Connecticut Leather Company
Coleco Industries Inc. is an American company founded in 1932 by Maurice Greenberg as The Connecticut Leather Company. It was a successful toy company in the 1980s, mass-producing versions of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and their game consoles, the Coleco Telstar and ColecoVision custom consoles. Although the company went out of business in 1988 as a result of bankruptcy, the Coleco brand was revived in 2005 and remains active to this day.
Review
Coleco Industries Inc. began operations in 1932 as The Connecticut Leather Company. The company supplied shoe repairers with leather and “shoe fittings” (accessories and supplies for a shoe repair shop). In 1938, the company began selling rubber shoes. Demand for the company's goods increased during World War II, and by the end of the war the company grew larger and expanded with new and used shoe machines, hat-shine equipment, and marble shoe-shine stands.
By the early 1950s, thanks to Maurice Greenberg's son, Leonard Greenberg, the company further diversified into leather lacing and needlework kits. In 1954, at the New York Toy Fair, their set of leather moccasins was chosen as the prestige toy for children, and the Connecticut Leather Company decided to go into the toy business. In 1956, Leonard read about a new technology for vacuum forming plastic; the company adopted this and became increasingly successful, producing a wide range of plastic toys and paddling pools.
In 1961, part of the leather and footwear business was sold and the Connecticut Leather Company became Coleco Industries, Inc. On January 9, 1962, Coleco went public, offering 120,000 shares at $5 per share.
In 1963, the company acquired the Kestral Corporation of Springfield, Massachusetts, a manufacturer of inflatable vinyl pools and toys. This has led Coleco to become the largest above ground pool manufacturer in the world.
In 1966, Leonard persuaded his brother Arnold Greenberg to join the company. Further acquisitions included Playtime Products (1966) and Eagle Toys of Canada (1968). By the late 1960s, Coleco operated ten manufacturing plants and occupied a new headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut.
Coleco experienced financial difficulties in the 1970s, although sales rose to $48.6 million in 1971. In 1972, Coleco entered the snowmobile market through an acquisition. Less-than-expected snowfall that year and market conditions led to a significant drop in sales and low profits.
Dozens of companies rushed to introduce game systems in 1976 after the release of the successful Atari Pong console, and the company entered the game console market with Telstar. Nearly all new gaming systems were based on General Instrument's "Pong-on-a-chip". General Instrument underestimated demand, resulting in severe shortages. However, Coleco was one of the first to place the order, and therefore one of the few companies to receive the full order. Although the dedicated game consoles did not last long on the market, their early order allowed Coleco to break even.
Coleco continued to do well in the electronics field. The company moved into handheld electronic games, a market popularized by Mattel. The first success was Electronic Quarterback. Coleco has released two popular lines of games: a series of two-player sports games (soccer, baseball, basketball, football, hockey) and a series of licensed Mini-Arcade video arcade games such as Donkey Kong and Ms. Pac. -The male. A third line of learning handhelds was also produced, which included the Electronic Learning Machine, Lil Genius, Digits, and a quiz game called Quiz Wiz. Launched in 1982, their first four mini-arcade games for Pac-Man, Galaxian, Donkey Kong and Frogger sold an estimated three million units within a year. Among them, Pac-Man alone sold 1.5 million units. Three more mini-arcades were released in 1983:
Coleco returned to the game console market in 1982 with the release of ColecoVision. The system was quite popular and came bundled with a copy of Donkey Kong. In 1982, 560,000 consoles were sold. Coleco also hedged its bet on video games by introducing a line of ROM cartridges for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision, selling six million cartridges for both systems, as well as two million sold for ColecoVision, for a total of eight million cartridges sold in 1982. She also introduced the Coleco Gemini, a clone of the popular Atari 2600 that came with a copy of Donkey Kong.
When the video game business began to collapse in 1983, it became clear that game consoles were being replaced by home computers. Bob Greenberg, son of Leonard Greenberg and nephew of Arnold Greenberg, left Microsoft, where he was a software developer at the time, to help Coleco enter that market. Coleco's strategy was to introduce the Coleco Adam home computer both as a standalone system and as an add-on module for ColecoVision. The effort failed, partly because Adams was often unreliable due to being released with fatal bugs, and partly because the release of the computer coincided with the collapse of the home computer industry. Coleco phased out electronics in early 1985.
In 1983, Coleco released a line of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls which were a huge success. That same year, Dr. Seuss signed a contract with Coleco to develop a line of toys including home video games based on his characters. On a wave of success, Coleco acquired Leisure Dynamics (makers of Aggravation and Perfection board games) and in 1986 laid siege to Selchow and Righter, makers of Scrabble, Parcheesi and Trivial Pursuit. Sales of Selchow & Righter games plummeted, leaving them with warehouses. Lots of unsold games. The purchase price of Selchow & Righter was $75 million. That same year, Coleco introduced an ALF plush doll based on a furry alien character who had his own television series at the time, as well as a talking version and a "Storytelling ALF" cassette doll. Combination of purchase Selchow & Righter, the cataclysmic Adam computer and the fading public craze for the Cabbage Patch Dolls contributed to Coleco's financial demise. In 1988, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The reorganized Coleco sold all of its assets in North America and outsourced thousands of jobs to foreign countries, closing factories in Amsterdam, New York and other cities. In 1988, the Canadian company SLM Action Sports Inc. acquired Coleco's pool and snow product divisions. In 1989, Hasbro acquired most of Coleco's remaining product lines.
Brand
Coleco as a trademark has been owned by several organizations since its inception in 1961 by Coleco Industries, Inc.
In 2005, River West Brands, now Dormitus Brands, a Chicago brand revival company, reintroduced the Coleco brand to the market. In late 2006, the company introduced Coleco Sonic, a handheld system containing twenty Sega Master System and Sega Game Gear games, including two from the Sonic the Hedgehog series. In 2014, River West Brands established a subsidiary, Coleco Holdings, for its projects under the Coleco brand.
In December 2015, Coleco Holdings announced the development of Coleco Chameleon, a new cartridge-based video game system; it is actually a rebrand of the controversial Retro VGS console, whose Indiegogo campaign failed to secure funding when it ended in early November 2015, raising only $63,546 of a planned $1.95 million. The press release stated that the system will be able to play new and classic games in 8-, 16- and 32-bit styles. The system was announced to be released sometime in early 2016 with a demonstration at the New York Toy Fair in February. However, some critics suggested that the prototype did not achieve its design goals and was nothing more than a Super NES SNS-101 model motherboard inside an Atari Jaguar case. Later simulation images of the prototype, published by AtariAge showed that the device uses a CCTV capture card instead of a motherboard. After Retro VGS failed to produce a fully working prototype, Coleco Holdings withdrew from Retro VGS, terminating the project.