Creating Empowering Dolls & Toys: The Journey of Andrea Furtick and the Afro Goddess Warrior Doll Project

Hello everybody and welcome to In the Dawn World, a show spotlighting the passion and the people of the Dawn community With your host, georgia Taylor, former vice president and co-founder of Big Beautiful Dolls. Join her as she talks to fascinating doll artists, customizers, avid collectors, redesigners, authors and all the people in between, as they share their journeys, give us glimpses into their processes and will propel their passion and drive to help keep the doll world moving and shaking. Welcome to the show, hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of In the Dawn World. I'm your host, georgia Taylor, and, as always, I'm so excited to bring you some amazing new doll creators in the Dawn World. So today is no exception. I am speaking today with Andrea Furtick. She is the CEO and founder of AGC Toys and she is the creator of Afro Goddess, which is a warrior doll collection. So excited to have her share her journey with you because I've seen these dolls and met her about a year and a half probably about a year ago, at a pitch contest that was given by one of the chambers before my friend Audrey and I developed the Gwynette Women's Chamber and we have stayed in contact and I'm just so glad to be able to showcase what it is that she's doing in the Dawn community. So thank you so much, andrea, for being on In the Dawn World with me.

Thank you so much for having me. It's such a special opportunity and I'm really glad to be here.

Yes, I'm so glad to have you here and for you to be able to share with my listeners and the people who watch the show on YouTube, to talk about your collection and why you got that started. I know you have a really unique story and share your story with us.

So my name is Andrea Furtett and I am from Orange Park, south Carolina, but I reside in the beautiful streets of Atlanta. I have always wanted to be an artist, and so that has always been the journey that life has taken me on. As I grew older and went to college and went to Savannah College for Art and Design, I realized that the college track wasn't for me and life just wanted me to take a different path. So I left school, I went back home to South Carolina and I really took some time to actually study what it was to be, I guess, a budding black woman in America, in the South today, and so that was really a very special situation for me, and so I started to create all my artwork around Afrocentric topics and theories, and I see the world in a much more, you know, beautiful way than a lot of other people. And so what actually ended up happening was one day I got a random message from a lady I had sold a painting to in England and she loved the painting and she said hey, girl, I really think you should get into the tarot. So didn't know anything about tarot or divination practices at that time. However, I spent like a year and a half just studying it card by card, and then, from the topics and the symbolism that I saw and I felt were important, not just for me but for the culture and for any other person who came to use it, I created my own tarot deck called the Afro Goddess Tarot Arkanas. So this is the Afro Goddess Tarot Arkanas. It's a holographic edition. This is actually the special edition that US Games licensed for me last year. But the special thing about the Afro Goddess Tarot Arkanas fully melanated version of the tarot that presents African culture in a really magnificent and really beautiful kind of way. So here's a little glance at the magician card. And so the magician card means that you have everything that you need at all times to do the things that you don't want to that you need to do. And so, even studying tarot, I learned that some, and probably most in today's age, are African American community, are not necessarily afraid, but incomplete misunderstanding of what tarot is altogether. So that became a real journey to bring representation to spiritual practice, to you know just what it is to grow up in a path that's not so mainstream. So, as US Games licensed this deck for me, it gave me an idea, because not only did they license this deck, they licensed the Afro Goddess Oracle deck as well, and that provided me with 150 plus characters that I could turn into a really amazing story, because if you know anything about tarot, you would know that it is simply just a story being told about the person. We all live the same story. It's called the hero's journey. You can look up countless articles about that topic. I've given speeches on it and it is a really mind blowing phenomenon of how life is literally the same, even in its differences, for all of us. So with these 150 characters that we have here, I started to create the Afro Goddess Warrior Doll Project. I always wanted to make dolls. I think I handpainted like three or four on Instagram and it went viral and then I was like, oh my gosh, can't hand paint these, don't know what I'm going to do. Well, the first thing we started with was the Supreme Goddess Statue. So this is actually the Supreme card, which I added into the tarot. I'm kind of as an aphrocentric representation of balance. So she has balance of her thoughts, of her actions, of her time and her material and when you think of all of those things, it really creates a life where you can kind of master and create anything that you want to have. So you made these, but they weren't necessarily cost effective. If you're in the market of building dolls, you would know sometimes if you're not getting the amount that you need like cost too much in order to sustain the product. But what we were able to do is prove to the market that people want this product. So then I was like, oh, let's have a Barbie style doll.

So from her was birthed actual Nova it's the one that I saw, by the way, just so everybody can understand and like. When she came to the pitch, that was the first thing I saw was this doll and I was definitely I grew up definitely gravitated toward that.

This is Nova, and so we're turning her into a Barbie style doll for our younger girls now, because it comes from a realization that we really don't have any evergreen, emotionally intelligent, afrocentric products in the world. We have a lot of black dolls budding and that they're beautiful. They really are, but it's more than just the outer appearance and it's time that we show girls that there's, that these dolls and the things that we're giving them to entertain them and teach them encompass more than doing your hair or different types of hair. Like. I love all the new products with the afrocentric hair and different types of hair, but being a black person is more than just your hair. It's the heritage, it's the thought process, it's everything that there is to go into the culture other than just the physical appearance. So from here, we don't want to leave our younger babies out. Nova turned into a plush and so traveling through this and designing it out in a really cool and amazing way, and I have a very unique tech approach that we can't mention just yet, but I'm super excited to share that with my hopeful new manufacturing partners soon.

Thank you so much for sharing the process of that. And again, I mentioned earlier the doll was the one that I saw and I just fell in love with her. I thought she was so unique and so different and just so beautiful and I was curious about your journey and I was curious about where you were headed in creating that doll. So I know that you went to Toy Fair, so can you shed some light on you know how that experience was for you and I guess, where you at in the process of creating the vinyl doll and also the plush dolls, because I do believe that those are probably closer to production for you than the vinyl doll. But just share a little bit about what your experience was at Toy Fair.

Okay, so my experience at Toy Fair was really, really cool. I've actually spent several years as an independent manufacturer, so if you don't know what that means, that means every product that I've ever created, from the tarot deck to the statue bed to books, to any of those things, I would facilitate that creation, oversee it and have it brought over from another country. So this is actually a new experience for me going into the licensing world and we're really only doing this because my independent production outgrew me and I could no longer sustain what it took for me to do that on my own not physically or financially in order to grow it to the rate it deserved. So I caught on to licensing and I actually attended the Las Vegas Licensing Expo and that's where I really learned about the process and how, at that moment, I could go back to just being a creator and not just doing all of those right brain things, because I'm so much of a left brain individual but I'm good at the right brain. But you know you have to shop out for the things you're not great Exactly. Yes, so now I just get to go back to being a creator. I actually stumbled upon not necessarily a contest, but an open pitch competition that you had to submit to a committee from the Toy Association, and I submitted the Afro Goddess plush collection for that venture and we were selected, and so that's how the Afro Goddess brand ended up at Toy Fair in like a little blink of an eye, because we actually didn't intend to go. But then they chose us and I rearranged my schedule, my kids schedule and always grateful for my parents who are willing to help and keep them when they need to and we took ourselves to Toy Fair and participated in what they call Creative Factor Inventor Day. So Creative Factor Inventor Day was a group of about 20 individuals that had new products that are coming out, that are looking for manufacturing partners, and so what the idea of the day was? It was supposed to not necessarily, you know, be a cheat code, but like move you ahead into being able to get these meetings with these individuals because they're already in the room. And so I had a really cool experience and I got to meet some really fantastic people that are executives and some of the biggest toy companies in the world. And now I'm chatting with them about the large scale production of the got the Effer Goddess Warrior collection, because where I used to, you know, produce it myself on a smaller scale, maybe 500 to 1000, and then bring them in and sell them one by one, and then I have to pack them and ship them.

That's taking time. Remember that. Yeah, remember those days. That's the creator.

And when I tell people like I'm the Disney you don't know, yet I'm literally the Disney you don't know yet. And if I'm ever going to realize that dream, I have to make sure I put systems in place, because I also, at the same time, I'm a mentor in a program called the Blocks Entrepreneur Reality Show. It's actually just aired on Amazon Prime.

Yes, it has. I've been watching it. I've been watching it.

Yes, I was a contestant in season seven and I'm now a judge and now a mentor, from season 11 and on, and so I I share with them that processes as we've learned from our I guess our little guru, wes Bergman, that your processes are what are able to progress you, and if you're too afraid to put progresses in line or let someone else into the business, you're kind of going to plateau and that's where it is. So there was a decision day I guess that had to happen, and licensing became it. New York Toy Fair has opened a tremendous amount of doors for me, so I'm extremely grateful to the Toy Association and that committee that selected me to be a part of that, and we were actually featured in the toy book, which is really exciting. Yes, congratulations, thank you, Thank you, and that's a really commemorial and wonderful experience. I'm really excited that that actually happened. So I'm just at this way we're just riding the wave, me and my wonderful agent, marlene QS stuff, us licensing, and so now that's my, my very godmother. And you know we're just rocking out together.

You have to have those people, you know you have to have those people to help you understand. You know how you need to grow in that industry and I think what you were saying was absolutely right Like when you don't have systems in place or you don't even understand what systems you need in place, you know, to reach that growth that you need. It is really detrimental to your business and, being a solopreneur, we always want to take on all the jobs because this is these, our babies. You know whether it's a doll or a product or, you know, a service, it's our baby and we want to. We want to feel like we're protecting it, but sometimes we over protect and it doesn't allow anything to really grow. And so I think the you know the advice that was given. Obviously he's an amazing entrepreneur and he knows what he's talking about. He's been in business a long time. But to share that with you and for you to receive that and take that in and then say how can I place my company to grow the way I want it to grow by, you know, allowing other people to be a part of that, I think it's really kudos to you for listening to that. But I think you know, I know you personally, so I know you have a lot of drive and a lot of heart and you're going to go after what you want, and so I know you made the right decision to do that, because that's really kind of who you are, because you really want your brand to succeed and and you know, as a solopreneur, it's really hard to say, hey, come on in and help me with this sometimes. Sometimes it's hard to ask for help. You're in a great position where you have a lot of people who want to give you help, and so you have to discern a lot of that too. I think you're doing an amazing job. I mean, you're just in the last year, you have grown so much. Oh, thank you. Yeah, you really have.

It's also been a little bit of a quite honestly destiny at play. To be completely fair, all these decisions, I did not sit down and map out Right?

Yes, some.

of the things just happened you know, for instance in the creation.

But you were ready at some point, right? It's always that thing of when you know when you're ready, the teacher appears right. If you weren't ready and looking for those things, sometimes you, even if the teacher shows up, you're not aware of it, but you're aware, yeah, because you already some of your goals were in place. You already kind of had a vision of what. You know what I mean. I have this doll, I want to create this, I want to make sure that it's seen by everybody. And you went and you did. You did the work in the front, you did the figurine, you did the. You know what I mean. You did those things to put yourself in that place, and I think that's important too.

Yes, and you know that's that's actually a really good point. So when I made the figurine in the back of my mind I knew I wanted to make a doll, and I think at the time I had reached out to a company that I thought could possibly do it for me and the price she quoted me was just ridiculous. And so that's how I actually ended up making the figurines. And I was talking with a friend the other day and we were talking about, you know, just showing the universe that you're willing, yes, that you're willing to try, that you're willing to do it small, that you're willing to keep going if you fall down, like all of those things, and just it naturally just kind of ended up here, even though I did do some action in the process, but the universe absolutely met me halfway. Very grateful, we're grateful.

Because you know, it's just a different twist. The fact that they're there sharing those stories just allows more people to understand what Tarot reading is about. All of those things helps people to find out a little bit more about who they are. I think that's really, really powerful. So that's one of the things that drew me to the dolls. I just think what you're doing is really powerful. It gives people a different perspective on who they are in this world, and I think your dolls can share that with young girls and adults. It's really cool. And so I know you were talking about the difference between making the figurine and and doing a production of vinyl dolls as opposed to a plus style. I've been talking to doll creators for many years. I'm in my own doll creator and I know that manufacturing vinyl is very expensive. It has been expensive 20 years ago when we started Pick beautiful dolls. It is just as expensive now, and I think that holds a lot of a lot of people back that don't have that kind of income to just invest. I mean, you know it could cost you almost a house really to create a vinyl doll. So talk a little bit about Sticker Shock that you found from trying to create a vinyl doll, and is that something that you think holds back a lot of creators?

It's definitely a barrier and I even want to say for our you know, black and people of color creators, because we don't have the capital to inject into a project like that. So my very first project, I actually got started on Kickstarter. The Apropos Terrarcanas ran and needed like $6,000. It made about seven. I paid for the project and I continuously rolled that money around and I ended up being able to create a bunch of other products. Now the where you say Sticker Shock, going from publication into the vinyl doll project, absolutely had a Sticker Shock because those rounds of 500 decks that I would buy would cost me. It started out costing me about $5,000. And then that crept up too. But asking them to make that there's not just the cost of the product or the doll itself. There is the setup fee, which is for them to do the 3D rendering of what is going to be done and don't need it changed more than twice. There is the molding fee and that is different between the head and the body. So those are two different prices. So the body that I had designed for Nova was a more authentic African body. It was larger but not too voluptuous, but still a healthy, bigger, strong woman, and that body was going to cost. I want to say she asked me for $12,000 just for the body. I had five different dolls. We would use the same body and do five different heads, and the heads were $2,000 on the mold. So now, after you paid all the mold costs and the set of costs, you get into the price of the actual product. That includes that vinyl doll, the clothing, the hair, depending upon what style or if they have the hair available, which they probably won't because this is a newer genre of Afrocentric product. They would not necessarily have the hair that I requested, so they'd have to find it. Then there's the little accessories, because we had a sword and a wand and cups that went with her. Each of those have a cost. There's the box, what they call the bolster, which is the thing that holds the doll in and makes it look cute. That has a cost. There is the mysterious shipping cost. That always fluctuates and it's quite extensive depending upon who you use and your method of choice. You can put it on a boat or you can put it on a plane, but those prices are very, very different, as are what happens in those processes and the least of time it takes for you to get it. So there's so many variables in doing that. It really does take a team of people and, quite honestly, I'm extremely impressed with myself that I did it as long as I could, and so now I am also impressed with myself that I have figured out the smarter route for a solo entrepreneur, without a team, to get licensing Right, and licensing allows basically not necessarily a team of people to work for me, but we partner. I come through with ideas and plans and they execute them in a way that I know is going to be market ready and they'll probably already have the shelf space in the stores that I'm about to try to fight for. So I'm super excited to get into this journey with licensing, and the sticker shock on that actually was a blessing in disguise, because at that time in my career when I was making that, I didn't know exactly that I could go. I didn't know the route of oh go, get a second mortgage on your house, do all of this or get the type of loan. I was literally flipping it around and paying it my own way and that's wonderful, but had I actually had that capital, I don't know that it would have been the smartest decision Right. Who injected all into creating those dolls at that moment? And then what? And so, then, how would the animation get made? How would marketing be paid for? And so, being, I guess, obedient to Destiny's hand, and waiting for the moment, that seemed like it fit good and it worked correctly. Licensing fell in my lap, and I haven't looked back since.

That's really, that's really, really, really exciting that licensing is coming your way, because I think it does to allow you to be the creator that you are and you know you can step back from having not that you're not making those other decisions, but those other decisions are handled by other people. You share what it is that you want to have and then they figure out how to make that work for you right, as opposed to you trying to spend all that time doing all of that. So you know, and you are a creator, so that's what you want to spend time on and I think that's what gets a lot of entrepreneurs, especially in the doll world, caught up, because they are creators and when they have to flip that script and become you know the marketing team, right, the PR team, you know all of these other people that they have to be to move their product forward. Sometimes it becomes a little bit difficult for them because you know they are the creators, they have this vision, but they cannot see how to make it happen for them on the other end, because they just the thought process is different, you know, in creating that. So having a team, I think, is really really helpful and I'm glad that you were able to find a team, that they found you, you know, and that they see something in what it is that you have to bring to market. So I'm excited for you and I'm excited to see what's happening. So, on that note, what advice really would you give of entrepreneurs or creators? Right, that's looking to make a significant impact in the toy industry, especially in the doll world.

You know, with what you have already gone through, my advice to other creators looking to enter the doll or toy industry is quite honestly, be honest with yourself about your capabilities. We all have really big dreams, we. If you can't break it down into an actionable plan and actually delve out those responsibilities to other people, the reality is it's often not going to go as far as you foresee, because you're literally just one person, and that was a hard lesson for me. It really was, and so I've got it now and I scream from the rooftop every chance I get. You cannot do it all. Your job is to create, to make beautiful things, to come up with amazing ideas, and it takes time and energy just to think these things up. You know, sometimes I can just I have dropped my children off to school, come back home, make coffee and just kind of sat at the table for hours, and before I knew it, hours have passed. And it's not that I'm not doing anything, I'm thinking what am I going to do next? What's going to make this work? How can I make this product better? How am I going to market this Like? Even not doing those responsibilities, I have to come up with a plan for it to be carried out, and so, trying to come up with the plan. Carry out the plan see if the plan works. Adjust the plan, relaunch the plan. All of that is so much on one person. It'll just drag you down and it'll kill your creative edge. So the best advice I can give is to understand what your power is. Find someone that can give you 80 percent of you. You'll never find 100 percent of you, but if they can give you 80 percent of you, that will be able to be directed into something you would find near perfect.

Wow, that's great advice. That's so great advice because it is true, it will drag you down, it will wear you out. Been there. Yeah, it'll stop you from doing the thing that you really want to do. You can get discouraged because it is like you said it's not, it's not. Oh, I'm going to create this and this is going to happen. It is a process. For any of that to happen, you just have to be able to switch different parts of you. Sometimes, like you said, if you really don't have the power in that area, then you really need to find somebody else who does, because otherwise, by the time you spend all your time trying to do things that you're not really sure about, you waste the time on the things that you can do. So thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate that. So, when you were talking about coming home and taking the kids to school and things like that, I know you have young kids. I know you're out there making it happen for them as well. What do they feel about what you're doing, as you're building a legacy this is a legacy driven business and how do they feel about the jobs that you're creating and what you're doing?

So I have very honest kids and these, this is my little focus group. This is my little focus group. So what's interesting is Noble Plush has been made twice and the first time Noble Plush was made she had a wider smile and my younger daughter thought she looked kind of strange and so, after I revamped her, gave her this smaller like cuter lip, and all five of them came in with these same like small cute lips and she put them all up onto the table and I called her downstairs and she said can I have them? And that's when I knew it worked. So they're wonderful, they're great. They listen to my plans. My older daughter is more of the help me with the story Because she's like that doesn't make sense, so what about this? And then because she's 13, so she's looking at everything with a very critical eye. So they're my focus group, my visual focus group, my storyline focus group, and I really like having them be able to be involved in the creation of this project. And I've even realized, just meeting some of the other creators in the toy industry, a lot of those children that are on the boxes in the store. Those are their actual children. They're actual kids that they're taking pictures of them playing with these products at home and they're using that. It's not necessarily a photo shoot with these children models that they picked. Those are their actual children. So I actually can't wait to be able to use my actual children box and it can grow up and be like, yeah, that was me on that box.

That's going to be really, really special. I'm really so excited for you and so proud of you. I mean being in this space because, you know, I think the more of us that are in this space, the better opportunity it is for us to be able to reach out and say, hey, this is what I need. Or, you know, I know that this person did that. I can do that too, and that's again. It all boils down right to representation of who we are as people. You know what we look like as people, you know where we come from as people, and the more we have represented in the Dolls page, the more holistic it'll be. So I'm just excited to see where you're going. And so, speaking of that, can you just provide us a little glimpse of the future? Maybe some other exciting products you have coming up?

OK. So the future of AGC toys at the moment is very bright, and I can't tell you exactly how, but you'll be able to see her in a very amazing way of quarter forward next year in a large retail store the very vague Papa Champagne bottle kind of answer. Now you know, we having a release here in Atlanta, even though it's not necessarily a toy city, it is our city and Atlanta influences everything. So we will be having a fantastic opening here for Nova and her friends in Atlanta when the moment comes, and probably in LA as well. After that I will not after, but in contingency to that I have been exploring a lot of other categories as far as activities, costume, birthday supplies, pajamas, sheep, luggage, just having a blast, and some very cool invention type toys that I really can't say anything about, but they're awesome, that's it.

Well, I'm excited. I look for my ticket to that, yeah, so I can come and be a part of that and just share with the you know, the documentary about what's happening. So with you, because I'm sure once people see you and hear what you have going on, they're going to be definitely intrigued. They want to know more about Afro Goddess Warrior doll collection and I'm just so glad to be able to share this with everybody because I think it's a little different. You know, again, like I want people to see the journey and, you know, talk to people who are just not just in the doll world but in the toy world too, because they kind of, you know, they kind of merge, you know, you know here and there and understand how you know the process is for bringing a doll to market and you can do very variations of what it is that you're thinking about creating. You know, I mean, you had a figurine, you had a vinyl doll, now you have a plush doll and all of those are important and all of them make statements in different areas of the doll community and the toy world. So I'm excited, I'm so excited for you and I'm really so, I'm just so happy, I'm so happy to see you there and happy to see that you're sharing these beautiful dolls with everybody. So can you just tell everybody where they can find you, where they could see what you have coming up and what's happening for you?

Yeah, absolutely so. You can always find me at AGCToysInccom and you can follow all of our social medias with that same handle. So AGCToys with an S Inc I N? C, and that will take you through our Instagram. We have a Facebook group where I share a lot of the behind the scenes motions of the creation, so you may be interested in joining that, and we have a mailing list that you can join from our website. That'll keep you completely up to date with everything's dropping and happening and all of the little special things that I share.

Well, thank you so much, Andrew, for being with us on the doll world. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me. This has been a wonderful time. I'm looking forward to sharing more with you all again in the future. Bye.

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