"A Brief History of Matchbox Toys, Inc.

Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith were high school alumni, but not related, and in 1940 they happened to be both serving in the then Royal Navy. They shared the same vision of one day owning their own factory and discussed working with each other after the end of the Second World War. Finally, on June 19, 1947, they formed a partnership, Lesney Products. The name came from a combination of the founders' names, LES from the first three letters of Leslie and NEY from the last three letters of Rodney, and the word "products" was appropriate because at the time they hadn't yet figured out exactly what they were going to do. Leslie Smith was also employed by the J. Raymond Wilson Company, where he worked for some years as a confirming officer for overseas orders. He only looked after Lesney's financial records at night until "Lesney Products" grew large enough to sustain him on a full-time basis. By this time Rodney had also found work with a London engineering firm called Diecast and Machine Tools.

With about 600 pounds of cobbled together income, the young men bought an old inn called the Rifleman in Edmonton, London, along with some government surplus foundry machinery. At this point, they decided to produce stamping and casting products for industry.

Another employee, John W. Odell, also known as Jack, also employed by Diecast and Machine Tools, joined the Lesney company and contributed his unique casting skills. As subcontractors to industry, these three began producing small cast parts. Together with numerous other small businesses, they contributed to the rebuilding of London.

British business practice of taxing inventory on January 1 of each year led to a drop in orders for parts in the last two months of the year. As a result, the few Lesney employees became idle during those two months, and the company's founders envisioned changing products to make ends meet. Other small foundries had already produced some toys, as experienced by Lesney's staff, and the first such toys were produced in 1948 and were only available in small local London stores. By Christmas 1952, Lesney was producing toys for Woolworth's stores in London.

London's toy distributors didn't think much of the toys, dismissing them as "Christmas firecracker garbage". But children were the only ones who liked them, and small shopkeepers wanted more of them. By Christmas 1953, the people of Lesney recognized that there was a market for their toys, but did not yet need to establish a complete mechanism for marketing, stocking, and developing a market for the short months of the year. Instead, they went in search of agents who were interested in selling Lesney's toys. There were several well-established pre-war agents in the east end of London, and they made contact with one of them, Moko.

Moses Kohnstam was a German agent who had come to England from Nuremberg in 1900 to develop the toy industry. He specialized in packaging, storage, distribution and financial support for many small toy manufacturers, for which he was able to obtain a substantial sales discount. Moses Konstam's company was the forerunner of Moko, and the toys he sold led to his company being renamed Moko; no matter what small business supplied the products sold, they were always called Moko.

The first product Lesnie produced when he started making cast metal toys in 1948 was the Aveling Bardford diesel-powered roller. By 1953, 17 other toys had been added to the Lesney lineup. These toys with a wide range of subjects reflected the uncertainty of production in which this branch of Lesney's business was situated at the time. Mechanical animals, vehicles on wheels, and even a novelty fishing item were tried, but like a flash in the pan, none were as successful as the vehicles on wheels.

During the Korean War in 1950-1952, the British government banned the use of zinc in non-essential products, making it impossible to produce zinc-based cast metal toys. The only dolls Lesney produced during this period were the "Jumbo-the-Elephant" dolls.

During 1953, Jack O'Dell began designing smaller scale toys. The first to come out were scaled-down versions of Leslie's founding toys. These small toys were a huge success and were continued as the "1-75" series. With the gradual success of the smaller series, the original large scale toys faded from the market by 1954.

Each of Lesney's early toys was packaged in cardboard packaging with a picture of the toy, the name of the product, and sometimes the name of the distributor, "Moko. From a collector's point of view, it is more interesting to keep the packaging of the toys intact. There are already a few collectors who collect the boxes.

Richard Kohnstam, Moses Kohnstam's heir, took charge of Moko in 1953. Lesney and Richard Kohnstam entered into an agreement licensing Moko to package and distribute Lesney-made toys. Gradually, Moko became the exclusive Lesney distributor worldwide. This was the year that Lesney began producing the small 1-75 series of toys.

In 1954, Lesney produced 18 models, all of which were distributed by Moko. The "Matchbox" trademark was registered in 1953, of which Moko owned 50 percent and continued to provide distribution services and financial support to Lesney. By this time Rodney had moved to Australia and left Lesney's, with Leslie Smith and Jack O'Dell at the helm.

During 1958, Leslie Smith felt that there was a potential market for his toys in Asia, especially Japan, but Richard Constam felt differently. In order to expand the market, Leslie Smith realized that he would have to break away from Moko and have his own marketing network, and therefore, would have to buy out the other 50% of Moko's shareholding.In 1959, Leslie Smith reached an agreement to buy out Moko's 50% shareholding in Leslie Smith, and for the first time ever, Leslie Smith printed his own toy catalogs. From there, Chad Constam opened his own company, Riko, and that same year, a second catalog was produced that included the newly developed "Models of Yesteryear," now known as the YY series. Also in 1954, Fred Bronner, a New York businessman, introduced Lesney toys to the American market. He became the exclusive importer of Lesney products in the U.S. in the late 1950s, and a decade later, in 1964, Lesney Products (U.S.A.) was founded in the U.S. as an offshoot of its U.K. headquarters. Lesney received the full support of Fred Bruno's inventory, which eventually led to Fred Bruno's progression to become the first President of Lesney Products (U.S.A.).

It was not until 1969 that Fred Bronner Corporation began as Lesney Products (USA). That same year, Lesney Products was confronted with the toughest competition it had ever faced in the marketplace: the Hot Wheels cart, introduced by Mattel in the late 1960s. It was a matter of life and death for Lesney's miniature car giant in 1969, as the Matchbox car could not run on a drop track like the Hot Wheels car of the day.

The Super Speed Era (1969-1982)

It was 1969, and Lesney was under unprecedented competitive pressure from Mattel Inc.'s Hot Wheels car, which used low-friction axle technology to speed down a descending track. Lesney fought hard, then developed frictionless bearings for its own carts and debuted the "Superfast" line in the second edition of its pocket-sized catalog in 1969. Between 1970 and 1971, Lesney replaced all of its miniatures with Superfast wheels, and even the original large-scale series was redesigned and dubbed "Superkings".

In 1973, Jack O'Dell decided to step down as managing director, leaving the company in the hands of Leslie Smith. During the year, Lesney developed a number of innovative gadgets, including the "Rola-matics" series. These products were equipped with moving parts that performed a certain action when the wheels were turned (similar to the current MB-770 S.P. Gun and MB-773 Weasel). 1973 was not an auspicious year for Lesney, however. An eight-week nationwide strike, followed by strikes at Lesney's dependent distributors, forced the company to shut down. To make matters worse, however, disaster struck at the Rochford equipment plant, destroying most of the plastic parts. As a result of this series of events, the "Yesteryears" line was eventually discontinued, and it was not until 1975 that it was able to return to the model car collector market.

In 1974, Lesney entered the doll market with Fighting Furies and Disco Girls. By 1977, Lesney had 6,000 employees worldwide, and from 1977 to 1978, Lesney purchased buildings around the site to expand the design workspace and production machinery.

Lesney purchased Vogue Dolls in 1977 and AMT, a U.S. company that primarily produced plastic modeling parts, in 1978. however, the AMT division went through a number of trials and tribulations, including a major relocation from Detroit, Michigan, to Baltimore, Maryland. to Baltimore, Maryland. The AMT division was eventually sold to the Ertl Corporation in the early 1980s.

In 1980, Jack O'Dell came out of retirement to assist the declining Lesney Corporation. During the year, Lesney was barely surviving by taking out bank loans.

Also in 1980, Universal Toys president David Yeh approached Leslie Smith and Jack O'Dell about utilizing their factory facilities in the Far East to manufacture Lesney products. The Disney line was one of the first products to come out of Universal Toys' factory in the East. Some of the models were also produced in Japan, but high labor costs made production there unsustainable.

By early 1982, Lesney had incurred a $15 million operating loss. Creditors were putting pressure on the company. Negotiations to sell Lesney continued throughout 1982, and on June 11, 1982, a heartbreaking day, Lesney declared bankruptcy and went into liquidation.

Three: The Universal Era (1982-1992)

With the bankruptcy of the venerable model maker Lesney on June 11, 1982, an era of toys that had begun in 1947 came to an end. That day, a buyout group consisting of R.D. Agutter and G.T.E. Ped reorganized the company as Matchbox Toys Ltd. and tried to find a buyer. There was interest from Fisher Price (now a Mattel sub-brand, then a stand-alone brand) and Mattel, but Universal Toys, owned by David Yeh, became the official buyer of Matchbox Toys Ltd. on September 24, 1982

The purchase of Matchbox Toys Ltd. was a major step forward in the company's history.

The removal of the term "Lesney Products" from all Matchbox models took Universal several years. By 1985, the term "Lesney Products" had been removed from all Matchbox products, including small-scale and Models of Yesteryear.

Jack Odell, one of the founders of Lesney, purchased a lot of Lesney's machinery and started his own model-casting business, LLEDO (the brand was derived from the reverse spelling of his last name, Odell, and still exists today, with alloy car models, and sub-brands such as Vanguards, which specializes in the 1/43 O scale model market). (43rd scale O scale model car market).

In 1977, Kidco Toys (the company that produced the Key Car line for Universal) was formed in the U.S. and began to develop the U.S. market for Universal Toys, which was acquired by Matchbox in the early 1980s, and in 1978 Universal Toys acquired an 80% stake in New York-based LJN Toys. When Universal Toys acquired the Matchbox brand, the entire Kidco and LJN product categories were being marketed in Europe under the Matchbox name. 1980, Universal Group purchased land in Macau to establish Macau Toys Ltd. and the following year established Macau Die Casting Co. In 1980, Universal Group purchased land in Macau and established Macau Toys Ltd. and the following year established Macau Die Casting Toys Ltd.

Just three months after Universal's acquisition of Lesney, much of the machinery and equipment used to produce Matchboxes began to be transferred to Macau, and the first Macau-made Matchboxes hit the market in May of 1983. Although Universal had decided to retain the original Lesney Rochford factory in the UK, even the Models of Yesteryear range was moved to Macau in 1985.

In 1986, Universal began negotiating with Kenner Parker to purchase the Dinky trademark, and in 1987 a successful agreement was reached to purchase Dinky. To protect the Dinky trademark, Universal produced six small-scale special edition models, packaged in Dinky's traditional rigid Styrofoam packaging, and in 1989 the first Universal Dinky models were unveiled at the British Toy Fair.

But Matchbox Toys was more than just a company of cast alloy toys, and in the 1980s a number of "unusual" products began to be marketed under the "Matchbox" trademark. Matchbox. Figures continued to be produced, and even stuffed toys were added, and in 1988, Matchbox won a license from Pee Wee Herman in the U.S. In 1989, Matchbox made the controversial Freddy Kreuger talking figure (Freddy was the main character in the then-current film A Nightmare on Elm Street) out of the blue. (Freddy was the main character in the then-film A Nightmare on Elm Street). The Freddy figure was quickly pulled from the shelves due to skepticism from parents and religious groups. As the 1990s progressed, Matchbox began to decline, possibly due to the fact that its product categories were too large and not all of its products were profitable. in early 1992, Universal Toys President, Mr. Chung-Mu Yeh, began to try to sell Universal Toys to a larger corporation. another important era in Matchbox's history began when in May 1992, Tyco Toys made an offer to purchase Universal Toys. Toys made an offer to acquire Universal Group. After months of negotiations, Tyco Toys eventually acquired Matchbox on October 2, 1992

Four: The Space Age (1993-1996)

The late 1980s were a tumultuous time for most U.S. toy companies, except for Mt. Laurel, N.J.

The only company that was registered in New Jersey was Tyco Toys Inc. Tyco Toys Inc. ("Space" Toys Inc.) relied on its varied and effective development program, for eight consecutive years to maintain the toy industry's leading sales record. 1992 "Space" company with sales of $ 769 million and In 1992, Space became the third largest company in the U.S. toy industry with sales of $769 million that year.

Space's strength can be traced to the leadership of Chairman, President and CEO Richard E. Grey. Under his leadership, Space has expanded beyond its traditional core business of electric trains and racing series by introducing new products and acquiring other businesses in a timely manner. Today's "Space" products range from action figures and radio-controlled cars to real telephones and Matchbox miniature alloy models, a far cry from the company's 1926 founding by John Tyler. Tyler, who initially named the company the Tyler Company, then changed the name to TyCo and eventually settled on Tyco ("Space"), initially produced only parts for electric train toys until the 1930s, when he decided to expand into the electric train market.

By the 1960s, "Space" was already producing HO scale (1/87th) racing kits, and at this time was a wholly owned subsidiary of the large American company, Sara Lee Corp. In the early 1980s, Space, which still relied solely on the sale of electric trains, trucks, and racing kits, was sold by Sara Lee Corp. to Savoy Industries, a private investment group. 1984 saw Space diversify its business to include Super Blocks model house and building sets and personalized telephones. 1986, Space became a publicly traded U.S. company, known not only for its model trains and plug-in sets, but also for its Super Blocks sets and best-selling radio-controlled vehicles. vehicles.

In 1987, Dino-Riders, a line of products based on fossilized dinosaurs found around the world, culminated Space's diversification, and in 1989, Space acquired Viejo, the company's largest and best-selling radio-controlled vehicle. "In 1989, Space acquired Vie master and the Ideal Group and introduced the Viewmaster Viewer, Magna Doodle and Ideal Nursery lines.

In 1992, Space continued its expansion with the acquisitions of Illco, a manufacturer of toys for preschoolers, and Universal Matchbox Group, a world-renowned manufacturer of alloy car models.

Matchbox joins Space's other famous brands of toys, which include The Incredible Crash Dummies, Baby Giggles 'N Go, Baby Get Well, Fashion Magic, Kidsongs video, Lickin' Lizards, and Scorcher Radio Control (a radio-controlled soccer toy). "Illco later became known as Tyco Preschool, Inc. and joined Tyco's Playtime division, which specializes in the which specialized in direct imports as well as letters of credit. "Playtime offers a wide variety of popularly priced toys, many of which are licensed from well-known brands such as Sprint, Spalding, Stanley, Revlon and Tyco.

Space "The preschool company is the largest licensee of Sesame Street preschool toys, and Space has also embarked on a major expansion campaign around the world. Since 1991, Space has opened wholly-owned subsidiaries around the world, including in the United Kingdom, Spain, France, the Belgium-Dutch-Luxembourg triple economic union, Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Mexico, Canada and Australia. Much of the credit for the establishment of these subsidiaries goes to then President Karsten Malmos. At its peak, Space had 2,200 employees worldwide and manufacturing and distribution facilities in the United States and Hong Kong.

Space is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol TTI.

V. The Mattel Era (1997-present)