I’ll admit it, I’m a late bloomer. The first time I heard of UNKL was at this year’s New York Toy Fair. Hiding between rows of uber-crappy kids’ stuff stood a small booth overflowing with some of the coolest figures I’ve ever seen. Little green robots with gas masks, monstrous giants with little white heads, and cute round-headed creatures, the UNKL booth was a vinyl toy wonderland. So I began chatting up the cute booth girl that UNKL clearly paid to hawk their goods. Turns out she wasn’t a show girl, but a PR person. They breed PR people a lot nicer in Oregon.

Anyway, UNKL was founded by designers Derek Welch and Jason Bacon as a means to further their own creativity without the constraints of a boss. The duo’s first creation, HazmaPo, was an instant success, selling out at vinyl toy stores around the country. UNKL began cranking out new characters with stories as elaborate as their designs. Seven years later, UNKL is an unstoppable force in the urban vinyl industry. The company has a ton of licensed collaborations under its belt, and many cool toys in development, including a series of figures based on indie-rock gods Wilco. Welch took a few minutes to chat with Life In A Bungalo about what it takes to build a vinyl toy company from the ground up.

What separates UNKL from the other toy production companies?
I think being designers and artists and doing design for more than 15 years as a business, allowed us the ability to do some creative exploration on our own. A few of the characters that we created as figures are from ideas that we’ve had as sketches way before we did anything with them. A good part of our lives had been spent being creative for other people, so we figured it was time to make our own stuff, the way we want to make them.

Your licensed figures aren’t just blank toys with a company logo. Is that something you make an effort not to do?
We’re not just looking to get our toys out there to everyone. We are pretty careful about who we work with. If we had a company asking us to work with them, unless we feel they are a company that we can jive with, we probably wouldn’t do something with them. We are starting to do a lot of things with bands. With that stuff, we are finding musicians that we like, or whose work ethic we respect.

Speaking of bands, the Wilco figures that you are releasing at San Diego Comic Con are stirring up a buzz. How did you get involved with the band?
We’ve admired those guys for a long time. A friend of mine in Austin who owns a store called Monkey See, Monkey Do sent me an e-mail saying that Jeff Tweedy from Wilco was just in the store and bought a bunch of UNKL stuff and appeared to really be into it. I went to our PR person and talked to her about trying to do a project with them, especially since Jeff Tweedy is already into our stuff. She put in a call to their management and they asked the band if the would be interested.

What did the band think of the figures? The photos of the toys look like simple images of the band members adapted to the Unipo figure.
There were a lot of little things that the band members wanted on their figures, particularly what they were wearing. We tried a few different versions. That kind of back and forth is interesting because the band is creative, and we are creative, but we’re visual and they are obviously music.

Are you planning any other music collaborations? Any dream projects you wish you could do?
We have quite a few music collaborations that going on right now, but none of them that I can talk about yet. What you’ll find is that this is a pretty eclectic mix of styles that are reflective of who we are as creative people, we are into a lot of different things stylistically, visually, and musically. I think the collaborations we are doing with musicians reflect that to a certain extent. As far as a dream project, I personally think it would be cool if we could do a UniPo version of Eddie from Iron Maiden. If I was able to do an Eddie I could die the day after it came out.

Would you need a new platform for Eddie? It doesn’t really seem conducive to a Unipo.
When we are doing any kind of character that has to take on a likeness of something that is existing (whether a character like Eddie, or a specific band member), I take a look at the visual tools and what the character looks like and see if it can be adapted to a character that already exists. That makes the project a lot more affordable, because we’ve already paid for the tooling. Also, the quantities that you can do are much smaller and that’s beneficial for many bands on a budget, especially when they are paying for it out of their pockets. We want to make these figures collectible and special, but that can’t be done if we need to make a new form. The budget is what is going to dictate a lot of what we do.

You seem to have a very punk rock approach to marketing and distribution, almost DIY. Is that something you strive for?
There’s not that much thought behind our overall strategy. From the beginning, we just said, “Let’s make stuff that we love and that we are into.’ The PR and the marketing are just there to bring awareness to what we are doing. We’re not trying to ram this stuff down anyone’s throat. It’s our full understanding that not everyone is going to be into what we are doing, it’s just not possible. In fact, we’ve received comments from people that don’t get UNKL at all. There’s no offence taken to that. We are just being realistic and we want to stick to what we want to do. People either get UNKL or they don’t. Either way, that’s cool with us.

You’ve had a huge response to the create-a-Unipo design contest. Do you plan on making an artist series of Unipos, or making it a platform toy like the Dunnys and Labbits?
UniPo is becoming more of a blank platform for us to do projects with a lot of different people. I don’t know if it is necessarily an artist series, but Unipo is definitely a part of the work we are doing with a lot of musicians. We are also doing collaborations with a lot of other groups, not music oriented, companies, organizations, etc. As far as working with established artists, I think we felt like there is enough of that going on already and we really like to do the creating ourselves, that’s why we started UNKL in the first place. For us to try to build UNKL with someone else’s name, that’s not attractive to us, although there are a lot of people doing great stuff that we would love to do work with. It just wouldn’t be handled the same way it’s handled with Dunnys.

What toys inspire you?
I collect Maschinen Krieger. That’s the only grouping of characters that I make an effort to collect. Mostly, I respond to things I like visually, that speak to me. I’m not concerned with how many were made, or how difficult they are to get a hold of. There’s some really collectible, limited edition stuff out there that I really don’t like at all. It’s just a personal thing for me. If I don’t respond to it personally, I don’t care how limited or special it is, I won’t collect it. Maschinen Krieger is inspirational to me. The detail and design are executed so well.

What was it like making your first toy and holding it in your hand?
That was a really cool feeling. Never having done anything like that before, we didn’t know what to expect. When we got the first samples, we sort of looked at each other and said, “Wow, these are really cool.” It’s amazing that what we wanted to make could come to life in a form like that. We realized when we were holding those first samples that they were executed so well, and that we were bitten by the bug. We knew that it was something that we wanted to keep doing, and that’s a scary proposition because it takes money to do it. We realized that we could be biting off more than we can chew. Luckily, that hasn’t happened yet. When the first set of HazmaPo sold as quickly as they did, we realized that we wanted to keep doing it. We were forced to take UNKL a little more seriously than we had intended, more like a business than a hobby.

How did you design your business model so that it actually worked?
If there’s anything that we learned, it’s that this is a continually evolving business. We realized that we would be better served concentrating on better character development rather than toy development. We have an enormous amount of ideas for characters and stories, and there is no way to take all of the things that we wanted to do and make them all into toys. So we took some things and turned them into toys, and we concentrated other efforts into building stories and creating show bibles for animated entertainment. For us it’s about taking these characters and stories and getting them out in front of the public.

A lot of fans are obsessed with your massive SUG figures. What’s your reaction to the growing fan base and the fact that people are willing to shell out big bucks for a toy that might not fit on their toy shelves?
I don’t think I’m that surprised. There have been characters that I felt would be really popular, that weren’t that popular, and vice versa. There’s no way for us to know who is going to respond to what. Our best bet is to go with the characters that we personally react to. We’ll kick sketches back and forth until there’s something that we all think is cool. I’m not surprised that the SUG is popular, just like I’m not surprised that there are certain things we’ve done that people don’t like. It’s what I would characterize as a Neil Young approach, you do your thing, but you have to realize that there are things you might do that even your biggest fans might not like, but that doesn’t keep you from doing it.

You have a Circus Punk coming out with an UNKL motif. What approach do you take to designing non-UNKL toys? Obviously, this is not going to be a HazmaPo with fur on it.
We respect the Circus Punk people and they are a great bunch of guys. We talked to Paul and Steve and we thought that it would be interesting to do some artwork on a Punk. Since what we are doing is so character driven, sometimes we just want to create artwork that isn’t based on a certain character, and isn’t hooked into a larger story, It’s just creating artwork for the sake of creating artwork. The Circus Punk platform was a good way for us to do that. And they weren’t telling us that it had to be one way or another, they just told us to do our thing. We made something that looked like it could jive within the UNKL framework but that would be reflective of the Circus Punks.

What do you have planned for the near future?
Character wise, we are working on about five different projects that are all geared towards creating show bibles for characters. These are characters that aren’t vinyl figures, they only exist on paper right now. As far as vinyl, we’ve got UniPo series 3 and 4 (2″ and 6″) launching very soon. For SDCC we are going to have new SUGs, one that’s a Comic Con exclusive. Then there’s Ulligus, SUGs companion dog. For each new SUG that we are doing, there’s going to be a matching Ulligus. That’s a gorilla/hyena/rhino looking animal with a head that looks like a SUG. We have a new set of Hazmapos coming out, as well as UniPoker, which is a tin box with a few Unipos and a set of playing cards that we designed. The Wilco figures also will be available at Comic Con, and I think those are going to go pretty fast.