Today we’d like to introduce you to Adam Litvack.
Adam, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I have always been fascinated by entrepreneurship even at a young age as I saw my parents fly around the world for business meetings, but it never dawned on me to start anything of my own until I was in college. I always knew that one day that I would do something in art, but I didn’t know what that was yet. After all, I was definitely not an “A” student and barely graduating high school I wanted to really look at my options in what I wanted to do. I decided to go to an art college for graphic design and then I later transferred to a school for animation. Halfway through college, I was working on a character for one of my classes and I couldn’t stop drawing this character. I showed it to one of my friends at the time and said wouldn’t this be a cool toy? My friend laughed and said, “Yeah, but how would that be possible?”
I told him, “I honestly have no idea… let me ask my parents who might have an idea.” To this day my parents are still my mentors and also my business partners. We’ll get to that later on…
After I showed my parents the concept, they shrugged and said, “looks cool…” and that was the end of the conversation until I said, “I think this could develop into a collectibles line?” They thought I was crazy, but at the time I was heavily buying vinyl toys and other collectibles in which really inspired me to develop this line, so it was easier to explain it to them. Months went on and I developed the line further with a few of my friends from school and we presented the concept again to my parents and they actually “liked” what they saw and asked me, “what do you call these things?” …and I asked my girlfriend at the time, who is now my biggest cheerleader, support system and wife said that they look like “zombies” but… they’re friendly looking.”
Friendly Zombie, Frombie was born after that and we went to work on flushing out the line more. My friends who helped work on the line with me ended up working for me and we started an internship program at our college in our senior year. We felt like Rockstar’s on campus! By our final year in school, we have gone to multiple comic-con shows and really built an audience for Frombie, attracting over 80,000+ followers and had over 2 million+ digital downloads worldwide through licensing partners. However, our first major achievement was actually getting Frombie into Walmart for the back-to-school season. It was huge! It had to be one of the proudest moments of my career so far and still is today. But with highs, come the lows and after the back-to-school season was over we spoke to our Walmart rep about our sell-through and they said, unfortunately, it went below average, so we had to eventually kill the program. They said for an unknown brand like Frombie to have at least the sell-through we had was still incredible. They wanted us to continue building on the brand and come back down the road.
After hearing the news, we decided to create a mobile app game called Frombie Run. And, in 2016 we presented Frombie to none other than Hasbro to be acquired. After heavy thought and passing multiple departments they decided to not take it on. After underperforming at Walmart and the Hasbro opportunity going nowhere, it was really disappointing to me after all these years of hard work and constant pushing, we already had failed twice. Like all things that happen in life, we have to just move on, learn from our experiences and grow. In 2017, we noticed a huge shift from our collectible toy sales to our fans and customers buying more of our collectible enamel pins. Our toys were $30-$200 each and our pins were at the time $5 each.
The funny thing to note is that we have actually been developing pins for many major companies for over 25 years under our parent company Traly Group, which was founded by my mother in 1992. You can say our pin game is very strong. We knew pins were big at the theme parks, but we never thought about another market which was literally right in front of us the whole entire time: (the fans and brand fandom). It was like a lightbulb moment for me which made me want to pivot our brand focus.
Understanding the pin business already from a larger scale, we thought why don’t we focus on making pins for all the companies here exhibiting at comic-con? Nobody is doing it and we can carve out our own niche. We can create a brand that can produce affordable fandom for true collectors. We also thought we could create another brand and just bring Frombie in as a sub-brand to keep our current fans. We called our new brand Pin Club.
Bob Iger, CEO and chairman of The Walt Disney Company said recently in an interview, “there’s no way to achieve great gains without taking great chances.”
From 2017 to present we have grown the Pin Club brand to an incredible company by adding major video games and anime partners like: Activision Blizzard, Capcom, VIZ Media, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Aniplex, Funimation and Toei Animation. Featured titles like: Call of Duty, Naruto, Assassins Creed, Gears of War, Street Fighter and Dragon Ball Z to name just a few.
My Dad always told me, “if you throw enough stuff against the wall, eventually something will stick.”
We continue to still exhibit at New York Comic Con and have an amazing community of pin collectors and fans! Most recently we launched our very first program with Target and have exceeded theirs and our own expectations in mass retail. We are currently on track to making the Pin Club x Target partnership into a million-dollar business on its own. It goes to show you to never give up, continue striving for greatness and learning to pivot in the right direction. In 2020 and beyond we have lots planned. We’re super excited for what’s to come.
In addition to developing both the Frombie and the Pin Club brands in the past 10 years, I have also joined the family business as well. For Traly, I am constantly pursuing opportunities in all facets of our businesses and what has helped me the most was LinkedIn. Surprisingly, I have learned to be very resourceful in reaching out on LinkedIn for new business in which we never have done that before in the past 20+ years. I have connected with thousands of industry professionals over the years and have actually helped expand our family business by doing so.
I am now one of the managing directors, partner and EVP of the company. I have the honor to work with an amazing product development team every day that directly focuses on and oversees product development, licensing, new business and sourcing for so many amazing companies worldwide! Visit (www.Traly.com) for more in-depth.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I wouldn’t exactly say smooth, but we’d say a road with lots of twists and turns. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn said, “An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a building and builds a plane on the way down” and I 100% agree with him. There have been lots of literal sweat and tears along the way, especially since I never went to a formal business school. I am very lucky that I have great mentors that guided me along the way and that kept me motivated. I feel like I got an honorary master’s degree from all my lessons during my journey. I am still learning new things every day. We overcame many obstacles by navigating our way and pivoting in the right direction. I believe that every entrepreneur needs to master pivoting in their business in order to overcome difficult and challenging times.
PIN CLUB AND TRALY GROUP – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
The Traly Group has been in the product development and manufacturing industry since 1992 and has been a leader since then. My role is to lead Traly’s creative strategy planning and exploration of new business to further expand Traly’s capabilities as a licensed manufacturer and as a premier supplier/vendor for some of the world’s leading companies. We produce collectible pins, premium accessories, souvenirs and promotional products to many major companies around the world.
We specialize mainly in premium metal and silicone accessory souvenir gift items which sets us apart from other vendors who have other manufacturing specialties. It’s more or less like, we do our thing and other trading companies do their thing. If we have a customer that is interested in something we don’t usually specialize in, we’ll have the items sourced and will get quotes from other factories.
Both Frombie and Pin Club are under Traly Group.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Over the years I have found that success is essentially built on these core pillars. I believe being successful is not just based on someone’s wealth or how much money you make. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple said, “let your joy be in your journey – not in some distant goal.” It is a lot deeper than that. It is more about managing your own health, managing your time, being with family, work ethic and having an extreme overall passion for what you do. If you can leverage all of these pillars together, then you will find success in your journey. It’s not rocket science, but it took me a couple of years to put these all into perspective and I truly believe in it.
Pricing:
- Collectible pins can range from $5-$30 per pin or pin set
- Pin Club pins start at $8-$20 per pin or pin set
Contact Info:
- Website: www.pin-club.com
- Instagram: pinclubofficial and adamzlitvack
- Other: www.linkedin.com/in/adamlitvack/
Image Credit:
Pin Club x Call of Duty pins, Activision Blizzard booth (industry), Coca-Cola products, Pin Club x Target, Pin Club booth at New York Comic Con 2019, Pin Club office, Pin Club and Capcom team picture, Dinner picture with former SVP of Sony Consumer Products / former SVP of 20th Century Fox, Pointing picture with flannel on is with Ubisoft’s Director of Consumer Products.
Suggest a story: VoyageMIA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
