When toy company Spinmaster, Inc. entered the world of girls toys via Liv Girls, they came to Almer/Blank to craft a rich digital universe where the dolls reside, and the resulting site at LivWorld.com remains one of our largest and longest running accounts.

SpinMaster, the makers of the Bakugan battle-bots among other top-selling products, is  the fifth largest toy company in the world. In 2009, they launched the Liv line of dolls, to compete in the same segment as Barbie and Bratz.

Less than two months away from the scheduled launch, after dismissing their prior vendor and deciding to re-start from scratch, SpinMaster called in Almer/Blank to provide a full-service solution, encompassing design, engineering, CG animation, copy, and support.

The task was to engineer a complex “webverse” that was user friendly and engaging, while taking on a full service brand roll-out and deploying cutting edge technology for the site (such as the inverse kinematics that we implemented to create the skeletal structures of the doll’s dressing rooms). With work spanning overall site design, to game development and integration, episodic webisode animations, writing and designing daily “diary” entries for the dolls, localizing everything in French, and engineering a fully-interactive “dress-up closet”, allowing girls to play with, pose, dress and photograph their virtual dolls.

Almer/Blank balanced these demands by leveraging our inhouse design team, establishing a seamless process for design, approval and integration including managing other specialists, handling numerous vendors (including the development an API to facilitate 3rd party engineering), all while communicating a constant brand message and guaranteeing quality.

Starting with only the product name and logo, we successfully designed, produced and launched LivWorld.com in only seven weeks! We then proceeded to release significant updates to the site over the following year.

For the first year and a half, SpinMaster utilized this site as a value-add for doll-owners. Customers who purchased a doll earned access to the site, the games, the dolls’ diary entries, and the original episodic webisode animations. With each new real Liv product a customer purchased (for instance, a new dress for the dolls), the customer would earn access to the equivalent virtual product in the site.

Now entering the third year of the operation of LivWorld.com, SpinMaster has decided to remove the  paywall  for all content, using this highly-trafficked site (with dozens of games, scores of webisodes, and hundreds of hand-crafted diary entries) as a marketing channel for other SpinMaster properties.