The RFID book-reader exists since a while within the toy category, but Pea & Promoplast has studied a further evolution of this product for other kind of positioning, with a lower price point. Finally, it made its debut in the newsstand channel thanks to a global DeAgostini initiative.
Recent studies have confirmed how important stories are in the development of children. Reading and listening to these stories stimulates imagination and creativity and contributes to balanced personality development.
The special DeAgostini Audiobook project “Magic Fairy Tales”, sold world-wide and supplied by Pea&Promoplast, consists of a collection of 80 3d figurines and a speaker.
An important added value of this project is the inclusion of Disney stories and characters as key content of the project. Together with the publisher De Agostini, they created a unique project. The production figures by Pea&Promoplast have been impressive and proportionate to the size of the overall operation, with 6 million of 3d figurines and 600 thousand of speakers produced by now.
For Pea&Promoplast it was a challenging job to develop such a massive quantity of Disney characters for their adaptation to the project, obtaining excellent results, appreciated by the Publisher, the Licensor and the Market.
The launch of this project started from 4Q of 2020 in several countries, such as Spain and Hungary, and then it landed in Japan, up to the current distribution in most of the countries where De Agostini is present, including Italy. The expansion of this product line does not end in 2021, but it continues until 2022, with new territories and pieces, for a total of 80 planned kiosks releases, all inspired by the most famous Disney and Pixar stories and characters.
Which is the technology behind this project and which are P&P next plans
RFID stays for Radio Frequency Identification, a new automatic identification technology based on electro-magnetic waves, allowing the univocal and automatic detection of static and moving objects, animals and people.
At this moment, for De Agostini’s “magical fairy tales” project, RFID system is of immediate use, simple and intuitive: the speaker (a square box) is in contact with 3d figure and it returns a sound content.
The idea beyond this product is to expand the field to apply this system and find new expansions of this technology, so that it can return other kind of data related to the use and the customer of the product itself.
The goal of Pea&Promoplast and its R&D dept is to be able to start from what has already been done and adapt it to other distribution channels, optimizing it according to the needs of the reference market.
