Walmart's Markdown Standoff

A story about how Nick Mowbray's company got blackballed from Walmart for 5 years over a pricing dispute.

"Walmart came back to us and said we had to fund all the markdown money from $30 down to 50 cents. We were like 'what's markdown money?' We were determined to keep our little bit of margin and refused to give them any money back.

We got blackballed from Walmart for five years - we never did business with Walmart after that. Two years later, I met Danielle's boss at New York Toy Fair, Laura Phillips. I wrote this big long email explaining everything that happened, and then we started to work together again.

That crazy story was actually our first break to make a little bit of money. From there, I started doing deals with US companies that only sold product in the US but didn't sell internationally. I started doing deals with them because we were really bad at designing and the Vulcan toys were terrible. We needed good product so I could open up these channels.

I'd do deals with American companies like Xyng or Zocca, and an Australian company called Yoho to take their products and sell them internationally. I'd tell them a big story that I could get their products everywhere so they wouldn't have to go out and hustle. We had a product called Zeezy's which became really successful, and a product called Schnucks from Australia that became really successful. We started taking other people's products and that worked much better."