M agic and mystery have always been an intriguing premise for both adults and children – a thought which inspired the imaginations of Chris Barnardo and Richard Blakesley when they set up The Wand Company in 2009. Launching their range of unique remote-control devices with ‘Kymera’ a lifelike, button-less magic wand, the pair have gone on to produce a range of collectable designs including the Star Trek flip-up communicator, and Dr Who’s Sonic Screwdriver. Adviser spoke to Chris about how they have managed to create such a successful brand within the highly competitive home entertainment industry. What made you decide to start your own business and how easy was it to get things off the ground? I have always been happiest running my own company having started a London-based design agency in the 1980s and a Venture Capital (VC) funded display manufacturing company in the early 2000s. However, I wanted to blend the two disciplines and build a company that developed, designed and manufactured consumer electronics products. I had a good idea for a product and approached a friend to begin developing it but it was really tough starting out because we needed money to cut tooling and buy stock. Our requirements weren’t enough to interest a VC but we needed more than we personally had to invest, so we offered our friends and family a chance to loan us money in return for interest, rapid repayment and an ongoing royalty. The deal took about six months to put together and we raised £75,000, which was enough to get us going. We paid the money back within 18 months, and with the ongoing royalties, each investor has approximately doubled their original investment.
You appeared on Dragons’ Den and were offered funding by all five Dragons. What are your memories of that? It was an exciting episode and I am very proud of how we did in the Den. Although we were offered money by all the Dragons and accepted Duncan Bannatyne’s offer in the Den, in the end we didn’t follow through on it and so have had no involvement with him since. Ultimately it has not been material in the growth of our business, not least because a large part of our profit comes from exports, in places where Dragons’ Den is not known. What were the lessons you learnt in the formative years of the business? • Keep it lean. Initially we worked from home offices, we did everything ourselves (and mostly still do) from website development, to product design, to customer care. • Build a good relationship with your retailers and your end customers. • Focus on making high quality products. • Understand all the costs of developing and bringing your products to the market so that you know how much real profit you are making. • Don’t overstock the market for a short-term gain. It hurts your retail customers, ruins your product and spoils your relationship with the end user: the (potentially loyal) person who actually buys your product and makes everything else possible.
Can you tell us a bit about how the range has developed? Why you chose the first pieces to make, and how you came to produce items like the Sonic Screwdrivers? I had built a website of craft projects (www.dadcando.com) and one of the most downloaded projects was my “make your own wizard’s wand”. With the success of Harry Potter I thought there was a market for a remote control wand that could appear to do real magic. I showed the idea to my old friend and colleague Richard Blakesley who is a genius and together we made a prototype of a wand which was universal, meaning that you could wave it and it would remotely control things like the television and music systems around the home. One of our early retail customers was Forbidden Planet in London. Our wand was already selling and the buyer there commented that our technology would work perfectly inside a Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver and suggested that we approach the BBC for a Doctor Who licence. This made sense and the BBC were very receptive to our pitch, plus the license was less expensive than we had thought it would be! We knew that if we were going to make a licensed product such as a sonic screwdriver, we had to make sure that it was very accurate, so we set about finding the best reference of the actual TV prop that we were going to copy, eventually borrowing it from David Tennant (the Tenth Doctor). Other Sonic Screwdrivers followed, and we realised that there was a niche in the market for highly accurate replicas which also had useful, real-world functions, that were made from authentic-feeling materials, and priced somewhere between a cheap toy and the stratospherically expensive hand-built replicas. From that point on, one of the most difficult things we have had to do as a business is choose the next hero product to invest our valuable time in developing. Many of the obvious potential properties are already licensed to other massive toy manufacturers and although there are many other opportunities available, the majority will never be able to find a big enough audience at the £100 to £150 price range that our products need to sell at, to recover the development costs and be profitable for us.
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