Rachel Field – Brand Manager for Licensed Products at Golden Bear – on the new Supertato toy range

Rachel, I think this is your first interview for Brands Untapped or Mojo Nation! So welcome! Let’s start off with an easy one… Who are you?
I’m Rachel Field – and I’m the Brand Manager for Licensed Products at Golden Bear.

Perfect! Now… Brand Manager is one of those job titles that means different things in different places. What does a Golden Bear Brand Manager actually do?
As a Brand Manager, I am the main touch point for all things brand specific! I work really closely with the product development team, the marketing and content team and the sales team to bring everything together. We help facilitate that process from start to finish.

And tell me, Rachel, where does that process start for Golden Bear?
It starts by identifying a gap. It might be our realising we need a new product for a certain recommended retail price, or one that’s going to go to a particular retailer once it launches. And then the fun starts! So you’ve got all the product development, the marketing kicking in, the monitoring of sales and analysing how effective our marketing comms are… Then managing the range portfolio to make sure all the products are delivering from a retail point of view.

An enormous job! And it sounds like it can start in a most embryonic way. In that respect, how is it you look to fill the gap? Do you knowingly prowl around BLE, say, looking at what’s popular?
We’re always on the hunt for new opportunities… Be that in the kids’ arena, or the more sporting arena, perhaps, now that we’ve got our Smart Ball brand. That’s more for the outdoor, sporty, football-related toys and tech. That’s prong one!

And prong two?
Prong two is where we’ve already got licenses within our portfolio. We might be looking to expand the range, or replace all the product lines that are naturally coming to the end of their life cycle…

It’s time for a change?
Right. We might look to fill that gap. Alternatively, a new opportunity might come up because, say, a new retailer comes on board, or there’s a new promotional mechanic to fulfill. In situations like that, we might develop product so we can go to previews and sell in. Other times, it might be that we need a new core line to fit a price point. And that’s where our creative and product development teams start to brainstorm!

That’s great. It’s easy to forget how much art and science there is filling such a specific slot. Let’s talk about one of your newest licensed lines – Supertato. What’s the plot there?!
Supertato is a potato superhero that fights to save the world from his evil nemesis, the arch-villain Evil Pea. Evil Pea is always trying to cause trouble in the supermarket… Supertato must save the day!

Perfect! And something that interests me about this is the age of the property versus the newness of the toys… The book came out in what? 2014? So why is now the right time for this?
That’s right. It’s the first book’s tenth anniversary this year. But in between the book and the toys, the BBC created an animated series. The animated series builds on the books in a way that feels like a really great setup to a toy range. It’s a really natural progression as the next phase within the licensing of the brand.

And presumably the TV show has to have time to bed in? It needs to find the audience and be a hit?
Yes. We knew how successful the books were, and that – clearly – there’s some longevity in the brand. But giving the series a year or two to bed in, as you put it, is also a good thing… The series came out in 2022. But the essential thing is to know the fans are out there and that they’ve been asking for toys. So we look at what’s happening on socials, listen to people and see what they’re searching for. Another important factor is to see if a property’s got a really significant licensor behind it.

Which in this case is the BBC…
Exactly. So we know that there’s terrific support there. Having a CBeebies presence is really important with something like the Supertato brand.

And Golden Bear is a routinely successful partner with the BBC. What else do you do with them?
We do Hey Duggie with the BBC. A couple of our other infant and preschool brands aren’t directly with them, but they’re related – In the Night Garden, for example. It’s under separate licensors but it benefit from that pedigree.

Yes. I think pedigree is a good word for the meshing of the BBC and Golden Bear’s enormously high standards. Now, part of me wants talk about being green! I covered this in an interview with Becs Henshey not that long ago – people can read that here. But Golden Bear is exemplary with its environmental efforts; I’m assuming that’s the case with the Supertato range?
Thank you! I would say that, as a business, we’ve got a really positive outlook. It’s important to us that we’re doing as much as we possibly can to help the environment. So we have our own ‘green team’. They’ve moved us to fabrics and fill-ins within our plush that are made from recycled plastics; recycled bottles. We highlight that on our packaging… If you pick up a Supertato toy, you’ll know – for instance – that 11 plastic recycled bottles were used to help make the toy.

Right. And that’s the toy itself as opposed to just the packaging, which would be easy to talk about just to tick a box…
Yes, the fabrics, the filling… We do look at the packaging side of things as well to help consumers recycle. We’re using recycled materials there, and soy inks. We’ve also moved away from any sort of plastic and wire ties in favour of paper ties to keep product in the packaging while reducing our impact on the environment.

And people can see this for themselves because the first wave of Supertato product is available now, is it not? What’s on the shelf?
We have a talking Supertato soft toy, which is our hero line. You press his superhero belt and he says a range of classic phrases from the animated TV series. He plays the show’s theme tune as well! We also have some smaller soft toys and an Evil Pea. Evil Pea might be an evil character, but it’s a popular one!

Naturally! We need to wrap things up but I have one last question… It’s early days, but how are Supertato toys performing?
It’s very early days, yes; it’s only been online and in store for a few weeks. But we’re really pleased with it! It’s doing well; it’s exceeded our expectations and we’re already looking to develop more product to extend the range.

That quickly?! Wow. How does that work? You just tell the team it’s a hit? “Everyone – to the Bearcave!”?
Ha! We’re geared up to do it quite quickly; we have a crash-critical path…

You got a what-there now? “A crash critical path”? I’m so excited; I don’t even know what it means. Ha!
Ha! It’s just working on a smaller time scale. We can react quickly because we have so many ideas bubbling in the background. If the demand’s there, which it seems to be, we can bring it to market quite quickly. It’s just about looking at the show and the most popular or iconic characters and having conversations about what should be plush, what should be plastic, what should be at the forefront of that range.

Fantastic! Well, thank you, Rachel, for making time for this. Great licence, great range, great partnership! Don’t be a stranger; do come back and give us an update.