How Pressman Toy Shaped The Business Of Play

Pressman Toy is a rare toy brand that can claim it has made toys for every generation from the pre-depression Greatest Generation through baby boomers, millennials, and Gen Z, and is still selling toys today.

The company, best known for selling classic board games like checkers, Chinese checkers, chess, and backgammon in its signature bright red boxes, was founded in 1922. Pressman was selling toys 20 years before HasbroHAS
(1942), 23 years before MattelMAT
(1945) and 10 years before Lego (1932).

During its 100-year history it saw toys change from simple wooden and cardboard playthings made locally, to plastic and electronic toys made overseas. It also saw toy marketing evolve from newspaper ads, to radio, to television commercials, to YouTube and social media today.

Pressman Toy was among the first toy companies to sell licensed toys, with its Orphan Annie bubble pipe in 1937 and its line of toys featuring the 1938 Disney hit Snow White. It was an early adapter of the move to plastics, buying an injection molding machine in 1947. And it was quick to dive into TV advertising, when kids television shows became the crucial way to drive sales in the 1960s.

That history unfolds in a new book by founder Jack Pressman’s son and former Pressman Toy Chairman, Jim Pressman, and his wife Donna, along with writer Alan Axelrod. The 232-page book, A Century of American Toys & Games, The Story of Pressman Toy, is a coffee-table size volume loaded with vintage photos, old advertisements, and stories about the marketing moxie of the company’s founder, and his wife, Lynn Pressman.

“The story just told itself,” Jim Pressman said of the book.

As the 100th-anniversary of the toy brand approached, Jim and Donna Pressman decided to write about the company’s history. They began looking through old Pressman catalogs and archives, and searching through decades of photos and documents at the Strong toy museum in Rochester, N.Y. and decided there was enough material there for a book.

Jim Pressman, 73, who appeared as a three-year-old model in a 1952 ad for the company, started working at Pressman Toy in 1971, and became president in 1977, said he discovered things about his family toy legacy that he hadn’t known before.

“We started to find all those ads from 1923, and pictures of my father in his first office with his Zellophone,” Pressman said. “We didn’t know that was one of his first items, that he built his whole business on.”

Jack Pressman founded his toy company after working in his father’s variety store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The store sold candy, and various odds and ends, including toys. Through the store, Jack Pressman became acquainted with toy suppliers. After serving in World War I, he became a toy salesman for a Brooklyn toy manufacturer, and in 1922 joined a toy wholesale company as a partner, and the company was renamed J. Pressman & company.

One of the new company’s first toys that attracted attention was the Zellophone, a wooden xylophone that sold for under $1.

One of the company’s first hits came in 1935, when Jack Pressman encountered a German marbles game that he helped become a classic known as Chinese checkers. Pressman bet big that the game could be a national craze and he was right,

The book notes that in 1938 Playthings magazine reported that fifteen million Chinese checkers games were sold between 1935 and 1938, using about a billion marbles. Pressman Toy wasn’t the only toy company selling the game, but it “had a first-mover advantage, which it exploited to the hilt,” according to the book.

The company also benefited from the fact that Jack Pressman had invested in a toy marble company just before the craze took off.

The book is organized in chronological order and groups the company’s innovations and toy hits by decades.

It tells the backstory behind Pressman bestsellers from the Let’s Go Fishin’ toy, born in the 1930s and still selling millions annually, to the 1990s hit Gooey Louie, and the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire licensed game, which was the bestselling board game in the world in 2000.

Jim Pressman sold Pressman Toy to Goliath Group in 2014. Goliath Group continues to sell toys under the Pressman Toy brand name.

Pressman Toy also was an innovator in the toy world because of the role of Lynn Pressman, who became one of the first top female executives of a toy company after Jack Pressman died in 1959. Even before his death Lynn had worked alongside Jack, leading the marketing campaigns for the company.

Lynn was known for what the book describes as Barnum-style publicity stunts, like the time in 1960 when she brought a baby elephant to Toy Fair to promote a new memory game.

A picture of that stunt appears on page 105 of the book, and Jim Pressman said his memory of that event helped led to the book’s creation. He knew that a photo of his mother Lynn with the elephant at Toy Fair existed somewhere, but he didn’t know if he could track it down. He discovered the Strong museum had archives of every issue of trade magazine Playthings, which had a story about the elephant stunt, with a photo.

When he found the photo there, he said, “I knew we had a book.” The end result was a book that is a great read for fans of history, Americana, toys, and the toy industry.