Saturday, February 15, 2014

NERF Successes Shared at Hasbro Investor Meeting

Hey warriors, I was able to take a few minutes this morning to look over the information from Hasbro's Investor Update they publicized ahead of the New York Toy Fair. Again, anyone claiming exclusive on this is being dishonest or is very misinformed. Our take on this may be exclusive, but the information is and has been readily available online!


Unfortunately, There are no new goodies that we can share with you after perusing the material. It seems that all of the blasters for the fair have been "leaked" by the company itself ahead of the big day(s). 

Yes, there is another angle on the previously revealed Demolisher. You can see the vent on the front of the launching post for the missile. Strangely, Brian Chapman (Senior Vice President over Global Design & Development) called this projectile, what he calls "the Thumper", the largest one done in Nerf. I really don't think it's any bigger -or even quite as large as the Titan rocket. Maybe they forgot about that one.

(More on new Rebelle products and Nerf's success after the jump)

While I watched the investor broadcast, one of the biggest things I was hoping for was an update on the Nerf Cam ECS-12. We had some initial thoughts on it after it was announced. The price tag is just way high for what I would expect most people to be willing to pay. I think they are onto something with the built in camera, but I also thought that their app cradle was fairly stable to put a smart phone into it.

It makes sense that they would work on the camera availability. In the meeting, Eric Nyman (Senior VP over Global Marketing) noted that there are over 1.1 billion views on over 180,000 consumer-created videos about NERF! I'm still betting that we'll see more development with the Nerf Cam blaster before the final rollout ahead of Fall 2014.

Overall, it has been a good year for both Nerf and their consumers. They were able to report an 18 percent growth in the franchise. They rest a significant portion of the credit on the Centurion, Rapidstrike and the N-Sports rollouts. I know the Centurion sold well, but it seems like they are still getting negative response to that one almost daily as well. I don't know what the net result would be if you add that reaction in, but I'm sure that they still grew significantly. After all, they have plenty of great products that still keep flying off the shelves.

NERF Rebelle didn't go un-applauded either. Rebelle took honors as the number one new product in the sports activity category in 5 of the markets they launched in. Nyman noted that the entire Rebelle brand was built entirely by looking at what was missing. They looked at "the white space" where there was an unmet need for girls. 

Now thanks to that success, they will be rolling out new blasters some of which we have already heard about thanks to several bloggers who found this Brazilian site. I'm still not completely sure how successful the Secrets and Spies darts are going to be, but time will tell! After, all Spygear is doing just fine with similar product.

The pursuit of the perfect toy bow and arrow combination has produced the Secret Agent Bow. Nerf also says this is their first ever arrow. The other ammunitions fired from Nerf bows have generally been enlarged foam darts. I'm still wondering about the safety aspect with the apparent size on these arrows.

I realize I didn't say anything about Super Soakers yet. Nerf says that they have entirely redesigned the line and point to their Tri-Strike bow as an example. I'm not really a fan of the retro-looking color scheme or the clunky feel the new blasters seem to promote. As always, we'll wait to pass judgement until we get our hands on them. You'll probably see reviews on those around Spring Break.

I am really excited to see some more angles on the announced blasters. Vas the Stampede at Foam From Above will be all over it like he has been for years! He left on a plane this morning and has loads of appointments to see the latest and greatest. He was even cool enough to take a couple of special requests from Click Click BAMF! Instagram will be alive with some play-by-play.We're planning to catch up with him just after the fair too. Blasterlabs will also be giving us their take this year!

2 comments:

  1. Here's a couple of ideas, maybe they should make the Cam 12 a Rebelle blaster or the built in camera modular to upgrade to higher res video.

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    1. Who knows, maybe the cam itself is decent but it just has a terrible built-in screen. For the price they're asking they could definitely put a better cam in there if it is, in fact, actually a crappy sensor, though I suspect that if it has only standard-def files it's for the sake of SD card space and can probably be upgraded with a firmware hack.

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