『Deddy Bears: From Shelf to Screen, Building IP Without Content First — with Gavin Lawler and Chris Ticker』のカバーアート

Deddy Bears: From Shelf to Screen, Building IP Without Content First — with Gavin Lawler and Chris Ticker

Deddy Bears: From Shelf to Screen, Building IP Without Content First — with Gavin Lawler and Chris Ticker

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2026年5月12日まで。4か月目以降は月額1,500円で自動更新します。

概要

 This episode, sponsored by Innov8 Creative Academy and Deddy Bears, sees Andy and Emily joined by two guests who met through a thoroughly Irish chain of mutual acquaintances and ended up building something genuinely unusual together. Gavin Lawler is the founder of Innov8 Creative Academy — a toy inventor and entrepreneur with over 250 IPs in his portfolio and a background that includes the Irish Fairy Door Company. Chris Ticker is a kids media showrunner and creator with a long career in the industry, including time at Jam Media. They're currently collaborating on Deddy Bears: a creepy-cute collectible toy brand that has sold over 10 million units in under three years and is now moving into content, with a YouTube series in production and a feature film in development.Gavin opens by telling the story of the Irish Fairy Door Company — half a million units sold at twenty pounds each in Ireland, a business that worked brilliantly at home but struggled to translate internationally because the Irishness was too specific and the product too niche. The lesson he took from it was the need to design for a global audience from the outset. Since then, Innov8 Creative Academy has built a reputation as a rapid trend-identification and commercialisation machine — the Six7 plush is cited as an example of a product that went from a six-hour design turnaround to hundreds of thousands of units sold in a matter of weeks. The model is built on firing small bullets: get to market fast and cheaply, test sell-through, and only scale what lands.Deddy Bears emerged from a 36-hour design sprint for a Walmart Canada Halloween brief. The buyer initially chose a different product, but when that proved too complex to execute, Deddy Bears got the slot by default — and promptly achieved 86% sell-through in its first season, opening doors to major retailers across 50 countries. The bears come in coffins with death certificates, each character has a backstory ranging from ancient Egypt to the modern day, and the whole thing sits in that now-familiar cultural territory occupied by Wednesday Addams, Stranger Things, and Five Nights at Freddy's: once-alternative content that has been thoroughly normalised for family audiences and is, as Gavin puts it bluntly, extracting cash from people's pockets.The conversation that forms the heart of the episode is about what happens when these two worlds — fast-cycle toy invention and long-form IP development — collide. Chris describes arriving into a brand that already had a fandom and realising his first job was simply to listen: to go to New York Toy Fair, watch the fans and influencers, understand who was actually buying the bears and why, before writing a single word. What he found surprised him — a remarkably wide demographic ranging from children collecting blind bags to 20-something women forming deep emotional attachments to the characters, caring about packaging, wanting to know the lore. The Giphy page Gavin's wife Aoife created as a half-joke hit 10 million shares within weeks of launch, including a front-page feature on April Fool's Day, and neither Gavin nor Chris fully saw it coming.There's a genuinely interesting structural argument running through the episode about the relationship between content and IP. Chris's view — shaped by coming into a brand that already had proven market demand — is that content doesn't always have to carry all the weight; sometimes it exists to support IP rather than create it. Gavin's perspective is that the toy market has always needed to fire small bullets and test quickly, and that traditional media could learn from this rather than committing millions upfront in the hope that an audience materialises. Both agree that character, not plot, is the fundamental unit of connection — plot matters the first time, but audiences return to hang out with characters they love.The episode ends with a look at what's next: the YouTube series launches this summer, studio conversations for the feature film are underway in LA, and Gavin makes the point that the priority now isn't a money grab — the IP is already selling — but finding the right partners who respect and bring along the fandom that already exists.Key Takeaways:Irish Fairy Door Company's international struggles taught Gavin a key lesson: a product built on cultural specificity needs to offer something universally resonant underneath, and Irishness alone isn't enough to drive global commercial scale.Rapid trend identification and small-bullet commercialisation is a replicable model: Innov8 Creative Academy's approach — spot a trend early, design fast, test at retail, scale only what sells — offers a very different risk profile to traditional IP development.Deddy Bears succeeded almost by accident, getting its Walmart listing by default when a more complex design proved undeliverable, but the 86% sell-through in season one validated the concept and opened up major global retail ...
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