Monster Trucks

Buildable Play Experience

The Marketing Store is a global engagement agency that’s mission is to bring people and brands closer together. They are the world’s biggest toy manufacturer by volume. With the scale and positive impact they have on people’s lives, they have put sustainability at the forefront of their design thinking – they are one of the leading innovators, changing the way that toys are designed and manufactured.

Leveraging our extensive toy and play experience design, The Marketing Store engaged us to work along-side their in-house team to help create a sustainable, buildable range of Hot Wheels Monster Trucks. The brief was complex, making it one of the most challenging one we have faced yet - strict safety constraints, tight box sizes and sustainability objectives all without undermining the crucial requirement of creating a fun play experience. The task was to create a buildable Monster Truck system that could be immediately understood and executed by a child as young as six.

A key challenge was to balance the manufacturing requirements of the material, Green PE (bio-based polyethylene produced from the renewable raw material sugar cane) the size requirement to avoid choke hazards and the constrained box size. This led us to design in the fine margins of buildable components that were big enough to avoid choke hazards, strong enough to avoid breakages yet small enough to fit in the packaging dimensions.

The toys needed to be designed with the ambition that they would be retained and offered repeat play by creating multiple levels of construction, engaging role-play possibilities and collectability. To achieve this, an understanding of why Hot Wheels Monster Trucks engages with so many and which of the existing traits could authentically translate into the toy design.

Working with The Marketing Store’s in-house design and innovation teams, our collaborative working practise helped identify a range of potential opportunities for a buildable platform, finally being concluded with a rail solution. At the heart of the design, was a play experience that replicated the unique free movement of the wheels and axles used by the real monster trucks.

Through several iterative toy prototype stages, a suspension design that replicated the unique axel and wheel movement was developed, using only three components for ease of assembly. Iterative 3D-printed toy prototypes were made and tested, this improved the function as well as allowed us to generate many video clips to capture the assembly process and range of stunts the truck frame could achieve.

To validate the concept, The Marketing Store undertook a series of safety and research sessions. Using our Formlabs 3L 3D printer, we were able to provide near-perfect surface finish prototypes, with the capacity to build multiple parts concurrently, delivering a high volume of samples for testing. The rail concept was thoroughly tested with the learnings applied across the full range of toys. The final collection included four buildable Hot Wheels Monster Trucks, designed to exclusively use a combination of Green PE and Fibre sustainable materials. Due to the thorough product testing and validation, the collection moved into production with little modification, retaining all the key play experiences and design intent; the trucks moved dynamically just like the much bigger real-life monster trucks.

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