Puppet Profits

Puppet Profits

A pair of Brits on the Gulf Coast turned a T-shirt into a kid's toy - without giving up the T-shirt. Now they are trying to turn a profit.

Sarasota entrepreneur Barry Fox was pretty sure he was on to something a few years ago when, after playing around with a sock puppet, he came up with an idea to make a children's shirt with a Velcro-attached finger puppet.

The plan was to design the shirt to provide two products in one: A shirt with bright colors and funky characters - think dinosaurs, monsters alligators and aliens - that can turn into a toy when the rubber finger puppet is pulled off. Fittingly, Fox called the now-patented product Toy Tees.

Three years later Fox and his business partner, Ruth Hardy, think the novel shirt idea is on the cusp of hitting the big time. The first hint came in March, when the pair brought the shirt to a Las Vegas toy show.

"It was like we invented the whale," says Hardy. "We got hit with so many people."

Even more validation and potential sales came in late September, in the days following Fox's appearance on CNBC's The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. During a segment called Million Dollar Ideas, Fox had just 30 seconds to pitch Toy Tees, but that was enough for Walgreen's chief executive officer, who called the entrepreneur the next day. The executive said he would send some marketing people to meet with Fox and Hardy, to work on getting the Toy Tees into Walgreen's 6,000 stores across the country.

Fox and Hardy make the shirts out of Koala Tees, Fox's T-shirt embroidery shop just north of downtown Sarasota. The puppet parts are shipped in from China and the assembly work is done locally. The company also makes Toy Tees hats, which follow the same concept, but are built into a baseball cap.

The shirts sell for $19.95 each, with sizes aimed at two to 10-year-olds. So far, the company has hit about $50,000 in sales, using a combination of the Internet and trade show appearances. Another $100,000 worth of inventory is ready to go in China.

But Hardy, a British native who met fellow Brit Fox through mutual friends, sees much more than six-figure annual sales on the horizon. So much so that Hardy left her job with a local construction company late last year to run the marketing and distribution side of Toy Tees. "I looked at this and knew it was going to fly," says Hardy. "The potential this has is huge."

Most of that potential lies in licensing, which Hardy says is the key to making the product go from novelty to next level. They are talking to executives with the big players in the children's characters industry, such as Nickelodeon and Disney, about turning those companies' best selling faces into Toy Tees.

And Hardy and Fox are also working on another market with huge potential: College sports. Hardy envisions someday soon the company will be able to manufacture and sell a Toy Tee with say, a Florida Gator logo and Gator finger puppet.

For that shirt, the company might even have to move into adult sizes.

- Mark Gordon