasting. I think now that we’ve launched, it’s doing great.”

Visit any Toys R Us or Walmart and look at the action figure aisles, and you’ll see what he’s talking about, as the first two waves of figures (16 individual figures in all), UFC, WEC, and PRIDE championship belts, and Octagon playsets are being scooped up as quick as they’re being put on shelves, with many items not even making it to the pegs as intrepid collectors intercept store employees before they unload their stock early in the morning. And when Walmart gives the seal of approval, you know you’re on to something.

“We are very excited to bring Jakks’ full line-up of UFC action figures, playsets and role play belts to Walmart at an incredible value for UFC fans,” said Walmart VP of Toys Laura Phillips. “We anticipate working with Jakks on more exciting UFC merchandise in the future, including exclusive products available only at Walmart.”

Looking from the outside, and considering the ever-growing success of the UFC over the last couple years, you would figure that action figures would be the next logical step and a no-brainer when it comes to success. But the toy business isn’t the same as it was when many of us were kids, and when you’re talking about the investment of time, resources, and money to create and market any new brand, a company like Jakks could have been rolling the dice in hoping that the same people that have made the UFC a pay-per-view juggernaut will do the same for a new toy line. But the California based company, which has been doing this sort of thing successfully for nearly 15 years, didn’t get here by accident, so they certainly did their research before adding the UFC license to a list of brands that have included WWE, Rocky, Spongebob Squarepants, Taylor Swift, and Hannah Montana.

“We have to do as much due diligence as we can,” said Ruvalcaba. “We were fortunate in that we had a similar brand in the past in WWE. Some people don’t like the comparison, but from a toy perspective it is very similar because these are articulated figures that are fighting / combat based. I know WWE is fake, as opposed to UFC, which is real, but there was a lot of overlap, and we tried to identify what percentage of our previous business we could do with this brand. We try to look at awareness as well and what’s going on with the brand. For example, the pay-per-view stats. We know what WWE does on a pay-per-view basis per event and we know what UFC does per event, and the numbers are huge. And we know that the brand has grown phenomenally since 2005 and The Ultimate Fighter, and there’s a lot of passionate fan support, so we definitely knew that it was popular. Our challenge was figuring out whether that popularity was going to translate into toy sales. A brand can be popular and that may work for sales of DVDs or apparel, but it may not work for toys. We had to really sit back and figure out if it had all the ingredients that we needed it to have. One of the ones we talked about a lot is consumer demographics. For example, a brand like Star Wars has been around for 30 years, and we know that there’s a huge percentage – Anywhere from 50 to 70 percent – of the people buying Star Wars are adult men. We know that UFC isn’t the most “kiddie” brand – like Pokemon or Sesame Street – so we know it’s not gonna be 95 percent five year old kids, but that’s not our forte; our forte is being able to address the collectors and really giving them something that they would want to buy. That demographic really fit to our expertise. We did the Rocky line before this, WWE, and they really fit that profile. All in all, we just had to look really hard and try to figure out whether that demographic was going to translate into sales.”

So far, it’s been mission accomplished, especially if you look at how fast product is being eaten up at retail and how high certain figures are going for on online auction sites like eBay. And again, it goes back to the makeup of the toy industry circa 2009, where the age of potential buyers for collectible action figures is a lot older than those who were picking up a Boba Fett or Han Solo almost 30 years ago.

“The one criticism of the toy industry that I was aware of before I jumped into it was something called age compression,” explains Ruvalcaba. “And it’s essentially that kids are growing up faster than they were when we were kids. And it’s not really that they’re growing up, but that they have so many alternative things that we didn’t have – computers, cell phones, mp3 players, video games. When I was an eight year old kid, I still wanted to be playing with action figures. An eight year old kid now wants to be playing video games. So the market has seen a general age compression where consumers are getting older younger, and for us, it’s actually great, and it’s why we pursue some of these collectible brands. It’s because it doesn’t affect us as much. Obviously we want to capture the younger demographic and we want kids to buy UFC toys, but it does help us out that we have men buying these figures and blogging about them and collecting them. We’ve had to adapt to that by appealing to the older collector a little bit.”

That means rare figures like ones with the special “1 of 100” sticker, which denotes that the figure is one of the first 100 produced, or those that aren’t as prevalent in each box of figures, like Royce Gracie, Kendall Grove, and Miguel Torres in Wave 0 or Mike Swick and Cheick Kongo in Wave 1. Of course, that makes you wonder what the process is to decide what constitutes each wave of figures.

“As far as managing the mixes, that’s a little bit more challenging, but we try to give everybody somebody huge in every wave,” said Ruvalcaba. “So it wouldn’t make sense for us to put Randy (Couture), Chuck (Liddell), Anderson Silva, and (Lyoto) Machida, and everybody into Wave 1, then we have a tremendous Wave 1 and we have nobody to do in Wave 2. So we try to spread out what we call the A+ talent. We’re spreading out Rampage (Jackson), Brock (Lesnar), Chuck and BJ Penn, so every series is gonna have one A+ guys, several A guys, and then a few other figures.”

But if having the past standouts and current stars of the UFC isn’t enough, Jakks is also digging into its bag of tricks for PRIDE and WEC figures as well (Kevin Randleman and Miguel Torres being the first two examples), something very important to diehard fight fans, especially one member of that fraternity.

“I’m very confident and I feel happy to be managing this brand because I am one of those guys,” he said. “I grew up with UFC and I consider myself a diehard who would watch every single fight even if I didn’t work on this brand. It’s important for me to represent the line in the best way I can, and I think a part of that is by remembering the history. So in every wave you’re gonna see either a WEC or a PRIDE guy. Everybody who’s a big fan knows about those PRIDE fighters and of course the WEC is great for the lighter weight guys. For me, it’s also very important to put out those legends. The first one is Gracie, the second one is Evan Tanner, and we’re going to go on and on with those. We’re not gonna lose touch with that and we’re gonna do as many of the meaningful figures from the past and from other Zuffa organizations that we can.”

And for the record, let’s not forget that when it comes down to it, there are still “action” figures, meaning that there are people out there who actually open up the boxes and play with their figures, something made even easier with the real scale Octagon playset which is HUGE, cool, and comes with a requirement for some serious negotiating with the wife to display it in the house. But I digress – back to the figures, which are built for battle with an amazing amount of articulation. For those of us who did grow up on Star Wars figures, this isn’t move the arms, move the legs, and maybe the head turns. The UFC figures actually have knee caps, the wrists move, and basically, if you can pull it off in the Octagon, you can pull it off with these figures.

“One of the things that I personally hammered home with the team was to make sure that they were as authentic as possible,” said Ruvalcaba. “We’re talking about demographics and who buys what, and in order for us to appeal to collectors, they’ve got to be authentic. And that’s what the UFC wants as well. That goes from likeness, to sponsors, to articulation. The whole thing about the articulation is that we wanted to make sure you could “play” UFC. And if you’re gonna do that, you’re gonna have to choke the guy out and be able to put him in an armbar or rear naked choke and all those moves that the guys really do. So early on, we looked at articulation and previous figures that we had done, and we identified that it was really important to be able to do all the real moves that a real guy can do.”

Those “real guys” like their own figures too.

“So far the reaction from the fighters has been great,” said Ruvalcaba. “Mike Swick saw his figure, blogged about it, and he loved it. That’s great news for us. Royce Gracie was in the showroom and he saw his figure, and he loved it. It makes me happy to know that the UFC has provided an outlet for these guys to use their talents, and we’re taking that one step further. Who would have known that you could have an action figure of yourself by becoming a fighter? Ten years ago, that was unheard of. And right now these guys are so proud to have action figures and it makes me happy that we’re doing a good job representing those guys.”

Now the only problem is finding room in the house for all of them…