Shawnimals
When Jen and Shawn Smith came to Tom Cassell, Director of CCV's Illinois Small Business Development Center, they were on the doorstep of launching a Nintendo DS game based on their line of customized plush toys. They were just starting to focus on their business full-time and they needed someone to help them realize the potential of their business. CCV brought the outside perspective that they needed. According to Shawn, “you have to know the limits of your business, but you can’t be stubborn; you must be open to suggestions from the outside.”
After working with CCV, Shawn feels like he has a much clearer outlook of the big picture of his business. Creativity has never seemed to be an issue with Shawnimals; what they needed was a guide to make them more comfortable with the business side of things. They were looking for answers to the general questions that all businesses must answer at some point: how do we continue to grow? How do we manage cash flows? Do we need capital? If so, from where do we get it? Instead of giving Shawnimals general answers to these questions, CCV customized solutions to the particularities of Shawnimals.
The company had just unveiled their Nintendo DS game, Ninjatown, and Tom understood the potential magnitude of this project and pointed out the importance of cross-promotion: Shawnimals used the video game to attract people to original Shawnimals projects. Shawnimals puts a lot of creativity into not only the design of each character, but into the back-story of each character as well. Tom suggested that they take advantage of this attractive branding scheme by really developing their website. Through a challenge grant, Shawn and Jen raised enough funds to expand their website. It is now a clever and artistic site that features a character archive that includes pictures and biographies of each character.
In 2008, out of 80 businesses, Shawnimals took home second place at the City Treasurer’s Business Plan Competition. Training for the competition helped them hone in on the mechanics of running their business. Shawn said that working with CCV was a great experience because “we not only learned what questions needed to be asked, we learned how to answer them.”
Shawn also gives some credit to Tom for helping them come up with the idea for the one of their most clever and successful products: the Professor Fliggins discovery series. Tom recognized that they were getting a lot of exposure from their video game, but they need to make some new products to take advantage of this new attention. From this, Shawn and Jen decided to get back to their roots by making more products by hand while maintaining creative design and story concepts. Each month, a character named Professor Fliggins will discover a new Shawnimal, which is sent to buyers in a package that features unique Fliggins branding. The project has been so popular among fans that Shawn and Jen plan to do a second volume of Fliggins discoveries. Tom’s influence on Shawnimals demonstrates that CCV does not only help lay the foundations of stronger business models, but it can even stoke the fires of creativity.
For more information on Shawnimals, visit www.shawnimals.com.