Brand Profile - SmartLab

What's cooking at SmartLab

This year, SmartLab Toys is preparing to welcome a raft of new products to its range, covering everything from interactive human anatomy to the science behind tiny baking. Rachael Simpson-Jones spoke to George Scott, senior brand manager, to find out more.

SmartLab is the only toy-centric ‘imprint’ from a portfolio of 33 brands within The Quarto Group, a leading international publisher of books and intellectual property products; the group acquired SmartLab’s parent becker&mayer in 2016, and the STEM toy brand along with it. Created in 2004 to offer fun, fact-filled and fictional novelties for kids aged 8-14 years old, and named for one of the founder’s beloved yellow Labradors, the brand still benefits from the knowledge and experience of its original employees, who designed the first ever SmartLab products. There’s 100 years’ experience shared among just a small handful of people, giving the company a rich history and ensuring every toy has both brains and passion behind it. George, SmartLab’s senior brand manager, has been in the world of design for a long time, making product development his entire career to date. For 15 of those years, he also taught college level undergraduates and graduate students while practising as a professional designer.

“Nowadays, we pride ourselves on producing educational science kits and STEM toys,” George explains. “Not only is this our focus, but it’s also what we do best and what we love doing. All of us want to make science fun. We want kids to have such a good time playing with our kits that they completely forget they’re learning real scientific principles. Everything we do is also geared around repeat play, something that’s not always common with kits for kids, which can tend to be more of a one-shot deal. SmartLab wants kids to come back to its kits again and again, and one of the ways we achieve this is by crafting all our components from scratch. When kids place their finished build or experiment on their shelf or desk, it resonates and stays with them thanks to the design quality and the thinking behind the activity.”

SmartLab’s approach to ideation is egalitarian in nature. George, a big fan of a kitchen analogy, paints a picture of an assortment of like-minded colleagues swapping ideas across morning coffee taken at the kitchen table. Everyone has a say in product ideation, and with between 4-8 new products launching each year there’s plenty of ideas to go round. Development itself, meanwhile, takes the form of a stovetop covered with bubbling, sizzling pans, each containing the possibility of something new. While some pans simmer gently at the back, others are red hot and near the front, ready for plating up. It’s simply a matter of pulling the right pan forward at the right time. Existing products are also regularly updated to keep things fresh, and the company is moving to an updated business model that will allow for around 10 product reformats a year, in addition to its new launches.

Arguably best known for its Squishy range, a tactile and highly sensory assortment of kits that includes Squishy Human Body, The Amazing Squishy Brain and Totally Squishy from Head-to-Toe, SmartLab introduced its Tiny range three and a half years ago. Currently six titles strong, four more products will join the range in 2022, bringing the brand’s total portfolio to over 30 products spanning chemistry and food to natural phenomena and architecture. Smart Circuits, widely touted by consumer groups as one of the best starter electronics kits for kids, remains a best-seller.

Reflecting Quarto Group’s heritage in the publishing space, each and every SmartLab kit comes with a full-colour book containing illustrations, scientific facts, ideas and instructions for experiments and more. Take a look through any one of these offerings and Quarto’s expertise in this field leaps off the page. The publications are so well-received, SmartLab is actually repositioning its products, in some cases, to bring these books to the front and centre of each offering. There’s also talk of selling them on their own, purely on the strength of the engaging educational content within. Full SmartLab kits, meanwhile, retail for between £15-40, hitting a number of sweet spots across gifting.

“Balancing fun with education is rolled into everything we do, but I wouldn’t call it a challenge, more a fun area to explore,” says George, when I ask how the company makes what can sometimes be a dry topic into an absorbing, amusing or downright fascinating activity. “For example, Tiny Baking saw us ask the question: ‘What’s the science in cooking?’ In these situations, we try to put ourselves in the position of a child. We’re constantly reminded to do this by our senior editor and it’s also something I was taught, and that I taught my own students. You must go directly to the end user, not the retail buyer, to the kid and find the fun activities and experiments offered by a particular STEM subject, or even start with the fun activity, and seek out the science later. If kids are immersed in their play – baking tiny cakes, planting tiny plants – and at the end of it they’ve also got something to keep, the product is going to increase interest in that category. This is why we always pepper our books, content and components with incentives to continue exploring that subject.”

It’s evident that behind the scenes, a lot of what makes SmartLab’s STEM kits fun comes from the brand’s team. While some companies might choose to outsource product development past the initial stages, SmartLab maintains a tight-knit, communicative approach throughout the entire process. You’d therefore be forgiven for thinking that the pandemic would have disrupted product development, but the team has instead made full use of all the networking technologies available to it. At the same time, taking turns heading to the office meant everyone could take home prototypes, materials and other things left for them by their colleagues.

The proof of how well this approach worked can be seen in SmartLab’s 2021/22 launches. Tiny Gardening and Tiny Ice Cream joined the Tiny range in spring, and both have been a sell-out success. Activities that families can enjoy together following Covid are particularly popular at the moment, and Tiny’s new additions are catering to that demand. The pandemic also saw record numbers of families take up gardening for the first time, making Tiny Gardening bang on trend, while Tiny Ice Cream has become something of a social media darling across TikTok and Instagram. Tiny Circuits launches next. The kit takes all the best bits of best-seller Smart Circuits, shrinks it, and puts it into a simple 7-component kit for children who have never played with a robotics or electronics kit before. New launches are also tapping into the current demand among kids for products that are sustainable and kind to the environment. Organic Science Lab lets kids make natural dyes and biodegradable plastics using sustainable materials, all packaged in a recyclable, plastic-free outer and sleeve. George anticipates this product will be big in the UK and EU, where awareness of sustainability and environmental issues is arguably higher than in the US market, and that it will mark the start of another new angle for SmartLab. STEM 101 is also launching this year. Similar to Kitchen Science Lab, this all-in-one kit contains everything young scientists need to tackle STEM head on, and would make a great addition to a party or afterschool science club (these two products are only available in North America).

The latest addition to SmartLab’s Squishy range, Ultimate Squishy Human Body Lab with SmartScan Technology is this year’s hero launch. The £70 set is the most advanced anatomy kit for kids on the marketplace, and a gamechanger in terms of the SmartLab portfolio and the benchmark against which all other STEM kits will be measured.

“There’s nothing else like Ultimate Squishy Human Body Lab at this price point,” enthuses George. “We’re going after IP for the SmartScan technology as well as the Squishy brand. Product development began with solids modelling a real cadaver, working with a team to create organs which were then manipulated into a 16-inch tall, multi-system body with hi-res detail and six different durometers of plastic providing different types of squishiness. Then we’ve built in RFID technology, so when kids remove an organ and place it on the scanner they can hear quiz questions, facts, and sounds. It also comes with possibly the best book we’ve ever created, which is 32-pages long. The level of sophistication essentially makes it four products in one: a detailed anatomy model, a scanner, a book and an audio module crammed with content. We’ll be offering a limited run this year in-stores and online, but the real launch will be at Toy Fair New York 2022.”

A personable, approachable and friendly company, marketing that doesn’t take the form of face-to-face meetings is relatively novel to SmartLab. Social media is a major focus this year, while real kids are proving to be the best possible advocates of toys made with them in mind. SmartLab is also exploring its options for smaller, shorter runs of more product, leveraging its 3D prototyping technology to speed up production and utilising more in the way of bioplastics and other cutting-edge materials. For a company with science so firmly at its heart, using the same science that goes into its toys to get to market faster seems like the most natural thing in the world.

“We’re a small group of people doing some really fun and amazing things,” George finishes. “Within Quarto, SmartLab is like a little pirate ship floating on this sea of incredible printed content – we can try different things while enjoying the backing of a vast publishing company. Raising the pirate flag lets us take risks and discover unexplored areas within the business, so we can keep finding new ways of getting science into the hands of kids.”