We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alex Kessler a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Alex, thanks for joining us today. Looking back, do you think you started your business at the right time? Do you wish you had started sooner or later

I think I started my business at the perfect time for both myself and for the toy industry. As far as my life, I had already started an entertainment business and learned a lot on that end, so I was ready to jump into KessCo with a lot more confidence than a first time business owner. The early years required a lot of travel, months of travel, which I wouldn’t want to do now that I have two small children.

As far as the toy industry, KessCo started right when Toys “R” Us was going out of business. We had a positive relationship with them, and it’s possible that if we had started just a year earlier, Kess would have been relying on Toys “R” Us as our biggest buyer. Coming in when we did forced us to diversify early, and that probably saved us from going under when some of the big box toy retailers did.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

First and foremost, my family has always been in the toy industry. My grandfather was a plastics manufacturer during the Depression, one of the earliest in the country. It’s something that my family’s been doing for my whole life.

Out of college, I was really fascinated with television, so I went in a different direction. I started working on entertainment projects and eventually started my own production company and that was a great learning experience about how to run a business, what the pitfalls are, and what’s important for building income. Through that process, I realized I actually wanted to make games, like tabletop games and play experiences.

At the time, I had an opportunity to work for Jakks Pacific based on my family selling a toy business to them. They focused on the summer category that I had worked in my whole life before college (through my dad’s business), so I did have some experience in that kind of product design space through that and the toy sale space. I took that opportunity and ended up being very good at product design and development. That launched me from Jakks to creating my own company, KessCo.

I like to take classic play patterns and make them exciting and interesting. I like creating something that makes it so that someone seeing it on a shelf in a store is excited about seeing this toy that they used to love, but now it’s new and fresh. For example, KessCo started in the hoop business. At that time, hoops were a product that had been on shelves for over a decade. Think about classic spiral cheap hoops that you could buy for a few dollars but weren’t very fun, and were kind of tired. KessCo changed the game by bringing unique patterns, really bright colors, and cool materials. On top of that, it was important to me to keep the hoop manufacturing and distribution inside the United States. It’s important for our customers to buy American, and it’s much cheaper for us to ship domestically than ship across the ocean. Having both domestic manufacturing and a unique product has allowed KessCo to be at the forefront of the hoop market.

On the gaming side, my social media presence has been perhaps the biggest driver of our success. I have a lot of content that I produce for gaming communities at large, making geek culture content, on TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, etc. Having that community and that love of creation since I had my production company has allowed me to keep a read on what’s exciting in the world of entertainment and what the next thing is that people are excited about. One Piece is a great example: I fell in love with the anime in 2021 after being an anime fan my entire life. I’m excited about One Piece, and I know how excited other people are about One Piece, so I was able to take that excitement to Toei and together create an amazing game in One Piece: Luffy’s Bento Panic. And that’s where KessCo truly shines, leveraging our actual love for different properties in order to create really cool gaming experiences.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I’ve been an early adopter of a lot of social media. It’s always been the Wild West for me, whether it was trying to make a TV show on Youtube, being on Twitter during the early character limits, or trying Tiktok the moment it became available and started to get big. I know that I have core communities that I can speak to and who want to follow the kind of content that I do. When I’m getting into a new platform, I find those communities and follow the people who are building them. I enjoy making content that’s in conversation with other creators – stitching and dueting, quote tweeting, etc. That lets other people find you easily based on you responding to people that they already follow. Another thing people who are just starting out don’t consider is how much film is on the metaphorical cutting room floor. I might wake up and make ten videos, post them all, and only one or two get any amount of engagement.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Our reputation is fully built on authenticity. On the games side, we’re fans of the properties that we work with and the games that we play. We make games by fans, for fans. And if someone isn’t already a fan of a property that we’re working with, we make sure the games are accessible and still fun without being a fan. On the toy side of the business, we’re also fans of play and making play fun and interesting. That authenticity shines through in everything that we do.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kess.co/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kess_ent/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KessToys
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kessco/
• Twitter: https://x.com/KessPlay
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@kesstoys