Lisa Guglielmi and Alexandra Deegan

[00:02] LISA GUGLIELMI: My name is Lisa Guglielmi I am 20 years old. Today's February 24, 2020, and I'm in New York at Toy Fair. I'm here with Alexandra Deegan, and she's my supervisor for my internship here in the US.

[00:22] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: My name is Alexandra Deegan I'm 57 years old. Today is February 24, 2020. I'm in New York City at the annual Toy Fair. The name of my interview partner is Lisa Guglielmi, and she is my current german intern.

[00:49] LISA GUGLIELMI: So, Alex, why don't you tell me a little bit more about what you're doing at the moment.

[00:56] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: I have been working the last 20 years in coordinating product development for Ravensburger, North America, mainly focused on growing our puzzle category today, Ravensburger was established in 1883 in the medieval town of Ravensburg, Germany, on the southwestern border near austrian Switzerland. It is a beautiful place, and I am here today with Lisa because she is doing a work study program for Ravensburger in Germany, and she's come over to the United States to be my intern for three months. She managed our New York toy fair preparations.

[01:46] LISA GUGLIELMI: You are here doing this. You just talk directly to her.

[01:54] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: But I can't. I can't read the. Read my. That's the thing. I don't have a memory of what we had discussed, what we wanted to talk about. I guess it's just because I don't want to do the. And keep looking up and down. Is that going to work for you? Okay. Are we still recording? Oh, I see. She managed our New York toy fair preparations this year and proved to be a wonderful organizer. So therefore, I chose her as my interviewer today since I don't have any children, and she would absolutely be my choice and a daughter.

[02:48] LISA GUGLIELMI: Thank you for choosing me as your interviewer. It's really an honor to be here, and it's really interesting to see New York toy fair and. Yeah. Let's start with our first question. You were talking about your job at Ravensburger, but I know that you've been working in the toy industry before. So how long have you been in the toy business in total?

[03:15] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: I've been working now in the toy business for 35 years. My journey in the international toy industry has been driven by fate. I truly believe that everything happens for a reason.

[03:29] LISA GUGLIELMI: Yeah, that's cool. So, when and how did you start?

[03:34] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Well, I started on my 18th birthday in 1981 during my college years at the University of New Hampshire as a receptionist for my father's us toy export business at our Nuremberg toy Fair booth. I was majoring in German at the time. And since English was not posted anywhere in Nuremberg back then, all the international distributors appreciated my translating services. Back then, the train set and model kit business for boys and plush and dolls for girls led the industry. And in the Nuremberg main train station, there were amazing displays of miniature train worlds in glass showcases as marketing for the toy fair, that always mesmerized me.

[04:28] LISA GUGLIELMI: It's interesting to hear because I know that there is still like one display with a miniature train at the Nuremberg train station. And yeah, I never knew the history behind it. So I know that you're still attending Nuremberg toy Fair. How often have you attended it in total?

[04:55] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: This would have been my 36th time attending. I've only missed three, three times. And what's amazing to me is I is witnessing an incredible expansion in the sheer size of the show, as well as how much more elaborate and imaginative all the booth designs have become. It was actually first established in 1949, only four years after World War Two ended and Nuremberg had taken quite a big hit in bombing during the war. So this was an amazing thing for the toy industry to already start an annual toy fair.

[05:35] LISA GUGLIELMI: Definitely, yeah. And now we're here at New York Toy Fair, which follows. Nunberg, what was your first experience here? Because I know you grew up in the US, so you probably have been to New York toy Fair as well quite a lot of times.

[05:55] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Indeed. Nowadays you have to be 18 to attend the toy fair at the Jacob Javits center. But when I was twelve, my father brought me to the New York Toy building on 205th Avenue, which was the toy fair location before the Jacob Javits center was built. Only back then, only top toy manufacturers who could actually afford it had showrooms there. And it was there that I demonstrated the first latracs, remote control cars in the hallways in the 1970s.

[06:31] LISA GUGLIELMI: That's nice.

[06:33] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: It was fun.

[06:34] LISA GUGLIELMI: Oh, yeah, I can imagine. Definitely. But speaking of change, what has changed most in the whole industry? Like, in the toy industry, I think.

[06:45] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: America's effect on the international toy business with more creative concepts has been the biggest change because we are risk takers as a culture. Previously it was a european classic, product dominated business.

[07:03] LISA GUGLIELMI: Yeah, we often hear something about, yeah, business is hard for women or was hard for women in the past. Could you experience a change in the toy business for especially women?

[07:19] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Absolutely. The toy business back then was male dominated and women worked as receptionists. But now there has been a big change in women being prominent in the toy industry, because we back then, especially men, didn't raise children, women raised children. So we had a bigger sense of what our children needed and what they played with, whereas back then it was men deciding what children were going to play with. Except for a few women, there were a few very important women in the industry.

[07:57] LISA GUGLIELMI: What names come up to your mind when you think about, one of them.

[08:02] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Is Ruth Handler, who started Mattel and the Barbie doll, Margaretha Steiff, who started the teddy bear business in Germany. So those are two names that two people who were then in the toy.

[08:21] LISA GUGLIELMI: Industry, especially the Stuyves, Teddy Berry, stoll, really, really known in Germany. Of course. So you have mentioned your father before and that he was the reason for you joining the toy industry because your family was into the toy business. How did he start in the industry?

[08:47] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: It was an interesting story. My father, John Deegan, was born in 1924 in Philadelphia, and life was very hard during the Great Depression in which he grew up. He was a creative guy, and already at the age of eight, he was selling any junk he could find to make some small change. And after joining the army at 17, back then you had to grow up fast because of having to go to war. He was in World War Two, and then he was called to duty in the Korean War, where he was a master sergeant in charge of supply transport. So my father was already at a very young age involved in sales and having his own business and in transporting product. So after he came back from Korea, he had various sales and warehouse supervisory jobs until his career met the hobby industry. So from 1956 to 1970 69, he worked for the Ravel model kit company, which was established in 1943 in California. So from 1960 to 65, my father became managing director of Ravel, Great Britain and Germany, hence the international link, residing in London, England, where I was born. And in 1966, we moved back to California headquarters, where my father was director of international operations until 1969.

[10:26] LISA GUGLIELMI: Sounds like a lot of different places he has lived in. But does this mean that you spend a part of your childhood in California? Do you have special memories from this time?

[10:39] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Absolutely. Well, as I mentioned before, Ruth Handler, my father introduced me to Ruth Handler, the founder of Mattel, and her daughter Barbara, for whom the Barbie doll was named. Of course, I was four years old at the time, so it didn't have the impact on me that it would today. I was also in a photo shoot of the dune buggy, for which Revelle made a model. And I got to go to Disneyland, where your fantasies of giant animated toys come true.

[11:12] LISA GUGLIELMI: This just sounds like a lot of fun. I really want to go to Disneyland. And you met the real Barbie and you said that you only lived there until 1969.

[11:28] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Correct.

[11:28] LISA GUGLIELMI: So what happened after?

[11:30] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Well, my father moved his career and our family to Michigan, where he became president of toy division of General Mills. And that consisted of MPC models, model kits, Craftmaster paint by numbers, and Lionel trains. General Mills actually ended up getting out of the toy business again, and his next career move took us to the east coast, to Concord, Massachusetts, where my father started his own toy export business. He sold us hobby and craft brands to distributors all over the world. Hence the reason for having a booth in Nuremberg, as the New York toy fair was not international back then.

[12:16] LISA GUGLIELMI: So you moved to the complete opposite side of the country, and you had to adapt again to a completely new environment. But I know that this was not the furthest that you had moved in your life, correct. I heard that you spent eleven years in Germany. After that, how did you end up in Germany?

[12:41] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Well, I wanted to get a teaching degree in German, but my father suggested I work as his assistant and start paying off my college debt. So I followed his advice and joined the family toy export business in 1985. Back then, communication was processed per landline telephones, unlike today or telex machine. And the telex machine entailed typing a message onto a ticker tape that had to be fed back into the machine and then dialed into the recipient's number, which arrived on the other end as a typed message. This was long before fax machines, let alone email. And also invoices were typed out on large IBM typewriters with carbon paper, so that you had a copy, and sent the original by mail, which took about ten days to arrive.

[13:38] LISA GUGLIELMI: Ten days. You could never imagine this nowadays.

[13:43] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: And because the german market was so insular, meaning lacking in distributors for outside distribution, for outside manufacturers. My father established a dexim office in Bunde So Dexim stands for Deegan export import, and he moved it to Bunde Westphalia, in 1980, where Revelle was and is still located, because that's where we had connections. And in 1986, I realized that I needed to retain my german language skills and asked him if I couldn't be sent to our german offices and warehouse for a year. The long story short is that one year turned into eleven. I took over a small business in a foreign country that owed money to vendors and had experienced theft from a couple of our german employees. So they were fired, and I was left alone at the age of 25 to turn around the business on a shoestring. It was all learning by doing, asking our CPA, bank manager, lawyer, and my new associates a lot of questions. I also called my father almost every day, since he was my boss. So at age 25, I also learned to drive and maintain a 1946 forklift with which I loaded trucks and warehouse racks. I packed and shipped specialty retail orders and typed invoices and kept log books. And so that's how that started. Then in my father sold dexim to the craft house corporation in Toledo, Ohio. We imported their paint by number and Suncatcher products in bulk and created european multilingual packaging for german rep groups and european sales, distributor sales. And I was thrown into the deep end of a completely foreign swimming pool and learned to get creative and problem solve with just sheer common sense that I continue to depend on today.

[15:59] LISA GUGLIELMI: It really seems to me like you had a lot of responsibilities at a young age.

[16:03] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Yes.

[16:04] LISA GUGLIELMI: And in a foreign country, which makes it even more difficult. So this is really impressive, I would say. But what was the most difficult thing back then? It was the hardest thing you had to do in Germany?

[16:22] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: I think the hardest thing was having to run a warehouse and organize all of the shipping that was needed. And we were importing raw products from the US, but packaging in Germany, I had to hire people to go into our warehouse and set up assembly lines within a budget, as I said, on a shoestring. And so that was the most difficult. The other thing that I would say is the most difficult is when, and I think, for anybody, is when you have to fire somebody who's not working out and is having a negative impact on the team, because I really love people and I understand their issues, but I would say that's the most difficult thing to have to do, is to let somebody go. And the other hardest thing, I think, in the industry was having to lose someone who is a vendor and has become a friend who dies and trying to fill that place with something else. A plan b of when you're. When you think you. You can depend on somebody or a particular product line or a particular staff member and they die, it's. I think that's the hardest thing for me.

[17:52] LISA GUGLIELMI: Oh, yeah, definitely. You lose someone. It's always hard. And was there also something about the germane culture that you like that comes up to your mind right now?

[18:08] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: The german culture is very different from the american culture because, as I said before, Americans take risks, and Germans like to have everything planned out completely, whereas Americans say, well, we've got it this far, let's see how it goes and make the changes we need to do along the way. So marketing is also very different. Back then, we didn't have any television advertisements for toys in Germany that much. And I have to say what was interesting is that because I was selling competitive product to Ravensburger, Ravensburger was my. Yes. Competitor. And it's interesting how all of this has come full circle and that now I work for Ravensburger in the US, as opposed for an american company in the toy industry in Germany. So, yes, I think that's the most interesting thing for me to do, is bridge the two different cultures between the german culture and the american culture, because the Americans don't understand how Germans think and the Germans don't understand how Americans think. So that's my job. And in speaking and in having lived in Germany, I get the Germans, and in being an American, I get the Americans. So that's pretty much what my job is, is coordinating.

[19:37] LISA GUGLIELMI: Yeah, I think, especially nowadays, in this international economy, it's really important that we have those bridges between the cultures. And I think that's also a good thing that we get the chance to do an internship like that, like what I'm doing now. How did your job at Daxom hobby articles end? After the eleven years in Germany.

[20:04] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Craft House was sold to another company, and the man who started the business and who was the heart and soul of craft house died. And the new company decided to farm out all of the know how, which was very sad. So the writing was on the wall that the business might end. So I gave my notice, not wanting to be alone in Germany, wondering what to do next. And so when I was 35 years old, 34 years old, I returned to the United States as an expatriate, and I had to get to know all sorts of things all over again, how to use the telephone, how to get credit. I had to do my driver's license all over again. Even though I'd been driving over 100 miles an hour on the Autobahn for years, I had to prove that I still could. I could drive a car like a 17 year old. So that was a bit difficult to transition because I couldn't get any credit. I had no credit record. I had no driving record, and so not everything was translating from german and from the german system to the us system. So I kind of had to start all over again in my own country.

[21:25] LISA GUGLIELMI: Yeah, like, this sounds really difficult, and you grew up in this country, and.

[21:30] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: I grew up in this country, but I still had my father as a support, and I decided I would move back to New Hampshire, where my best friend from my university days studying German, was living. And she had established a family. So that was my best option, was to just go back and see what I wanted to do with my life and a job, maybe even switch careers. I had no idea, because I couldn't even get unemployment, since I'd never paid into the unemployment system here in the United States. But luckily, I'd always saved my money knowing how to live on a shoestring. And the most amazing thing is that at the time, as I said, everything happens for a reason. I found out that Ravensburger had its offices at the time in New Hampshire, half an hour away from where I had moved, and they were looking for somebody in product development. And this was the perfect opportunity because I could speak German. So the german colleagues in Ravensburg were so happy that they finally had somebody who could speak German, because even though they can speak basic English, when you start talking about technical issues like machines breaking down or. Or how you process things, how you make a print for a jigsaw puzzle, how you create boxes, it's not as easy for them to explain the issues to you in English, which isn't their first language, especially if they're in technical departments. So they could explain it to me in German, and then I can explain it to my team in English. So I did a lot of translations. I translated some of our first games from English into German. And so I really got into the whole Ravensburger system. And because we're so famous for quality and precision, that's what the brand is all about. So I really love working for Ravensburger because it's fulfills my passion for making products that last forever, that are useful, that teach you things, that give children skills. We have products for young and old. It's something. It's like a quality you can grow up with and grow with, and it establishes memories, memories with your family. And it's still a family owned business. And I think that everybody who works at Ravensburger, I've now been working there for 20 years. We really stay there forever because we just love the people and love that family feeling of making products that are for people's enjoyment, but also for their education and stimulates their mind.

[24:36] LISA GUGLIELMI: Definitely. And as you mentioned, you are in this business for so many years. What keeps you going? What's the joy of creating toys?

[24:49] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: To me, the most special moment is when I see a child play with the products that we make, and their eyes light up because they have actually accomplished something. They've solved a problem, whether it's a puzzle or how to move something or how to play a game and how to follow rules or get creative, whether it's with arts and crafts or. And to see a child really enjoy themselves with the products that I make makes it all worthwhile for me also to have an adult come to me and say, I love your products. They're the best. And I love all that you do. I collect it all. And I always say to them, tell me about your experiences. Because it's all about the experience. It's not about just buying something and using it for a moment and then throwing it away. It's about having an experience with your family, with your friends, or even having a hobby that you can do on your own to relax, to decompress. So it's important. I feel like I have a reason for being.

[26:04] LISA GUGLIELMI: Yeah, I think it's even getting more important that the product has a purpose for my generation now. So that's really interesting to hear.

[26:21] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: So I have a question for you, Lisa, because I know that you have attended the Nuremberg toy Fair as a demonstrator for Ravensburger. And now that you've been here working on our toy fair and demonstrating for us and being a receptionist here on this end, it's interesting for me to see all these years later what you, for me, what you find are the differences between the cultures of, first of all, toy fair in Nuremberg and Toy fair in New York, and also your experiences in our office, how we work differently than we do at headquarters in Ravensburg.

[27:07] LISA GUGLIELMI: So what I can really say at the two toy fairs is that Nuremberg, the booth is huge and it's real. So there are so many people walking around all day long. Of course, it's the same happening in New York, but the Nuremberg booth is more like, it's bigger than the one that we have in New York. What also makes it more difficult to talk to colleagues, to get to know new colleagues. And at Nuremberg, I was more talking to the other apprentices and staying in the group with the other interns. And here at New York, it doesn't.

[27:52] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Matter.

[27:55] LISA GUGLIELMI: What your position in the company is. You're all talking to each other because the booth is smaller. The team dinner that we have is smaller. So you really get to talk and to meet new people from the, from the company. What I really enjoy about being here in New York and what I can see in the offices is that.

[28:23] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Of.

[28:23] LISA GUGLIELMI: Course, the Newton office is also a little bit smaller than the one in Ravensburg, the headquarters. So I know, I would say I know the Newton office now. I know the people that work there, at least in the office. And I feel that it's a really, really big family there and you help each other out all the time and all the different departments work together, and you're even having lunch together, which is just not possible. In Ravensburg, it's because of the size. And in Ravensburg, it's more that, you know your department you're in and you go to lunch with your department, but it's way more difficult to really go out of the. Get out of the group that you're in.

[29:15] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Yes, I agree.

[29:17] LISA GUGLIELMI: Yeah.

[29:18] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: And do you find, what about personality wise, when you're in Germany and versus here, do you find here is more a relaxed atmosphere?

[29:31] LISA GUGLIELMI: Sometimes it is. I think that Germans overthink a lot, and we are planners, as you mentioned before. This is the experience you had. And this is also what I'm thinking. So we like to have a plan. We like that everything works out the.

[29:49] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Way that we planned it. We planned it, yes.

[29:52] LISA GUGLIELMI: And this sometimes makes it a little bit more difficult because it's always about the results and it's also about the way how to get to the results. And I think I felt really welcomed in America, and no matter where you go, everyone is open minded and talking to you. And I would say in Germany, it takes longer to really make friends, to really. Yeah. Have someone to go out with or to just get into a group that is already, like, that's already existing. And I would say this is easier in America.

[30:37] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: I agree. I think we're better at hosting and welcoming.

[30:46] LISA GUGLIELMI: Yeah. But it's interesting to see the both cultures and how we work together.

[30:51] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: Well, I've really enjoyed having you as my intern.

[30:54] LISA GUGLIELMI: Thank you.

[30:55] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: And again, you've done a wonderful job. I know you were a bit nervous about it, but I wouldn't let you fail. I don't let any of my interns fail. And I really enjoy mentoring interns because it's also, it gives me a fresh outlook on things and I don't have to be right. I think that everything is always changing and that you have a lot of good feedback and input as the business grows and you're the new generation to take over from the rest of us. So I would like to thank you in German for being with me and also for having this interview with me. Danke Schon.

[31:37] LISA GUGLIELMI: Danke Schoen. So I also want to thank you, first of all, like, for being my supervisor here. I really enjoyed my internship. I really enjoyed New York toy fair and the preparations for it. It was a really interesting experience, and I think I would never had all the experiences without you. And you were always there for me, whatever the problem was. So thank you.

[32:10] ALEXANDRA DEEGAN: And I hope to see you again.

[32:13] LISA GUGLIELMI: Yeah, hope so, too.