In 2023, when Razor was introducing the Crazy Cart Shuffle, a non-motorized go-kart that can spin in circles, it made the counterintuitive decision to introduce the product not on kids’ media but rather somewhere more popular with boomers: QVC.
The reason, as Razor’s CMO Ali Kermani told Retail Brew at the time, was twofold: It was targeting boomers to purchase the product for their grandchildren, and also hoping that the grandparents would buy a larger, motorized version, the Crazy Cart XL, and join their grandkids for a spin in the driveway.
It was what Kermani calls “intergenerational play,” the notion that, compared to generations past, some parents (and grandparents) don’t want to just stay on the periphery of the playground but rather join the juice-box drinkers on the jungle gym.
Now Razor is embarking on another intergenerational initiative, but this time it’s to interest kids in something that has traditionally been the domain of adults: product assembly.
In advance of the 2024 holiday season, the company redesigned the assembly and instruction manual for the Crazy Cart Shuffle, transforming a typical manual with mechanical drawings and zero personality into something that looks more like it was produced by Cartoon Network.
It’s filled with something you’d never see on the assembly instructions for an Ikea bureau: cartoonish illustrations, a maze, a word search, and even a coloring page.
It might just look like a few illustrations zhuzhing up a manual, but there’s a broader retail strategy at work.
“Our products are designed to be so easy a kid could put them together, so why not have the kid put it together with the parent involved?” Kermani asked Retail Brew in a recent interview. “It could be a shared experience.”
Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey: “This is actually part of a much bigger paradigm shift at Razor,” Kermani told Retail Brew. “What I see Razor being now is not only selling items, but also offering a platform for intergenerational play, like a point of connection between older generations, grandparents, parents, and their kids.”
Kermani, whose young children have the enviable task of being muses and test subjects for new products the company develops, said using the manual to assemble a Crazy Cart Shuffle with his kids proved educational.
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“I realized, ‘Oh, you guys don’t know what a Phillips head [screwdriver] is—OK, let’s have that discussion,’” he recalled. “Let me teach you ‘righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.’ Let me show you what an Allen head wrench is and what it does and how there’s two ways to use it.’”
Once Junior knows basic upkeep for the products, that could benefit Razor, too.
“The kid’s going to be the person living on the product,” Kermani said. “So if they know that this is supposed to be tightened here, this is supposed to be loose here, that helps my company and it helps their experience for the child to be informed about how the things should properly be put together.”
Street legal: It will come as no surprise that Kermani has had to bump heads with Razor’s legal department so much over this that he probably wishes he’d worn a helmet.
In an earlier version, his team had scattered the illustrations and puzzles throughout the manual, and hadn’t changed a word or typeface in the original instructions, but it didn’t fly.
“Even though I kept all the text identical, they were scared that perhaps we’re opening a liability in that we may be distracting from the proper assembly with games,” he said, adding that’s why they moved those elements to come after the instructions.
But Kermani said that this is just the first step, and his goal is to make the instructions even more kid-friendly while complying with his attorneys’ concerns.
Ultimately, he envisions instructions for all Razor products to be written in a “friendlier” and “colloquial” voice. Kermani even evoked a character his kids surely have never heard of, Clippy, the (polarizing) character Microsoft Office developed in the 1990s who used to pop up on the screen to offer assistance and shortcuts.
“We don’t want to jump in with two feet into uncharted territory,” Kermani explained. Now that the visuals have loosened up, he’ll pursue “a secondary voice,” he said. “We run that by legal—if they’re comfortable with that, if there’s no problem in the actual marketplace, then we can look at another step forward.”