Boosting Sales Is No Game to LeapFrog

This is actually the second time LeapFrog SchoolHouse has won the Golden Lamp award.

“Winning our second Golden Lamp award gives our team a huge motivational lift, considering that only around 80 products have earned this award in the last 40 years, and LeapFrog SchoolHouse has won it twice,” Lorion says.

Lorion and other executives, such as Jim Mills, senior director of marketing, believe the division is back on course for success.
“The [SchoolHouse] division’s earnings contribution for full-year 2006 was a loss of $5 million, compared to income of $9 million in 2005. With the restructuring late in 2006, we expect to be profitable in 2007,” Mills says.

Net sales from the SchoolHouse division totaled $5 million for the first quarter of 2007. While these numbers are down compared to the first quarter of 2006 ($7.7 million), Bill Chiasson, LeapFrog Enterprises CFO, says it’s all part of the rebuilding process.

“Our first-quarter-sales decrease primarily reflects continued declines in LeapPad product sales as a part of our planned transition to a new reading platform in 2008 as well as the impact of our SchoolHouse restructuring strategy,” he says.

It is still too early to tell whether LeapFrog SchoolHouse’s transition will be a success in terms of boosting sales. However, the company, with its history of interactive products, seems to have a leg up in the increasingly multimedia world of publishing. In fact, it has started working with several print-based publishers to help them evolve in the digital world.

“We’ve worked with several traditional publishers, and together have produced interactive, multisensory books that are designed to help teach children and adults to read,” Lorion says. “We intend to expand our ability to provide platforms that will allow content publishers to move their content to the digital world in an easy-to-use, easy-to-develop and easy-to-support manner.” BB