What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [106]
To help pay the bills, Myrna went to work as a wallpaper hanger. “I was a mommy and I had to make ends meet. I’d renovated three houses, I’d torn down walls, I’d done tiling and Sheetrocking, and I was really good at hanging wallpaper. My girlfriends’ husbands always used to call me for advice on laying floors and other things. So I registered myself at a paint store in West Orange” and started getting jobs, she said.
Meanwhile, she pushed forward with her product. By 1991, she began to self-manufacture three “Party Fun & Favors” kits that contained an assortment of morphed images and a reflective cup on which drawings took shape as they were colored in. The following year, a friend asked Myrna to make an activity kit to keep her kids entertained during a plane ride to Europe. Myrna whipped up what she dubbed the Awesome Art Activities Kit “Circus,” an anamorphic coloring kit designed to fit on an airplane tray table. Her friend was so ecstatic about how well it worked, Myrna brought it to the 1993 Toy Fair for its debut. And Ooz & Oz won its first recognition: a gold “Doing and Learning” award from Parents’ Choice, the nation’s oldest nonprofit guide to children’s media and toys. “To get the award right out of the box was incredible,” Myrna said.
Over the next year, Myrna found herself awash in more than $750,000 in purchase orders, pro forma invoices, and earnest inquiries from buyers in twenty-eight countries. But as a one-woman company without a lot of capital, she could not possibly manufacture the merchandise to fulfill those orders. So when representatives of stationery giant Pentech International, which manufactured and sold art and school supplies, offered to license and distribute the Ooz & Oz line of products, Myrna signed a two-year contract and sold all her existing stock of kits to the stationery company. Pentech was then reporting nearly $60 million in annual sales. The New Jersey company had licensing agreements with Walt Disney, Coca-Cola, the NFL, the NHL, and the NBA, and sold its products through Wal-Mart, Kmart, and Target, among other stores. Myrna figured she was on the cusp of the big payoff.
But, in what seemed like the next breath, Pentech’s sales plummeted in its newly formed teen cosmetics line, it lost a costly patent infringement case, and it became mired in internal disputes. The company never made or sold a single one of Myrna’s toys. Worse, Myrna was prohibited by contract from contacting potential customers. And despite her pleas—evidenced in ample correspondence between Myrna and the company’s president—Pentech never informed her potential customers that it had taken over her toy line or when it might deliver on orders. “Customers, like Radio Shack, reserve money and shelf space for purchase orders. When items do not materialize or when there’s no communication from the manufacturer,” the buyer loses trust, she said. “Pentech tied me up for two years, and for two years I could not do anything. They wouldn’t manufacture and they wouldn’t contact my customers. I kept begging them, ‘Let them know where things stand.’ But they wouldn’t. They had lawyers and deep pockets, and all I had was me. It was excruciating. They had taken this wonderful idea and this wonderful company of mine and basically killed it. It hurt so much I couldn’t go into toy stores for almost ten years.”
She was so devastated that the details of that period remain a blur to her. “You’re trying to make ends meet, you’re trying to raise a child, you’re fighting in court, your heart is broken because your little pot of gold at the end of the rainbow has been buried or trashed or something.