I was a supervillain mastermind, but now I’m a child’s toy designer

Photo by Taylor Heery on Unsplash

I had always aspired to be a supervillain. I dreamt of tunneling into banks and extracting bills of high denominations with a vacuum powered by uranium, or stealing the moon and holding it for ransom.

I realized I could be a far worse menace to society by designing children’s toys.

As a supervillain, my pivot to designing toys came easily. I needed to take my desire to wreak havoc by terrorizing an entire population, and scale it down to focus on the parents and guardians of innocent children. I set out to cause chaos and potentially institutionalize an entire nation, one grownup at a time.

Same plan, different execution.

There are several key areas I focus on when designing toys that invoke hysteria and cause increased blood pressure levels.

My favorite targets for buying my toys are grandparents and aunts and uncles. These individuals likely pay no attention to the size of the toy relative to the size of the house where the child lives. I purposefully make it a point to entice them through clever marketing to buy the largest toy possible, regardless of the amount of storage the parents might have.

I can only imagine the parents’ faces when a grandparent appears at the door with a 14 person ball pit or…