A Play Ecosystem
Super Heroic
Super Heroic (sunsetted in 2019) was an aspirational kids brand looking to create an ecosystem of play. It premiered into the market as a kid’s sneaker led by Jason Mayden (Nike Executive and designer of the highest grossing sneaker of all time, the Nike Monarch).
Mayden’s vision was to create a fully immersive play experience starting with the sneaker as a uniform for play. He teamed up with leading hardware incubator Playground Global (founder of Google’s Android) to develop and produce an AR enabled digital world.
I was pinged to lead the endeavor required to stitch together the holistic ecosystem.
Creating a HIPAA compliant digital experience that encourages physical movement and parent involvement.
Understanding the current landscape of child play behaviors
Many shortcomings parents pointed out in the current play ecosystem was a lack of a play experience centered around a child’s physical movement. The current solutions were categorized into 2 buckets: sport and tablet games.
Conducting our own studies, we found parent’s often referred to 90’s playground culture when they were asked to construct their ideal play experience. The games that required imagination, communication with other players, and rotated around the axis of concrete rules but left room for spontaneous play.
This brought us to the two main barriers for today’s play environment:
Whiteboard + Concepting a Collaborative Pure Play Experience
There were 3 key variables to be considered to provide a framework for development.
It was imperative to have a scalable format that would be fitting for the child’s current habits + the parent’s episodic involvement. From a building perspective, once these stages were crystallized, it would allow for content partners to “create their own stage of pure play” and be a juggernaut for partnership revenue.
The vision was to graduate the business to a play + entertainment platform.
Short-format (5-8 minutes)
Parent as editor, AR (sticker)
This would fall into the definition of play-time for kids, prep time for adults. This would be a high completion level, with AR reward stickers being revealed at the end of completion, and parents had to simply submit a photo. The kid could play in the living room and be heroic with the completion of their mission.
Long-Live Format (30 minutes)
Parent as coach, AR (prebuilt, high recognition)
A live-play date narrated by our trusted Play Expert. This would be a high commitment level from the parents since it usually takes place in a playground on a saturday morning. Our Play Expert would narrate how to conquer “the floor is lava” - with live play instructions, and recording of their child’s movement.
The end result is a 30 minute play-period with the kid receiving a digital asset of their movements of jumping, crawling, and running through the stage avoiding the lava (AR implementation) - while their parent serves as their “command center” cultivating teamwork, imagination, and skill-building.
Canceled Mid-Development
Investors weren’t willing to explore the monetary value of play. They viewed Super Heroic as a kid’s leading apparel brand, not a play company.
All production was stripped down to a marketing campaign that used play as a hook, not its own ecosystem. Soon after, Foot Locker Inc. would take a controlling investment in the company.
