Dropmix

If there was one thing I was known for at Hasbro, it was that I never stopped pitching and marketing DropMix.

Every time I had the chance, I would be playtesting the game with other people within the company. Lunch time, after work, at the bar - I was constantly selling DropMix.

At every internal sales meeting, I was the person was constantly showing off the game to our oversea markets.

Any marketing opportunity we had to talk about the game, I was the one who was sent to go speak on behalf of the company.

After presenting the game so much, Hasbro decided to make me the official spokesperson of the company and did a local tv spot for Dropmix and the upcoming HasCon - Hasbro’s first fan convention.

The company also decided to send me to New York City to The Today Show to give Hasbro’s yearly $250,000 donation. It was an absolute honor, but the best part was being able to show off both Hasrbo and Harmonix’s baby to the world.

Creating an original IP at Hasbro was not an easy task. Hasbro is known for its historical brands and rarely tries to create an IP. So this was an uphill battle that we loved climbing.

I remember pitching the game 3 separate times to the VP of Design, VP of Marketing and Head of Creative of the company, and each time we were told “no”. Once we finally had a working prototype, we took it back for one last go - and we got it through.

After we secured a slot to pitch it to the President of the Company, we had an extremely slick pitch demo working - and we nailed the pitch.

I knew we had to work fast, so we instantly started working on the branding. The team’s goal was to create “the most inclusive branding” that Hasbro had ever seen. Every color of the rainbow had to be represented - because we were mixing every genre of music together.

The final box art represents our vision perfectly - as it contains the card art of all of cards mixed into a rainbow collage.

As we started to finalize how the technology would work, we had to also start putting together a product lineup - while also adhering to how Hasbro normally sells products.

I reached out to Wizards of the Coast, since they are also owned by Hasbro, and starting collaborating with some of the original designers of the Pokemon TCG.

I learned more trade secrets about pack outs and rarities than I am allowed to talk about, but it helped me figure out the best way for our cards to be packaged.

We settled on an open-style album for the 16 card packs - so you could open the pack up to see the contents of what was inside the pack. The big mistake we made, and trust me I fought against it, was that we made the smaller 5-pack a "blind” pack.

The board itself went through many iterations. We contracted out an Industrial Design firm to help us through the concepting phase, and I oversaw that final designs that they would send back to us.

Once we had most of the music selected, I designed the card matrix that we would be using for manufacturing.

This was an extensive document that had all of the cards, the card details, the RFID tag information, card art, internal hasbro id number and more on it.

The card manufactures would use my document to start to produce and create all of the millions of cards used in the game.