Children's Features

Innovative KIDS: It's All in the Name
Sally Lodge -- 11/20/00
A publisher of interactive books that resists the term "novelty"


Puzzles, board games, magnetic letters, pop-out play shapes and minibooks that double as holiday ornaments are just some of the colorful components found in fall releases from the aptly named innovative KIDS. Based in Norwalk, Conn., this children's publisher launched its first list in fall 1999, and just a year later its staff is celebrating an impressive milestone: the company's top-selling series, Soft Shapes, has reached the million-copy mark in sales.
The new imprint is a division of Innovative USA Inc., which president Michael Levins and publisher Shari Kaufman founded in 1989 to provide book and product development and packaging and manufacturing services to other publishers. Though the company still functions as a packager on a selective basis, its primary focus is now on creating its own list. The shift, Kaufman said, was the result of economic as well as creative considerations. "We were having difficulty making the margins work as a packager, since our inventive formats are so manufacturing-intensive," she noted. "This concern, as well as the fact that we had so many great book ideas in-house that were not being realized, made us take the leap from packager to publisher."
Sales of the Soft Shape series have
recently topped the one million mark.
In fact, innovative KIDS, which is distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Chronicle Books, made a decidedly bold leap into the marketplace, introducing on its debut list a number of series as well as individual titles with unconventional formats and imaginative features. "From the beginning, we combined high-quality content, terrific artwork and interactive elements to enhance the reading experience," Kaufman said. "Encouraging children to read was our first mission, and we wanted to do it by sparking their young minds and hands to work together."
This philosophy has certainly sparked sales. In addition to Soft Shapes (a line of foam books that teach early learning concepts), several other recent innovative KIDS titles have also sold in significant numbers. Sales of The Amazing Game Board Book, which features pull-out pages and foam, magnetic and write-on/wipe-off boards, have topped 200,000 copies since its March release; and two coin-collecting books, Coin Count-y and Coin Collecting for Kids, have also sold 200,000 copies each. Another big success this fall, already reaching a sales total of 100,000 copies, is Now I Know My ABCs, whose components include a spiral-bound book with fold-out pages, magnetic letters and board, and 26 four-piece puzzles.
The Amazing Game Board Book
features several interactive elements,
like magnetic and wipe-off pages.
The staff of innovative KIDS seems to take in stride the unusual design, manufacturing and retail display challenges created by the books' wide range of formats and features. "We consider every aspect of a book before we produce it," Kaufman stated. "We have an incredibly talented staff of 24 people and we develop all of our concepts internally. We have engineers on staff who make sure that each format and all components of a book work together well, since nothing that we produce is easy." Safety is also a primary concern of the company, added Levins, noting that "we have a very intensive safety compliance program. All our products go through a testing process, both before and after they are produced, to make sure that they meet both U.S. government and international safety requirements, as well as those of the toy industry."
Making sure that retailers and consumers know exactly what they are getting when they purchase an innovative KIDS product is also a key consideration for the company. "We try to resist shrink-wrapping so that a consumer can peruse the product and see the components," Levins said. To this end, on some titles the publisher wraps the interior pages with an acetate band, enabling potential customers to open the front cover, and also includes on the back cover a photo of each component of the package.
The company's patented Groovy Tube
packaging can hold toys and other
book tie-in items.
One especially creative design, the company's patented Groovy Tube format, features a clear, tubelike spine that holds the toy animals (bugs, dinosaurs or sea creatures) that thematically tie in with the various titles in this series. In addition to making the contents visible, this format also shelves well in stores, noted Kaufman, who cited this consideration as another top priority. In her words, "We are very concerned about how a book will retail and try to devise formats that will shelf spine out. We go to great lengths to make sure that we don't need to devise a special display for our titles." One exception is the retail displays that the house has created for its Soft Shapes line, which entails three different trim sizes.
Levins, who is quick to dissociate his publishing program with "novelty publishing" (maintaining that too often publishers of this genre "just tag a plush onto the side of a book rather than integrate the book and play value creatively so that there is meat there"), anticipates that innovative KIDS's annual output will increase from the current 24 titles to 32. Highlights of the spring 2001 list include Hocus-Pocus Magical Cookbook, which includes a "wizard wheel" on the inside cover that lets young chefs translate "secret ingredients," and Phenomenal Foam Flyer Book, which features four foam, pop-out flying objects that demonstrate various aerodynamic principles. Innovative indeed.