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When Isabel Hoffman tucked her young son Nikolai into bed at night with imaginative stories about an adventurous little boy and his mischievous toy cat, she had no idea the characters she was creating would later become the flagship product of an ambitious and fast-growing company.
But in two short years, the fictitious Nikolai and his friend Neow-Neow have leapt from bedtime stories into interactive CD-ROMs, an Internet site, toys and even a fan club, transforming Hoffman's computer training firm into one of Canada's leading producers of interactive multimedia entertainment and education products. Moreover, it has set the pace for Hoffman's new strategy: to become "the Disney of the North".
To Hoffman, Walt Disney was a consummate story-teller who with vision, focus and tenacity masterfully built up franchises on a stable of cartoon characters. "Our raison d'etre is story-telling," says Homnan. That means telling her own stories, through the Nikolai products, she says, and helping others learn to communicate better through multimedia training. "I don't believe in technology for the sake of technology," she says. "It must have added value."
It's a niche that seems to be paving off. Hoffman's push into educational products, combined with a commitment to multimedia training and partnerships with leading technology firms to produce and distribute CDs, has pushed her company's 1996 sales to $5 million. That's up from $1 million three years ago.
"They are constantly staying on top of technology, trying new things," says Wayne Vaivada, a designer with The Watt Group, a design firm in Toronto. Vaivada, who designed the Nikolai CD packaging, notes Hoffman's training facility gives her an edge when it comes to new technology: "They are accessing it, and using it before anyone else."
Although she's now firmly entrenched in information and "edutainment": it's a far cry from what Hoffman expected to be doing when she came to Canada in 1976. Raised in Switzerland and Portugal, Hoffman intended to study astronomy...