Australian brand Pocket Sports, which began as an idea for a simple cricket dice game, has expanded into the overseas market and now counts Europe’s largest retailer of dice among its stockists.
With the games now available in the UK, US, Canada, France and Australia, founder Hamish Sterling says there is no secret method to getting your product to an international market, other than persistence.
“Sales and distribution takes more effort and is difficult to do being independent,” he says. “More times than not it’s also a timing issue. They may not be looking for your or my product this year but next year they might want something different. Constant emails and effort are your best weapons when trying to find new business.”
Sterling started the brand in 2011 with the intention of updating classic cricket game ‘Owzthat’ by bringing it into the modern T20 format and introducing extra dice to capture the fast paced nature of the game.
After producing an initial run of 1,000 units, Sterling saw the potential in translating the table top format into other sports. The brand has now produced 12 different versions of the game including Pocket Footy (AFL), Golf, Football (soccer), Basketball and Tennis, and Sterling says he aims to add at least two to three new sports per year to keep the selection interesting.
Although each game takes about four to six months to develop with Sterling as the sole designer and rule maker—involving many hours watching sport and testing game play—he says the design aspect of the business is the easy part, and that he has acted on advice from more experienced industry players to improve his product.
“We’ve addressed some minor gripes with packaging that Gerry Crown [CEO of Australian toy and game distributor Crown & Andrews] kindly advised on and now we have the ‘next gen’ individual boxed games. They look very slick and the packaging is certainly the reason why we’ve picked up a few more overseas stockists.
“We’ve also reduced the MOQ and pushed the retail price so there’s less of a financial outlay for new stockists and better margins for them too.”
In future, Sterling plans to have yearly production runs with changes and modifications to each game. “I want the games to be collectible, so subtle changes to rules, dice, packaging and team card inclusions are all something I can do to engage retailers to stock us as a long term prospect and product.”
While the international expansion is exciting, Sterling is eager for more Australia retailers to stock the products, which do well across the gift, toy and corporate promotional markets.
By Ruth Cooper
