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There was a great disturbance in the Force. For the first time in many years, the toy industry has not Star wars movie to pick up the holiday shopping season. This means there is no new Kylo Ren helmet. No Bower of Nerf Chewbacca updated. No Episode IXLego Millennium Falcons. And for Sphero, no new droids compatible with the BB-8 application.
For most toy companies, lose a tent like Star wars is enough to make their annual business count go down a cliff. But not Sphero, says CEO Paul Berberian, whose company has sold more than 4 million toy robots over the past eight years.
"Most people think it's Disney, but no, about half of them are licensed products," says Berberian. The other half of Sphero's 4 million robots sold to date have all been original products, he says. "The Sphero brand has clearly benefited from a huge boost from Disney, but our own products continue to sell incredibly well."
Founded in 2010 under the name of Orbotix, Sphero has done a lot of things during his eight years of existence. The company began as a good little toy maker, touting its cue ball named Sphero. A new brand image and a few products later, Sphero became a pirate toy maker, with programmable goodies like SPRK (also known as "Spark") that delighted the STEM set.
Then, after a spell at Disney Accelerator in 2014, Sphero turned to branded toys like the popular BB-8 droid, not to mention the development of technology that animated the BB-8's full-length puppet film. A Spiderman vocal doll, an animated Lightning McQueen car and an entirely interactive R2-D2 later, Sphero learned something about toys – what makes them work, what makes them sell – as well as robots. Since then, Sphero has decided to no longer deploy its efforts in a new company called Misty Robotics.
But with the Skywalker saga that ended in 2018, Sphero is back on the road to success. And the reason Sphero will have a life after Darth, says Berberian, is that, throughout his journey, the company has slowly and quietly set up a STEM-based business. Sphero's efforts in this area began in 2012 when they recruited one of Apple's education managers and began developing a strong program of projects themselves.
"The nature of the game in education, unlike retail, is about maintaining power," says Berberian. "Products must be useful year after year". While consumers want to know what innovations are integrated with the latest Sphero product, education customers want to know that these robots (or technology investments in the classroom) will remain in power. So while everyone was turning to BB-8, Sphero was building an empire in the field of education.
One of Sphero's central tenets is that the game can be a powerful teacher, a concept that really begins to resonate in the classroom, says Berberian. "Companies are focusing on STIM and STEAM education," he adds. "Many of these subjects at school are boring, but when you put in a robot or a high-tech experience, it really infuses subjects that do not really engage all kids."
Take, for example, the learning of Pythagoras' theorem. On a whiteboard, the subject could not be duller, but when you place a robot ball on the floor and have the children program it to drive a triangle, suddenly you bring the subject to life. And that's what students around the world do. "We have more than 20,000 schools and 30,000 teachers and nearly 2 million children enrolled in our system and use them in their classroom," says Berberian.
This leads to Sphero Bolt, the company's newest robot. Chock-a-block with sensors, the $ 149 device is a dream ball for kids. The Android, Chrome, iOS, MacOS and Windows compatible mobile robot has Bluetooth and 360-degree infrared capabilities for communication between robots, ambient light sensors, a magnetometer (a bit like a compass), packed in a polycarbonate shell translucent.
But the biggest difference between Bolt and his predecessors is the 8 by 8 LED color matrix display in the middle of the ball. Programmable via the Sphero Edu app, this mini-screen can do a lot, from displaying animations (which look cool in some Pac-Man games) to displaying values such as the amount of lumens detected by the Bolt light sensor.
Photo of Bryan Rowe. Courtesy of Sphero
Of course, Sphero hopes that schools will buy Bolts through clusters – and their hopes are not totally unfounded. According to Berberian, BB-8 is not necessarily the company's best-selling product – its SPRK + power pack of nearly $ 1,799. A rolling suitcase teeming with robot balls, this STEM class in a box can load Spheros on the fly, and is popular with science teachers and the math team. "Basically, if you're a school and you get a scholarship for STEM, one of the essentials is a suitcase filled with Spheros," says Berberian. (Coinciding with Bolt's release, Sphero releases a new version of Bolt Powerpack for $ 2,499.)
Selling spheros to dozens of schools may seem far from peddling one of the hardest-to-find toys of the party (although it was only last year), but Berberian is a new challenge. "While licensed products were really fun to create and teach us to grow and enhance our brand, Star Wars was a unique time," he says. And now, it's time for Sphero (and his Bolt robots) to learn new tricks – though the Force is still with them.
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