SuperZings Police Station 

MagicBox Toys, 2018
Barcelona (Spain) and Shantou (China)

THE CHALLENGE

To design and develop a big-size playset to compete with Playmobil sets.

THE CONTEXT

This would be the firm's first playset, all eyes were on this development.

THE TARGET GROUP

Children from 4 to 9 years old.

KEY METRICS

More than 400K units were sold during the first year in the market.
Best-selling toy during Christmas at Amazon Spain 2019.


The project starts with a search for topics. Agreement between Marketing and Design to develop a police station.

sketches-portraitArtboard-1-copy-2
Paneles-Police-2Artboard-10-copy-3

Actions

One of the main focuses was on defining and designing the actions that could be taken with this toy.

It was important that they were related to the police topic. For that, I used films and stories as references, while I put myself in the shoes of a child imagining adventures.

One of the challenges was getting the bed trap to work properly.

  • Since the figurines come in a variety of shapes, it was a puzzle to design a bed that would hold them in place while rotating the bed.
  • Initially, it was planned to activate the bed trap with a button that would activate a spring, which would rotate the bed and quickly pull the figurine into the ventilation duct. I tried several spring systems until I found the right one. However, the mechanism eventually had to be simplified to a hand lever in order to achieve the target manufacturing cost.
ActionsArtboard-3-copy-3
ActionsArtboard-3-copy-2
ActionsArtboard-3-copy-4
Prototyping-2Artboard-1

Prototyping

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Prototyping-2Artboard-2

Cardboard prototypes to achieve the right size and proportion.

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Pre-production model

Different parts of the model were printed on 3D to accomplish with ergonomic and technical standards.
After that, the final model was delivered to a model maker to create the pre-production model.

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5-Pre-productionArtboard-3-1
5-Pre-productionArtboard-1-2
5-Pre-productionArtboard-2-2
Paneles-Police-2Police-packaging

Credits:
Product designer: Martín Pardiñas | Creative director: Andreu Sierro | 
Project manager: Oriol Bella | Graphic designer: Marc Cassola | Illustrator: Marcel Massegu

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© Martín Pardiñas 2022.