The Pitch

Jon Jraper stepped into the room where the executives from the toy company sat smoking.

“Well, it’s about time,” one of the executives snapped.

“Sorry I was late,” Jon Jraper said. “I was just finishing a quick extramarital affair.”

The executives nodded and muttered their understanding; who could blame a man, after all!

“Now,” Jon Jraper went on, “I’ve been thinking a lot about your conundrum. You have a toy company but you don’t know what to call it. So allow me to walk you through my thinking.”

Jon Jraper stepped to the chalkboard and wrote down two words: ‘USA Toys.’

“Here, we have, by definition, who you are,” he said to the assembled toy executives. “Your place of origin, the product you pedal. And yet, you don’t come to a firm like this one because you need help defining your business. You come to us because you need help defining your soul. And your soul is here.”

Jon Jraper tapped the second word.

“You don’t make just any products,” he went on. “You make toys. You are, then, producers of wonder. You provide children with an assembly line upon which an unrefined resource such as an hour might be manufactured into joy. It is not the toys you bring to market but the memories those who use them make–that is the real thing you’re selling. And yet, none of this is possible if you don’t convey one simple truth: your toys are fun. So how do you do that?”

“We call it ‘Fun USA Toys’?” an executive offered.

“Not exactly,” Jon Jraper said. “Here, watch.”

With the quick stroke of an eraser, Jon Jraper removed the ‘s’ from the end of ‘toys.’ A murmur of panic rose in the room.

“But we make more than one toy!” shouted an executive.

“I wasn’t finished,” Jon Jraper said. He added a ‘z’ to the end, so that it now read ‘USA Toyz.’ “Had I written an x or a y or a d, it would’ve reduced the phrase to nonsense. But s’s own jagged cousin? It conveys a message, plain and simple. ‘We understand the rules, but we don’t let them rule us. We seek to bend them, to rethink them, to make them work for us when we need them to, and to abandon them when we don’t. We, in other words, seek the one thing that you seek: fun.’”

The room burst into applause.

From the fray came one dissenting voice. “But our game! Our signature game! Wherein balls float on invisible puffs of air, allowing one to use them for foam dart target practice! What shall we call that?”

“How about,” Jon Jraper said, “‘the Astroshot Zero G Shooting Game’?”

The room awaited more. “Aren’t you going to give us one of your famous pitches?” someone called at last.

Jon Jraper shook his head. “To be honest, I don’t think I could. I had about four bourbons before I came in here, and they’re really starting to catch up with me now,” he said.

The executives nodded and muttered their understanding; who could blame a man, after all!