IT all started at age 12 for Keith Millman. That’s when he entered his first invention contest and won the New Jersey state finals.
His creation, the Mean Clean-Up Machine, a
Tonka truck-like vehicle with a plastic front-end loader, was a parent’s
fantasy – the idea, he says, “was to make cleaning up your room fun.”
For Millman, now 30, it was just the beginning. While the rest of his classmates were off playing, Millman was tinkering in his parents’ garage.
About the same time, Westley Ciaramella was indulging in similar
pursuits in nearby Staten Island.
A childhood tae kwon do champion who’d earned a black belt at 7, he’d developed a heart condition at 12 that left him unable to do a lot of the active things 12-year-old boys do.
“To keep myself busy, I started coming up with games, and taking my
toys apart and putting them back together – that
kind of thing,” says
Ciaramella, 28.
Today the pair have
parlayed their love for inventing toys and games into a thriving business, Brooklyn-based Catapult Concepts, which produces more than 100 concepts a year for manufacturers including Mattel and
Hasbro.
It started eight years ago, when the two met at their first day attending the toy-design program at Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology.
Millman ended up there after earning a mechanical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins; Ciaramella had been studying illustration at FIT when he’d learned about the toy program and applied, submitting as part of his application a game he’d designed when he was 12.
“We hit it off immediately,” says Millman. “For starters, we were both so excited to be there we were jumping out of our skin.”
After graduating, they decided to get as much on-the-job experience as they could. Millman took a job at a toy-inventing house in Chicago, while Ciaramella ended up at a toy manufacturer in Texas.
Three years later, they reconvened on the Jersey Shore, and Catapult Concepts, a toy- and game-invention studio, was born. The headquarters was a house they shared in Long Branch, with a workspace in the basement, where they set about analyzing the marketplace, brainstorming ideas and building prototypes.
“We’d constantly present our ideas to each other and ask ourselves, ‘How does this game work? What makes it different from anything out there?’ ” says Millman.
It was slow going at first, says Millman. But eventually they sold their first toy to Mattel – Piranha Panic, a plastic action game where fish race to escape a hungry piranha. After a few more sales, last year they were able to move to an office and design space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, off Third Avenue.
While some of the concepts they sold went nowhere, others have hit the mark, most notably Piranha Panic, which “should break a million pieces sold by Christmas,” says Ciaramella. And today, Catapult Concepts is on a roll, bringing in close to million dollars a year.
The two are riding high on their success at turning a childhood preoccupation into a viable career.
“The best feeling,” says Millman, “is when you go to a store and you see a kid pick up your game and ask his mom to buy it.”