Moonlighting engineer crafts educational toy with play appeal

SAN MARCOS ---- Like parents everywhere, Scott Seligman wanted his children to learn while they play with their toys. And as a veteran mechanical engineer, he decided he had the skills to make educational toys children would want to play with.

The result is "Smarks," sets of colored building blocks, some of which are "talking." The talking blocks sing, play music, and even teach basic math.

Seligman, an engineer at medical products maker DJO in Vista, designed and tested Smarks in his spare time at his San Marcos home.

Costing $30 for a 70-block set (there are 19 different sets, with 16 talking blocks in all, in five sizes), they'll be available at www.talkingbuildingblocks.com starting Aug. 9.

Seligman said he got the idea for Smarks from watching his four children play at home. They'd play a while with talking educational toys, but always gravitate back to their familiar building blocks. So he engineered the educational functions into building blocks.

The blocks come in seven colors representing their various themes, such as music, ABCs, nursery rhymes and math. They have six pins that lock into openings on other blocks. Their sound effects depend on which pins are pushed.

"There's puzzles hidden inside them," Seligman said. "So the child has to figure out the (building) structure in order to solve the puzzle. It stimulates creative thinking, spatial awareness and all that good stuff."

A virtual company

Seligman has outsourced nearly everything. A company in China makes the blocks, a San Diego company ships them to customers, and customers order through his website. That leaves him enough time to devote to his job at DJO.

The website is Seligman's main marketing tool, where customers can learn about the blocks and order them. It's loaded with colorful, graphically intensive sound and visual animations that display the blocks in action.

"My goal with the website was to really show people exactly how they work, so you know exactly what you're getting," Seligman said. "So I went to a lot of trouble to show people every different aspect of the block ---- how they work and the technology, and how they sound. With most toy websites, you see a picture of the product, but you don't really know how it works."

Kids can play with each talking block by itself, by pushing its pins with their fingers, Seligman said.

"When I first gave them to my kids, they each had their favorite. My 3-year-old, he loved the green color block. So he carried it in the car with him, and would sit there, pressing with his fingers."

Making local contacts

Seligman said he designed Smarks using skills he's developed over 25 years in product development. To implement his vision, he turned to local companies.

Seligman said having to meet DJO's high standards for medical products gave him the experience he needed, not just in making the blocks but also in developing a business strategy.

"I knew if I didn't get a patent, I wouldn't survive," Seligman said. "So that was the first thing I did. I have 20 patents, so I'm very familiar with the whole patent research process."

He chose a local law firm, Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch LLP, to be his patent representative.

Seligman said he had originally designed the talking blocks to run on the "button" hearing aid-style batteries. But his wife wouldn't hear of it, as those batteries are not very well-known and difficult to replace. So he redesigned the talking blocks to use the ubiquitous AAA batteries.

After designing the Smarks, he went to Vista-based circuit board maker, Precision Circuits, for the electronics. Through that company, he found Chinese contacts for the manufacturer.

Seligman said he struggled at first with the website, which didn't do what he wanted it to do. If he couldn't present a professional appearance, he said, the company wouldn't survive.

"I was really struggling, and the website wasn't at the level I was looking for," he said. "So I went to a new company, called Super Interactive in Solana Beach. And they are a very high-end website company. They've done websites for Callaway Golf, Ford, Hitachi, Quiksilver ... all really artistic and functional websites."