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Fast Toys, Fast

Winning in toy competition depends on speed

The American International Toy Fair, a make-or-break event for toy makers, loomed on the horizon a short five months away. Mattel’s project designers were tasked with the challenge of developing a new line of Hot Wheels vehicles that would emulate the popularity Barbie had enjoyed with young consumers for years. Unlike anything Mattel’s Hot Wheels designers had ever attempted, the six ultra-light, high-tech Top Speed Pipejammers cars featured radically different design and development components, including a detailed engine, floating front axle and a translucent plastic body.

The project appeared to be on-schedule as the toy fair drew to three months away. Then, as Murphy predicts, Mattel’s manufacturing engineers said that the planned translucent wheels would require drastic retooling at the company’s plant. For the designers, this meant new wheels and new prototypes, costing $15,000 and 3 weeks by conventional methods. With time and money being critical resources, Mattel’s designers turned to the stereolithography (SL) team for assistance.

Mattel first modeled the design in Alias 3-D CAD. SL models were then built in two sizes: an exact size replica for verification, and a “3-up” pattern, three times the size of the actual car, which is used to make aluminum molds good for plastic injection molding of 10 to 1,000 parts. By February, stereolithography “masters” of the vehicles were painted and ready for display at the toy fair when Top Speed Pipejammers made their official debut for customers and members of the media. The new line of cars was instantly declared a “hit” and attracted significant media attention.

By adding stereolithography to the “pit crew’s” resources, Mattel decreased time-to-market by 20 percent, with a significant cost savings of $14,500 per prototype. SL also provided the designers with assurance that design integrity would be fully retained, including highly intricate detail never before attempted in the Hot Wheels product line, as well as releasing production molds in a record eight months for plastic injection molding of 200,000 models of each vehicle.

—RM

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