John Coveyou is the founder of Genius Games and king of dad jokes around the campfire: “Have you heard the one about the sidewalk? It’s all over town!” So, it makes sense that he’s always had a passion for game design, too. Throughout his military service – during which he discovered his love for science – and while earning a master’s degree in engineering, he wondered why there were no games on science concepts like the periodic table, biology of the human body, or the atom. And just like that, Genius Games was born!
Genius Games now offers more than 50 games that sell worldwide. Originally, John fielded requests from other English-speaking countries – the UK, Australia, and Canada were early adopters – and soon after, often at US game conferences, he found himself fielding inquiries from international distributors eager to sell into their home countries.
John soon discovered that, instead of working with multiple distributors, building relationships with in-country game publishers possessing native fluency of local languages simplified his operations and increased revenues. To support that structure, John built Genius Games as a multi-national rather than global company, allowing for greater autonomy, cultural adaptation, and customized product offerings within each individual country, as opposed to a global company with centralized operations and static processes. For example, the company’s publisher in Spain translates game and product information into Spanish, pays for production costs, then sells the games into international markets. Margins are lower, but royalties are consistent and all profit. Listen to the full episode to hear more on the accounting and numbers!.
Currently, about 20% of the company’s revenue comes from international markets, thanks to the relationships built with overseas publishers visiting the US, and Genius Games are now translated into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Korean, and other southeast Asian languages.
To complement the expansion effort, in 2022 I introduced John to his state’s export representative; he ultimately secured a STEP grant covering his attendance at an international trade show. The grant paid for travel, lodging, and conference fees and connected John with exporting help from international groups and additional growth opportunities. For instance, he now understands the importance, and mechanics, of adding translation to his website to drive more sales to his partners. A multilingual website optimizes the experience for people searching for Genius Games – or games in general – by recognizing their native language. The strategy increases the company’s reach – consumers will more often buy from websites in their native language – and linking to partner websites for the sale prevents cannibalizing partner sales. (If you’re interested in exporting and want to be connected to your state export rep, reach out to me for an introduction.)
Even with such meaningful success in consumer and international sales, John still sees room for growth. Genius Games has yet to tap into the educational market – if you’re a potential partner or have any connections or resources to help with access to the educational market, please reach out to John on Linked In.
To have fun, play some Genius Games available on their website or Amazon.
Links:
Website: https://www.geniusgames.org/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-coveyou-15586163/
STEP Grant Information: https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/grants/state-trade-expansion-program-step
German Words (Butterfly): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo0Hsx-yHiI
Connect with Wendy - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendypease/
Connect with John - https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-coveyou-15586163/
Music: Fiddle-De-Dee by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
ATTENTION: Below is a machine generated transcription of the podcast. Yes, at Rapport International, we talk a lot about how machine translation is not good quality. Here you see an example of what a machine can do in your own your language. This transcription is provided as a gist and to give time indicators to find a topic of interest.
Wendy: Hi friends, and welcome back to another episode of The Global Marketing Show. As you know, the show's brought to you by Rapport International, and they provide us with a Tidbit. So today's Tidbit is about emojis. And do you know where the word emoji came from? Well, emojis, you know, are those little picture characters that are associated with cell phone usage in Japan.
But, they're now used all over the [00:01:00] place. The word emoji comes from the Japanese, characters, which mean e=picture and moji is a written character. So it's picture written character. Isn't that funny? I always wonder where the word emoji came. Okay, so speaking of emojis and games and fun things like that, we've got a really interesting guest here.
John Coveyou, I met him through EO Entrepreneurs Organization and he began creating board games as a kid. But he waited until 2013 to quit his engineering job and start Genius Games. And between those life events, he was in the army. He earned a master's degree in engineering from Washington University, and he actually taught chemistry and physics to students of many ages.
He loves to talk around a campfire. Laugh and probably tell dad jokes and hear stories about real people who did [00:02:00] amazing things. So John, we got asked, do you have a good dad joke to start us off with?
John: Oh goodness. I threw that one out at you. Have you heard the one about the sidewalk?
Yeah. Yeah. It's all over town.
Here you go. It's, it's funny, I forgot about that in my bio cuz I'm actually leaving tomorrow morning to take my kids camping with a couple other dads and it's a great time to sit around the campfire and just hang out. So that's what I'll be doing all weekend. All right. Well, you
Wendy: better go pull out that dad joke book and have some at the ready.
Right. Refresh your memory. Absolutely. Yeah. I love that. And then telling jokes always makes me think of translation. Would that translation actually work in other languages? And that's one that might, I'll have to, that one.
John: I have to think of that. Pardon? I said that one might. [00:03:00] Yep. Yeah, it
Wendy: just might. Yeah.
All right. So tell us about Genius
John: Games. Yeah, so like you mentioned, I started it in roughly 2013, so it's about 10 years old now. It started out as a hobby because I'd always loved board games growing up. I had always designed just kind of my own little fun adventures and games growing up. When I was a teenager, I got a little bit heavier into some of the modern hobby games.
Played a lot of risk when I was in the military. And I also really fell in love with the sciences while I was in the military. Reading textbooks about, you know, how Adams worked and the size of the. It was actually very therapeutic when you're in a combat zone wondering, you know, why does this person across from me hate me so much?
There's so much about us that's in common. And, and so thinking about science was actually very therapeutic in that way. When I came home [00:04:00] from Iraq, I finished my degree in engineering. My undergraduate was in environmental biology and then a master's in, in engineering. And I a, as I was learning a lot of this stuff, I thought, boy, you know, I, I spent a lot of time playing board games and playing games with my friends.
Why is there, why are there no games out there themed around like science concepts instead of zombies and dragons and ninjas and science fiction and fantasy? I want a good old game about an. Or, you know, a game about the periodic table or a game about the human cell or, you know, something like that. Just a science, the straight science concept, there were none.
So I started making some of my own play testing prototypes and whatnot, and I realized that making a good game was actually far, far harder than I thought. Most of the early designs I created were pretty terrible, but I just kept at it and I joined some meetup groups of other game designers. Play tested all [00:05:00] of my products many times over and over, and made 'em better and made 'em better.
And finally we had a few games that we thought were good enough to publish. So I found an artist to create some files found a factory in China. First started in the US looking for factories, and then found some, some cheaper places in China that could produce better quality for less cost.
And uh, we launched a Kickstarter campaign and we made our. Dollar of revenue, I think October of 2014. And we launched our first game then and, and since then we have publish. Boy, I would say about 40 different products, maybe even. We're in the fifties now. We've, we've made somewhere probably around two and a half to 3 million through Kickstarter campaigns and probably another few million dollars through Amazon.
And we sell to a lot of different retailers and distributors across the US and across the world. And maybe the, the. The biggest retailer is Barnes and Noble, and then in, in the [00:06:00] UK it's actually called, I think Waterstones. And that's probably the biggest of all of our retail distribution networks.
But yeah, that's the, that's the thousand foot summary of genius Games. What's
Wendy: your favorite game that you've created, and who's it targeted to? I like science, but the science that I like is outside hiking in the woods and learning about plants and touching and feeling with body. So, you know, the only science type game I can think of is that operation game that buzzes when you hit the side.
So, sounds like yours are intellectual, but what makes me wanna play it and who are they targeted
John: towards? Yeah. Most of our games are so I, the, the answer is actually a little bit different now than it was, you know, 10 years. 10 years ago, the answer was we were targeting a gamer. So usually an adult who really just wanted a different, a different flavor of games.
Someone who just didn't want more science fiction or fantasy, but wanted real [00:07:00] science. And along the way we've adapted that a little bit because we've created a few different lines of products. So now we have smaller games for kids. We have lighter card games and games that are not so science intensive.
So, uh, there's a game called Ecosystem. It's probably our best selling game. It's basically a game about an ecosystem. You have these little cards and you're passing them around the table and every time a hand gets passed to you, you get to choose one of the cards from the hand. And it's things like a bear or a hawk or a, a bee or a a river or some kind of habitat, and you're placing them.
Into a grid on the table and trying to build a habitat and the different cards score dependent upon what they're next to, or what they're closest to, or what they're adjacent to, or what they're not close to. You know, like wolves wanna be off and packed by themselves, and so that's a really fun light game, not hard science, family friendly, easy to learn.
But then we [00:08:00] have some other games that are, you know, we have a game called Ion, the Compound Building Game. It's about taking positive and negative ions and building neutral compounds. That's like, right, you know, chemistry 1 0 1, you know, you're gonna learn about that in chemistry class. And then we have bigger games about the human cell or about Mendelian genetics and then smaller math games for kids.
And then we recently actually started publishing a full line. Of double-sided jigsaw puzzles for young kids. Floor puzzles that are somewhere about dinosaurs. You have a dinosaur on one side and the skeletal structure of a dinosaur on the other. And then we have anatomy puzzles. So a tiger, a shark, and an owl.
You have a picture of a tiger on one side and on the other side you flip it over. And a certified medical illustrator who studied at Johns Hopkins University did a full anatomy illustration of the. So on one side's, the tiger on the other side's, the anatomy. So things like that, we're just trying to get creative and think about, you know, how can we just [00:09:00] make people fall in love with science through play and, and, and activities and games.
Wow.
Wendy: That's fantastic. Okay, so you have this great idea. You start, they sound fun, not boring, right? It's not geared towards formal education in the school, but really bringing the family in and a social event to play.
John: That's exactly right. Yeah. Our goal was to create games that gamers would choose to play, and scientists thought were accurate and correct.
And in that way, Gamers will play it cuz they think it's fun. Families will play it because it's constructive and it's fun. And science teachers would pull it in the classroom because it was science accurate and they could use it as a, as a tool in their classroom. Okay.
Wendy: Okay. So you create this, it's in English, you're based out of the United States, and you decide to go international.
How did
John: you make that decision? [00:10:00] Yeah, it's a good question. So kind of the first step was we were going to a number of different conferences throughout the us. The largest one is called GenCon. It happens in Indianapolis once a year. There's about a hundred thousand people from mostly the United States, but also all over the world who attend that convention.
And then there's also another convention called Gamma the Game Manufacturer's Association of America or something like that. And that's usually in April. And it's just for publishers of games and hobby kind of products and then retailers, distributors or licensing partners. And, and so we first got introduced to a few of these distributors and the idea of, of distribution.
The distributor's gonna buy product in volume from you. So they're not gonna buy 10 units or 20 units. They're gonna buy like a few hundred or a few thousand units. They're gonna freight it over to their country overseas, [00:11:00] and then they're gonna sell it to their retailers or customers in those countries.
And so we are already in distribution in the US for a few different larger distributors here that focused on the hobby, focused on games and toys and that kind of thing. And so we were. By a few of these distributors. First in the UK and then also in Australia and some in Canada because those were English speaking areas.
And so it was really easy for us to get us to basically, we were not really the exporter. We would just ship and we learned, you know, through a lot of trial and error. We would first ship the products directly to their warehouse, say, in England or Canada or Australia. And we realized, well that's not economical because we can't afford to ship, you know, say a half a pallet or a few cases to a retailer in a different country.
And so a lot of these larger distributors, what they'll do is they'll set up a freight forwarder in the US so usually in New York or somewhere like that, and they'll order products from a whole bunch of US manufacturers or us publish. [00:12:00] And they'll combine all that product on the one container and then ship that container from New York to wherever their port is.
And in that way, they're not sending lots and lots of little tiny shipments. They're, they're very efficiently taking advantage of economies of scale and just shipping one larger container and splitting that cost amongst all the, all the products on that container. So now we have a policy where we'll ship free anywhere in the US to retailers or distributor.
But we won't ship overseas, so they have to have a freight forwarder in the United States. And that's how we really first started branching out. Is through these conventions, setting up this international distribution network
Wendy: R to any of the international markets or have you all done it through the local
John: conferences? Yeah, so I mean, we started out local. There are a lot of international conferences. There's one in Nuremberg. We've never attended it, but it's a, it's basically a global show for toys and games.[00:13:00] We do or have in the past attended Essen Essen board game convention.
That's actually the largest board game convention in the world. And while we are there, we would meet new distributors and retailers and, you know, like there's, there's only so many, you know, distributors across the world who are doing. Specifically board game publishing like we are. And so once you, once you get into a few countries and you, you get in with a few different distributors, you've kind of saturated that market.
The market that we haven't saturated is the educational market. So the funny thing about all of our distributors and all of our licensing partners across the us and we can go into licensing too cuz that's a completely separate beast. They are all board game publishers. They're hobby focus. None of these, none of our partners are education focused.
So in the US even though education is a primary market for us overseas, a lot of our partners are just focused on selling toys and games.
How much of your
Wendy: revenue comes from overseas versus the us? [00:14:00]
John: Yeah, I'd probably say maybe about 20. And, and part of the reason is we haven't really pushed that hard in, into this. It's always been a sales channel that has just come to us by default, but, you know, 20% still a few hundred thousand dollars of revenue.
Uh, so it, so that, that, that's still a good chunk of change and really adds to the bottom line. And and, you know, distribution is one thing, but as we've, you know, gone to these game conventions overseas, We started to meet not just distributors, but other publishers. And these publishers, they, they wanted a different model, so they don't wanna sell the products.
Let's say it's, you know, it's Italy or France or Germany or China or Poland or even Russia, which is all over the news now. Yeah. Um, they don't want to buy English copies and sell English copies in their country. They want to sell copies in that native [00:15:00] language. So what we would do with that is we would, we would license products to them under what you would re refer to as a licensing fee or royalty.
And the way we distinguish this is, you know, so, so in the US there might be products that someone else designs or creates, and we will license that product from them and we will publish it. We'll manufacture. We'll sell it to our retailers, our distribute distribution channels, and we would give that designer a royalty, right?
So it's somewhere between like three to 10% of the net. The, the net sales that we had received from the sale of that product, we'd give to the designer of that. It's kind of the same thing that we're doing.
Wendy: Wait, run that by me again. Okay. So you've got a publisher that's based in Spain, right? Yeah.
Okay. So they want to. They want the trans, they want a Spanish version of it. Right. So rather than you translating it, you license it to them. That's [00:16:00] right. Okay. But then the sales are going through
John: them, right? That's correct. Yeah. So there's a few ways we set it up. The, the normally, we'll, we'll give them, we'll create a licensing.
That license agreement will say they can print, you know, X number of units, say they're gonna print, you know, 2000 units. They're gonna owe us 6% of our s r p our manufacturer suggested retail price per unit. So let's say it's a $50 game, 6%, that's $3. So they're gonna print 2000 units, they're gonna owe us $6,000, they're gonna have a expiration date on that.
They're gonna have a language restriction. So it has to be in a German, let's say if it's in Germany, they can't have any English content on. It has to be purely German. They're gonna get a geographic restriction. So they can either sell all across Europe or just in Germany, or worldwide, [00:17:00] you know what, wherever it is.
There will be a usually a deposit. They have to, uh, they spend 50% of whatever that total licensing fee. To get the files from us and then they take those files, they will translate everything, and then they will update the files with the new translated language. And then we'll review it, make sure the files still look good, and then they'll either use their factory or our factory to print those products.
And usually what we'll try and do is print their products along with an English re. That way they're using our factory and we can control qu the, the quality and make sure that the same material is being used for both the English and say the German or the French or the Chinese versions. And
Wendy: then wait, so you print the one that's translated and then you also print an English one so they can just eyeball it,
John: right?
We'll, we'll, we'll try and print both them at the same time, at the same factory, because we're already [00:18:00] printing these at the factory that we use in. And so if they're also gonna print the same, the exact same game, but in a different language, that means the materials are identical. Only the ink is different.
And so we're gonna get a cheaper cost per unit because we're, we're, we're spending, we're printing more units.
Wendy: Okay. Okay. All right. So you've. So you're in 50 countries in seven to eight different languages still. That was a
John: couple years ago. Yeah, I think it's a lot more now. I mean, we have most major languages plus a lot of more unique languages.
So we're obviously English Spanish, French, Italian, German Chinese, Hebrew Polish. And we have a, a Russian license that also sells into the Ukraine. And I'm probably forgetting some, I think we have a few languages in, in Korean, a [00:19:00] a few in Southeast Asia. So yeah, there's, there's quite a few languages now and they all kind of work under that similar licensing type of agreement.
So how many Spanish speaking countries are you in? It's a great question. So we license all of our products to a single Spanish publishing company called Mosque and they are in Spain and they sell and distribute to most of South and central America as well, except for Brazil, obviously, cuz Brazil is gonna be Portuguese.
Okay. So, you know, I, I, I don't know, I don't know what the actual penetration is in the South American and Central American market. You know, if you walked into a game store down there, would you actually see our products in Spanish? And a lot of that would be up to the company in Spain that has the license for the Spanish products and where they are, uh, what kind of reach they have across the.
Wendy: Yeah, that's what I, that's exactly what I was wondering about because [00:20:00] if you had one licensing fee in Spain and then then another one in Mexico, how would you control that global message or consistency
John: across, um, yeah. US right now when someone gets the Spanish rights, they were large enough that we gave them global.
So, um, they knew, we knew that when we first negotiated that contract with them that they were gonna get all Spanish speaking countries throughout the world. And then what about French? Yeah, when you get into French and German and Dutch, you, it, you get it's a little bit messier, but we did the same thing where if you are the French publisher, you get all rights in French across the.
I think the only thing we didn't do is was Canada. So they can't do like Quebec or French speaking Canada. But you know, cuz you've got a number of countries in Europe who, who speak French and you also a number that speak German is Switzerland, [00:21:00] if I'm not correct, is part of that. And so we we gave them the license to be able to sell basically in any of those countries.
And there's, and you know, now I think about it, there's actually some countries in Africa who. Speak French as well. And so they are allowed to sell their products in the French language to any of those countries. And they also, you know, every once in a while you'll have a customer like in the United States who wants to buy the French version, and they're willing to pay the money to have it shipped from the, the French distributor or the German version from the germ German distributor.
They're willing to pay the cost to get it here in the United States because it's more of like a collector's item for. Right. We work
Wendy: with a toy company that has some games in Berry be paraphernalia, and they, they sell a lot of Spanish Translated materials here in the US cuz they're such a large, so I can see that with French and Spanish in, in, well a whole bunch of different languages in the us Yeah.
So it's really interesting to me cause I don't think I've heard this before, is that you're not doing it by [00:22:00] country. You're doing it by language and then you're contracting with those publishers rather than using the distributors.
John: That's right. Yep. And then they can solve whatever distributor they. And, you know, there's a lot of reasons for that.
You know, when you look at like Switzerland, it's hard to say who's allowed to sell into Switzerland. And, and so, you know, do we have a separate publishing company who, who wants to go all in on a language? And, you know, if, if, if you're geographically restricted, you're much less likely to be successful because you have to do a smaller print run than you can't sell outside your borders.
But if you're gonna make the product. It's gonna be the exact same one. French version's gonna be the exact same as the other French version, right? Or one German version's gonna be the exact same as the other German version. So why would two companies duplicate the exact same work and then sell into two different territories when one of them could have done the same amount of work and sold [00:23:00] twice as many into more territories.
So they're willing to, to pay us more to a larger print run. And then they're more successful because they own global rights instead of you know, just a smaller territory. How
Wendy: come you decided to do work with the other publishers rather than doing it
John: yourself? Yeah, that's a, that's a great question.
The primary reason is that publisher already sells products in their language. They know the distributors, they know the retail. And they know their own language it would be very costly for us to have it translated. And then we don't know the market that well, whereas with this it's basically money upfront and no work and no cost for us.
So when we get, when we make $10,000 in a given month from our licensing, That's just $10,000 that [00:24:00] goes into pure bottom line profit. There's no cost for us whatsoever in that $10,000. All the cost is in the publisher, them translating and then them manufacturing the product. It's no additional work, no additional costs, just pure profits for us, which is why we use that model.
Okay, and
Wendy: so what, so your licensing fee.
I wrote it down here with 6%. Yeah. What do you bring down, if you don't mind sharing to the bottom line when you're doing it on your
John: own? Yeah, it's probably I mean, that's go, it's gonna be different depending upon what sales channel we sell into, but I would say, you know, our bottom line is probably somewhere around 30 or 40%, depending upon the sales channel.
What
Wendy: point, like this, this model works great for launching it, particularly when you're having it in demand. Have you ever thought about what point you would [00:25:00] change it and do it
John: on your own? Not really. Because, you know, like say a customer falls in and they're upset because their version wasn't right, or it's missing a piece and they're speaking in.
There's nothing I can do. And so we would need, we'd have to set up, you know, that 30 or 40% and that 6% is, it's, it's not apples to apples. That 6% requires no overhead. That 30% requires an office and staff and insurance and, you know, you name it. So we have a, we have a monthly overhead that we, that we have to.
Pay for so that we can provide customer service for all the customers we have here in the us If we were then to begin translating ourselves into French or German or whatever other language, and we've got customers that are upset in France or in Germany, there's really nothing we could do. So we'd have [00:26:00] to hire someone overseas in that country.
But now we have to compare what is the amount of money we're making after we have hired staff overseas. And it, it seems more economical for us to just enter the market immediately with a massive publishing company who can sell 5,000 units or 10,000 units instead of us trickling in possibly only selling a few hundred units.
Because we don't know the market. We don't know the language, we don't know the distributors, we don't know the retailers. We don't know how to communicate to the customers. Right. Right. And then you, the publishing partner does. Pardon? And that publishing partner does, they know all. Not only do they know all that, they've already been doing that for say, 10 years, and that's why they're gonna be successful at selling our products in those areas.
Right. And then you'd
Wendy: be competing against them too, if you're coming in as a smaller company.
John: That's right. Yeah.
Wendy: Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean and, and now seeing companies do that and they get to a tipping point where they go, okay, this is just too much [00:27:00] to manage all these publishers.
We've got enough mass now, and there are ways to solve for that language, like telephone interpreting. So you still build out your customer support team, but somebody calls in with another language and you get an interpreter on the phone to. So, yeah. Um, There's a lot of processes that way, but I mean that's, it's really fascinating how you set up, you've built a bit good global business and it's one you could have done without even traveling internationally, cuz you, you met people here.
John: Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Wendy: Now are you selling so like e-commerce and online and, and all that. And do you handle the language or That's all left up to the manufacturers to, to.
John: In those countries? Yeah. Yeah. No, we don't touch, we don't do anything in those countries. We only, I, we only personally sell in English in the United States, no.
And then we do so, and then, yeah, basically in English, in the United States everywhere else outside of that, a distributor owns [00:28:00] that territory or selling in that territory, including Canada. So we sell on Amazon in the United States. We sell on genius games.org, the United States. Science games.com, science puzzles.com.
Those are all our sites here in the United States. Everywhere else. It's either a foreign publisher who has the language rights, or it's an English distributor who ha who is distributing those products to the stores in those areas in English.
Wendy: Okay. So if I go on amazon.com and I search for Genius Games, then I will the English.
Will come up for me, but I can't navigate over to the Spanish. No, that's correct.
John: Because
Wendy: it's completely managed at another place. Right. So it's the, and then your website isn't translated, so, right. So you're, you're not getting, yeah. So you're not building the robust global messaging and marketing, [00:29:00] but you're trusting them to know their market better.
John: That's right. Yeah, that's
Wendy: right. Yeah, it's the difference between like a multinational expansion strategy versus a globalization strategy where it's all under one. Yeah.
John: Yeah. And there could be, you know, I think we could make an argument in the future for building out our website to be to be multiple languages into geolocate, to those sites.
However, say it's, you know, Spanish or going back to the, the German version we've been talking about we still have to. We'd still have to basically sell the German copies that the German publisher owns. Right. Cause we don't own those copies. Yeah. The, the German publisher does. So if they ordered it from that site, the German publisher, we, we could basically like rebuy those games and ask the German publisher to ship it to the product, to ship it to the customers that came to our site to order.
But then, you know, you're kind of coming full circle. [00:30:00] Maybe we just act as a retailer to them in, in that case. But, you know, at the end of the day, a lot of those customers in Germany, here's the thing, if, if you're a customer in Germany, you're not going to genius games.org. You're going to wherever customers in Germany buy board games.
And so, you know, we'd, we'd have to really build out our marketing platform in that area to make translating our website in that area viable. And if we did that, we're basically then cannibalizing the licensing partner that we have just given the rights to anyway. So, and for us, you know, if I wanna make more money I'm gonna make more products or I'm gonna push other sales channels in the us I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't.
My, my growth strategy wouldn't be to to compete with our partners that are already giving us a good amount of, uh, So, okay.
Wendy: Play out on this. So say you take your website and you [00:31:00] translate it. Yeah. And have they, is it Genius games in all the countries or did they
John: translate the name of it? Genius Games is not translated in other languages, so it's just genius.
If someone finds genius games, they're gonna find just genius games.org, the US site. But it won't, it'll, it'll. I think we shipped to Canada, but that's the only place we shipped to from that site. Yeah. See,
Wendy: I think that there's a co-marketing opportunity, a way to support your distributors. Let me play this out cuz you'd know for sure.
Yeah. Is if y, if they're searching genius games and they come to your website and it's all in English, you then put a stop to the buyer and they've gotta do more work. But imagine they get there, they see best practice, the globe, they drop down, they see the language, and then the language. Page goes to support your
John: distributor.
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. We should probably [00:32:00] put, we should probably put language links to those distributors, or at least like, here's some retailers in that area you can purchase products from. Yeah.
Wendy: Yeah. Cause then you have a landing page and then they'd be able, and then if you put the link to their website where they can buy it, they'd be able to track what's coming in from you when you're, so then you're supporting the distributor and increasing your revenue
John: coming in, right?
Yeah.
Wendy: Now, another thing that I'm curious about is, do you ever check the quality of the translation?
John: Yes, they're required to send us a number of samples, and so after that print run is done, we'll usually get three samples and then sometimes I'll keep 'em as souvenirs and then other times we'll you know, give 'em away as a, you know, a a raffle or something like that.
But yeah, usually it won't look through it. Just make sure the quality's the same. Do
Wendy: you have somebody that speaks the language, like do a check edit [00:33:00] against.
John: No. That we kind of leave that up to that publisher.
And what's
Wendy: your, just the trust in the publisher?
John: Yeah. You know, cuz we have the publishers that we've been working with they've translated, you know, most of our games into that language and they're good at it. And the reality is there's a lot of. There's a lot of lingo in games, there's a lot of terminology that they're gonna know as native speakers that we just would never know unless we were, you know, gamers.
Mm-hmm.
Wendy: Yeah, that's certainly the case. Do you ever worry about them taking liberties and changing messages or meetings or part of the game from the original concept? No,
John: I don't think so. No, there's nothing that there's nothing that sacred in the games that we would care if, if they did that.
Wendy: Okay, okay.
Yeah, that's what I'm wondering about. Cuz I've, I've seen instances where people will have their distributed [00:34:00] or do the translation and they change the marketing message to a sales type message. And so in the games, like as I was asking the question, I was trying to process whether there'd be something, but it's, it's pretty factual cuz
John: it's.
Right. Yeah. And most of what they're translating is say the name of the game and the rule book and the words on the cards. So you know, the words on the, the words on the board. The words on the cards, and then the rule book. So however they would explain the rules and their language is, you know, really up, up to them.
There's not a lot of marketing material in the games. Right. So that's really up to how they decide they wanna market the products and they would be marketing our products along with all their other products. So we would have less control over how they went about marketing them.
Wendy: Right. And then you're tracking numbers and know what you'd expect to see them selling.
Right, because you have contracts with that. Yeah. And it's, it's brilliant how you've [00:35:00] set it up. I mean, it's so exciting cause you've got that, that natural growth. Yeah. So um, Yeah, if you, if you wanna explore translating your website, I have a bunch of other ideas on that, but we don't have to capture that now.
We're kind of coming to the end of time, which is such a bummer. And you know, this question's coming at you. What's your favorite
John: foreign word? Oh so I would pro probably say the German word for butterfly. Metal, I guess is my, my rough pronunciation of it. And the reason is, how'd you say it?
That Schmeling. I think that's, that, that's, I'm, if you're a German speaker, you're probably going, Ugh, that was horrible. But there's this really funny video that I saw that, that describes the way that German people say certain words and how aggressive it is. And my wa my, my mother-in-law was born in Germany and my wife grew up speak.
German as well as English in, in the [00:36:00] home. And so the, there was this video we saw about how people in Italy pronounced certain words and then the word in French and then the word in German, and it, and it was like really beautiful and, and French and, and Italian and Spanish. And then it was this really rough shing for butterfly.
And I just, it always just stuck with me and it was just always such a funny thing. So, oh my gosh, that.
Wendy: Can you, uh, can you still access that video? I'd love to put that in the show notes for people
John: to, to watch. Yes, I will. Okay. Yeah, I'll pull that up. Okay. So we'll
Wendy: share that on the on the, the show notes.
And then do you have any recommendations for people that are thinking about exporting or that they're afraid
John: of exporting? That's a great question. I mean, I would, I'd probably say. There's a lot of conventions for whatever kind of product, international conventions, [00:37:00] and those are probably some of the best places to go to meet other people who are doing that.
To identify who the exporters are, who the international partners are. There's also just a ton, there's an enormous amount of content online you can find about it. You know, I know Sheltered International, they're a large freight company that we use a lot as well as Frito. They both
Wendy: have. Um, can you say the first one again?
I didn't catch that. Yeah.
John: Sheltered International.
Wendy: S H E L T E R E D International.
John: I think that's right. Yep. Yeah, like I've never heard of that. Sheltered. Yeah. And what was the next one? And then the other one is fredos. It's like Fred, but then os Fredos. Yeah. Yeah. Good name. Sheltered International.
Anytime we are sending things overseas or, or picking things up from China, They're basically like a customs broker, and they'll, they'll provide, they'll search for a container. They will broker all of your documentation to get you into the United States or out of the [00:38:00] United States. And so we just pay them, you know, if we've got a 40 foot container of product that needs to leave Shanghai, we'll just call them and say, Hey, we've got this product.
It's f O. Freight on board, or it's X works mean pick it up from the factory. Can you give us a quote to get it from the factory to our US warehouse with all customs and duty paid? And they say, yep, that'll be, you know, $7,569, and say, great. And then they take care of that whole shipment and we pay them that amount of money to move that product.
Here. There's also fredos, which is sort of doing the same thing, except you don't call a person. Or send an email to a company. It's like, it's an online tool that brokers it out for you and then tells you, here's all the options you have just to ship that, send that shipment. You can do an LTL lust truck load or LCL lessen container load.
Or you can do full containers, 20 foot containers, 40 foot containers, you know, 40 foot HQ or HC high capacity containers. So [00:39:00] depending upon what you have. They're like an online broker to basically tell you, here's the fastest shipment, here's the lowest price, here's the highest reviewed freight company, and then you just book it right through fredos.
And, and what I was mentioning was they both, they all have blogs and so you can just read a lot of the blogs and learn about you know, what is, what's happening in, in the movement of product. Okay, so go to
Wendy: conventions to meet people and learn and go to the, your product, you know, whatever your products are.
Go there and then go online, particularly to Lake Freight forwarders or logistics people and read their blogs and read. Uh, those are great ideas. Any other ideas for people who are interested in learning more? How to
John: export? I mean that, yeah, call Wendy.
Thank you. Yeah, don't call me. I'm too busy.
Wendy: Did, um, did you ever connect with your [00:40:00] state export rep? Didn't I put you together with that person?
John: Yeah, they actually have, they've got a great program where we went to a few conventions overseas and they. For a plane flight and the convention fees and some marketing materials for us to go demo product overseas.
So that was great. Wow. Okay. Um, I think that's the STEP program in, in Missouri
Wendy: here. Yes. It's called the STEP Grant. And if you're in any state in the United States, call me and I'll connect you to your step grant representative so you can find out how to access flight conference fees. And what were they, what,
John: what else did they pay for the flight, the conference fees.
A hotel room and I think some marketing, I mean it was like, I think they reimbursed us like six and a half thousand dollars to go to the Essen game convention. It was, it was a great, great rebate. That's
Wendy: fantastic. I'm so glad that worked out cuz I had wondered. Yeah. And so that's, there's the trade advisors from every [00:41:00] state and then the federal government that will help.
All right. So John, where can people reach you or learn more about your
John: games? Yeah, you can, I mean obviously you can go to amazon.com in the US and search for Genius games. You can go to genius games.org or science games.com or science puzzles.com. You can reach out to me my email, john genius games.org if you wanna reach out to me specifically.
So is so
Wendy: much for taking the time outta your busy schedule to talk to me today.
John: I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Yeah, I had fun. Thanks, Wendy. Okay.
Wendy: Yeah, and for listeners, if you wanna know more, go find him. Or you can go to our global Marketing Show podcast and listen to other people that have fun experiences like this to share.
You can find it on where you listen, Spotify, apples, or you can just search Global Marketing Show online. So thanks so much. For listening forward this on to anybody that you know that is in the the gaming industry. I'm [00:42:00] sure they find it fascinating. We'll talk to you next time.
