Bakugan was one of the biggest toy fads of 20.
WHAT IS SPIN MASTER TV
An associated anime TV series, which Spin Master co-produced, made the brand into a household name around the world. A Bakugan collectible card game turned the toys into game pieces. The toys, which Spin Master co-developed with Japan’s Sega Toys, are addictively fidgety, with spring-loaded limbs and hidden latches that make each one as beguiling as a miniature Chinese puzzle. Five years earlier, the company had launched Bakugan, a line of Transformer-like toys that start as marble-sized plastic spheres and then, when they come in contact with a magnetic surface, pop open into palm-sized creatures like Dragonoid, a red dragon with a narwhal-esque nose horn. When Gadbois, a CPA, joined the company in 2012, Spin Master was in a bind.
When we met, his tuft of sandy hair was combed neatly atop a clean-shaven face that would have looked severe if it weren’t so frequently lightened by laughter. Gadbois’s personal appearance matches his surroundings. Just about the only corner of the complex that isn’t completely festooned with toys is the office of chief operating officer Benoit Gadbois, where the decor is spare and modern. T-shirt-clad engineers mingle with preppy marketing pros in a sleek corporate cafeteria where a giant rainbow-coloured mural of the word “play” is made up of hundreds of thousands of Bunchems, Lego-like building toys that look like psychedelic cockleburs. Floor-to-ceiling illustrations of the company’s products adorn cerulean walls and there are toys everywhere: perched on the dividers between cubicles, sealed in vitrines for public display and strewn about in a special room called the Toy Box, where staff and visitors can cuddle giant Paw Patrol plushes or shake hands with a waist-high Meccanoid robot. The seven-storey suite, in a downtown Toronto office tower, is still brand new-Spin Master has only been there since June. Spin Master’s headquarters are everything you’d imagine a toy company’s offices to be.
Ben Gadbois, global president and chief operating officer of Spin Master (Photograph by Daniel Ehrenworth)