Meet the Maker

By all accounts, a Hong Kong artist named Michael Lau started the designer-toy movement. At an art show in 1997, Lau displayed a collection of 101 G.I. Joe toys that he'd modified to look like his friends and neighbors — skateboard kids, graphic designers, urban B-boys. Lau went on to design a line of coveted toys, then Nike sneakers, then ad campaigns for brands such as Levi's.

Other artists in China and Japan picked up on Lau's idea. Several years later, when the trend was dying down in Asia, artists worldwide unleashed their own lines of vinyl toys. Companies such as Kid Robot and Critterbox identified vinyl toys as the next wave and hired artists to design them.

Between his junior and senior years of high school, Madl jumped at the chance to take summer courses at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He loved the school and the city so much that he didn't want to return to Kansas. But he did, just long enough to finish high school.

"Literally one week after graduation, I had my stuff packed and was on the road," he says.

Madl returned to Otis. During his freshman year, the school introduced the country's first bachelor of fine arts program in toy design. The program offered a course devoted to plush animals, which he took. For the final project, Madl's professor instructed the class to re-create the toy that parents had fought over so viciously during Christmas 1996: Tickle-Me Elmo. Madl's version was called "Nightmare on Elmo Street." His Elmo had a detachable scalp that could be pulled back to reveal a plush skull and brain. When you poked the brain, a mechanism inside Elmo would make the toy twitch.

Madl also took an action-figure class. He still has that final project locked in a padded briefcase. The fasteners snap open to reveal a decapitated clown with Bruce Willis muscles, each limb lovingly hand-carved out of resin and painted. The clown has a chiseled face, dollops of red on his cheekbones and two spikes of red fuzzy hair behind his ears on an otherwise bald head. When assembled and dressed, the clown is shirtless under suspenders that hoist up felt green-and-yellow polka-dot pants.

He entered the action-figure clown in his school's final gallery show, but his assigned display space was on a remote upper floor. So he hired a friend, a bodybuilder and aspiring actor, to dress up as his toy, with makeup, yellow-and-green polka-dot pants, suspenders and all.

"What's my motivation?" Madl's friend asked him.

"Just act like a pissed-off clown. Don't talk to anybody. Just frown at them and hand them these fliers," Madl said. The fliers simply read, "5th Floor."

Madl's clown was a hit. He got an A.

At Otis, creative classes were propped up by instruction in marketing, business and economics. Madl had professors who, in their professional lives, held positions as judges in contract law and attorneys for toy manufacturers. Through them, Madl learned one of the most important lessons for an artist: how not to get ripped off.

While in college, Madl also landed a vital internship with toy-manufacturing behemoth Mattel.

He remembers one day when the Los Angeles office geared up for a big review. A huge conference room was set up with presentations that teams had worked on for weeks. Madl had been in the Disney-themed infant-preschool division, designing toys in Minnie Mouse patterns. This was the day when everyone found out whether his or her idea would sink or swim.

"The president of the company and two lower VPs came in, and there were probably a hundred different presentations set up," Madl says. "They literally just went down the line and went, 'Yes, no, no, yes,' without looking at them, reading them, you know? And then it was done. It just sucked. It was like, wait a minute, I just worked for, like, three months on that — don't you want to hear about it? But they're off to the next meeting. Unfortunately, then that idea goes in a box and never gets shown again. It's dead."

Every decision was driven by focus groups and price points — the major factors involved with releasing a toy to every Wal-Mart in the nation.

What Madl was sketching in his black book was wilder than anything he'd dare showcase at Mattel.

And whereas Mattel was churning out its toys in six- or seven-figure runs, companies such as Madl's beloved Kid Robot were manufacturing products in small batches — no more than 2,000.

After graduation in 2000, a marketing VP at Mattel offered Madl an interview. He turned it down flat. The other Otis students thought he was crazy, but there was one person who knew he wasn't corporate material: Sarah Belcher, Madl's girlfriend since their freshman year at Blue Valley High School.

"He doesn't like to answer to anybody," she says. "Except me."

Madl briefly came home to Kansas, married Sarah and moved back with her to Los Angeles, where he interviewed at boutique advertising and design firms. He landed a job at JMP Creative, where he designed artwork for marketing campaigns. After three years there, Madl and a few other JMP employees spun off to create their own firm, called By George. He worked with By George until he and the owners parted ways — they were, he says, content to keep making toys for Taco Bell kids' meals, he says. Madl wasn't.