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Louis Marx® and Company
Louis Marx and Company was an American toy manufacturer in business from 1919 to 1980. They made many types of toys including tin toys, toy soldiers, toy guns, action figures, dolls, toy cars and model trains. Some of their notable toys are Rock'em Sock'em Robots, Big Wheel tricycles, Disney branded dollhouses and playsets based on TV shows like Gunsmoke. Its products were often imprinted with the slogan "One of the many Marx toys, have you all of them?"
Logo and offerings
The Marx logo was the letters "MAR" in a circle with a large X through it, resembling a railroad crossing sign. As the X sometimes goes unseen, Marx toys were, and are still today, often misidentified as "Mar" toys. Reputedly, because of this name confusion, the Italian diecast toy company Martoys, after two years of production, changed its name to Bburago in 1976. Although the Marx name is now largely forgotten except by toy collectors, several of the products that the company developed remain strong icons in popular culture, including Rock'em Sock'em Robots, introduced in 1964, and its best-selling sporty Big Wheel tricycle, one of the most popular toys of the 1970s. In fact, the Big Wheel, which was introduced in 1969, is enshrined in the National Toy Hall of Fame.
Marx's toys included tinplate buildings, tin toys, toy soldiers, playsets, toy dinosaurs, mechanical toys, toy guns, action figures, dolls, dollhouses, toy cars and trucks, and HO scale and O scale trains. Marx also made several models of typewriters for children. Marx's less expensive toys were extremely common in dime stores, and its larger, costlier toys were staples for catalog and department store retailers such as Eaton's, Gamages, Sears, W.T. Grant, Montgomery Ward, J. C. Penney and Spiegel especially around Christmas. In pre-WWII America, it was common for Kresge's and Woolworth's to place yearly orders with Marx for at least $1 million each.
History
Founded in August 1919 in New York City by Louis Marx and his brother David, the company's basic aim was to "give the customer more toy for less money," and stressed that "quality is not negotiable" – two values that made the company highly successful. Initially, after working for Ferdinand Strauss, Marx, born in 1894, was a distributor with no manufacturing capacity. All product production would have to be contracted out for the first few years. Marx raised money as a middleman, studying available products, finding ways to make them durable but less expensive, and then closing sales. Enough funding was raised to purchase tooling from previous employer Strauss for two obsolete tin toys – the Alabama Coon Jigger and Zippo the Climbing Monkey. With subtle changes, Marx was able to turn these toys into hits, selling more than eight million of each within two years. Another success was the "Mouse Orchestra" with tinplate mice on piano, fiddle, snare, and one conducting.
Marx listed six qualities he believed were needed for a successful toy: familiarity, surprise, skill, play value, comprehensibility and sturdiness. By 1922, both Louis and David Marx were millionaires. Initially, Marx reevaluated and produced a few original toys by predicting the hits and manufacturing them less expensively than the competition. The yo-yo is an example: although Marx is sometimes wrongly credited with inventing the toy, the company was quick to market its own version. During the 1920s, about 100 million Marx yo-yos were sold.
Unlike most companies, Marx's revenues grew during the Great Depression, with the establishment of production facilities in economically hard-hit industrial areas of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and England. By 1937, the company had more than $3.2 million in assets ($42.6 million in 2005 dollars), with debt of just over $500,000. He was declared "Toy King of the World" in October 1937 in a London newspaper. By 1938, Marx employed 500 workers in the Dudley factory and 4000 in the American factories. Marx was the largest toy manufacturer in the world by the 1950s. Fortune Magazine in January 1946 had declared him "Toy King" suggesting at least $20 million in sales for 1941, but again in 1955, a Time Magazine article also proclaimed Louis Marx "the Toy King," and that year, the company had about $50 million in sales. Marx was the star article of the magazine with his picture displayed on the front cover. Marx was the initial inductee in the Toy Industry Hall of Fame, and his plaque proclaimed him "The Henry Ford of the toy industry."
At its peak, Louis Marx and Company operated three manufacturing plants in the United States: Erie, Pennsylvania, Girard, Pennsylvania, and Glen Dale, West Virginia. The Erie plant was the oldest and largest, while the Girard plant, acquired in 1934 with the purchase of Girard Model Works, produced toy trains, and the Glen Dale plant produced toy vehicles. Additionally, Marx operated numerous plants overseas, and in 1955 five percent of the toys Marx sold in the US were made in Japan. In 1952 Marx Company stationary listed operations in: Mexico, London England, Swansea Wales, Durbin South Africa, Sydney Australia, Toronto Canada, São Paulo Brazil and Paris France. By 1959, the demand for American toys was a billion dollars a year.
Marx enjoyed his wealth at his 20.5-acre estate in the wealthy suburb of Scarsdale, north of New York City. The estate featured a 25-room Georgian mansion, a barn and stables for horses he raised and other amenities. The estate was sold to a developer after his death in 1982, to make way for some 29 homes.
Read More: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Marx_and_Company