We were lucky to catch up with David McGranaghan recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi David, thanks for joining us today. What sort of legacy are you hoping to build. What do you think people will say about you after you are gone, what do you hope to be remembered for?

As an instigator of change in the toy and game industry: in the materials used to make products and in bridging the gap between traditional boys and girls toys.

After growing frustrated with the greenwashing in the toy and game industry, and how bio-plastic still contains plastic, Julian and I set out to work with eco-friendly materials already available, most of which are made from plants.

We have worked with pop up paper engineering to make a large plastic-free pirate ship for our new game Fire In The Hole, and in 2023 we are releasing a toy line called AstroBeasts that will be plant-based (natural rubber from Hevea trees). We are also working with molded pulp to replace the plastic inflatable tails in It’s Bananas, and our new game MEOW MEOW will center around a large molded pulp cat scratch pole. All of this is in the hope that as a company we’ll be 100% plastic-free, carbon neutral, and biodegradable – a first in what we hope will become a growing trend in the industry.

As we move into kid’s toys in 2023, we are also hoping to marry the world of girls and boys toys into a toy line for all. AstroBeasts will bring the two worlds together in the hopes that brothers and sisters can play with the same toy line, and we as an industry can start to move past excessively gendered kid’s toys.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

Hi. We’re McMiLLER and we make laughter; you know that hardy har har, tee he he, snot-out-your-nose kind of laughter. We’re a teeny-weeny, queer-owned company that makes epic toys and games.

McMiLLER was founded by David McGranaghan and Julian Miller, and our titles, such as It’s Bananas, UpRoar, and Fire In The Hole, have had over 75 million TikTok views, have been featured on NBC, FOX, ABC, ITV and BBC, and are some of Amazon’s top selling products during the Christmas period, having reached #1 in games and toys multiple times.

At McMiLLER we start with a fun idea, work with talented designers to turn that idea into a product, mass produce, handle all logistics, and sell online. We pride ourselves on how multigenerational our products are – granny is laughing at the gameplay as much as the kids.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Julian and I were set up on a blind date 13 years ago. Neither of us could afford to go out for dinner, so we went straight for the pub and instantly clicked. I was inventing a board game (Game For Fame) at the time, which had been a lifelong goal of mine, and the rest is history. We’ve been working and developing products together ever since.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Julian and I were both professional actors in London when we met – I was one of the Jersey Boys on London’s West End as well as playing leads at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Julian acted in movies opposite Melissa McCarthy and Matt Damon.

To supplement the patchy income that acting can provide, I invented Game For Fame and scraped money from family and friends to get 1300 copies made. It wasn’t easy, but after a few good reviews on Amazon.co.uk, we started to sell one copy a day, then three, next thing I knew the game was sold out! Putting all our energy into Amazon was the first milestone for McMiLLER.

The next was creating It’s Bananas – the monkey tail game. With competition on Amazon getting tougher each year, we needed our next product to sell outside of Amazon as well. We needed a customer to look at a picture or a video of the gameplay on a Facebook or Insta ad and say ‘that is so hilarious, I need to order this RIGHT NOW.’ It’s based on an old dutch game, which inspired the idea of a monkey tail that hangs between your legs that players have to pick things up with.

Suggestive enough to get the comedy across to adults, but tame enough that you can play it with the whole family, It’s Bananas has taken our company from a side hustle to a multimillion dollar business with revenue doubling year on year. It also launched us into the US market with a bang, as we struggle to keep up with demand.

While all of this was happening, Julian and I were in Hollywood pitching comedy tv shows and game shows to Netflix, NBC, ABC etc. It was a lot of work and creativity for the hopes of a show getting greenlit. With the company doing so well we eventually had to choose between the two.

We’d been growing increasingly frustrated not being in charge of our own ideas, and having our destiny in the hands of so many other people, so we decided to quit the entertainment industry and pour our joint creativity into all things McMiLLER. It’s now been less than two years since we made the decision to go full time with the company and sales are nearly doubling year on year, so are happy we left Hollywood behind.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mcmiller.fun
• Instagram: @mcmiller.fun
• Facebook: mcmiller.fun
• Other: Tiktok: @mcmillerfun