Biography and History Kapla

Tom van der Bruggen (67), inventor of the building toys Kapla, never got a diploma, but knew how to convince the world of his “gnome planks” “There is just one plank” Lesson 1 A man is not dependent on money “As a child I was a great admirer of the Muiderkring, a group of artists, writers and musicians who came together in the 17^th century at Muiderslot. I wanted the same thing: a castle where I could be the host to artists and musicians. When I was 25 I sold my antiquities shop in Leiden, and bought a ruin in Averyon, south france. Once there I built my own castle, it took 16 years. My wife and I had met a year earlier when she bought an antique cup from my shop. We moved together. For six years we lived with no electricity, but with light from oil lamps. We had flowing water from a ground source and of course pressure due to height difference, the toilet was outside. We lived of our vegetable garden, fairly poor. We ground our own wheat into flour, first by hand and then using a shaft from a small tractor. My wife baked delicious cakes and breads on the fire from the fireplace. Of course it was tough, physically as well as financially. But it was also a beautiful time in our lives. I’m a very determined person that’s a part of my personality. I’m naturally optimistic. Maybe you call it Friesian stubbornness but I’m also a real go-getter. My ability to imagine a beautiful result is a motivating factor. To make things beautiful just like antiquities. You can live like a noble man and experience that style, despite not having blue blood. That’s a wonderful and unique experience: even in the period where we had no electricity and were living of our garden. The culture was great. In the summer time we often ate with 12 people at one table, we had a lot of help. We read a lot and listened to classical music on our transistor radio. A gentleman is not dependent on money, it’s about a certain kind of style. Now I’ve earned a lot of money so I can do a lot. I have a beautiful vacation home near Monaco with a beautiful view of the ocean , a beautiful sailing boat which I often use. And I just bought an old Rolls Royce in the Netherlands. A very old one which I’m getting rebuilt in Scotland to a cabriolet. Lesson 2 A crisis asks for a creative solution I worked as a builder for six months and fixed up other houses which I sold on. A lot of my projects were done together with Peter, a dear friend from Averyon. With the money I made I worked on my own castle for six months. First I built the walls, then I went for a builders permit. It wasn’t till 1976 that I started with the actual building of the castle. Back then you were still allowed to make your own blueprints, so I drew the castle myself. During the drawing I played with blocks. That is the foundation for Kapla. This because I found out that blocks are too big to construct something, you needed planks. And later on I discovered you only needed one plank, in the size 1:3:15. That was the result of a very subtle brain game and possibly had something to do with my chess playing earlier on in life. If that’s really the case I can’t say for sure. But there are definitely similarities. Planks in a certain form, you’re creating, but you’re also thinking about what you are creating and the technical and mathematical possibilities which play a role. This is parallel to what you do in chess. My wife had started singing, she wanted to have a piano, but where we lived you couldn’t find a decent piano. This was when I went to England to buy second hand piano’s. I fixed them. Sometimes it was complete restoration, and peter-who is also a musician- tuned them. In that time house prizes were shrinking phenomenally, it was 1977 the house crisis. So I decided to start earning my keep with the restoration and sale of Piano’s. Halfway through the 80s the castle was ready and Peter and I organized a music festival. A great initiative which Peter continued in France. I’ve discovered, now that I’m sitting here like this, that some sort of crisis has always challenged me to do something new. A crisis asks for a positive and creative reaction. Because of the housing crisis I got into the piano business. But people buy one piano, they don’t keep buying them. So I started working on the building toys I had invented. I had two boxes of Kapla and I played with them myself. I thought: You have such a good idea, you have to do something with this, not knowing how much money this was going to cost, so much that in fact I had to later on sell my castle. Lesson 3 Show the different possibilities. “I made my first four hundred boxes of Kapla in 1987, in the piano work room in my castle. In my own innocence I thought that I would just go to the toy store and they would be so enthusiastic that they would immediately start to sell it. This was false. It did not work at all, the business wasn’t interested. I started giving demonstrations, in maybe 30 schools. Sometimes they bought one box, sometimes ten. But every school bought something. I played with children in the supermarket, on the beach. The effect was that people saw me and saw what you could do with Kapla. For a small loan which I had asked for, I had to follow a course with some older people who were now either broke or fired. They got paid a good amount of money to explain to people like me how you approach a business. I had to follow their classes. One of these men told me: ‘Mr van der Bruggen you are talking about a product and not marketing’. I got a little angry, even though I did not know that I spoke the truth in my anger. I told him: ‘The only thing you can tell me is what Bic did in 1946, Bic from the ballpoints. But in twenty years time people will say: ’Kapla did it like this’. This is in fact true at trade schools they now talk about the unorthodox method I used for Kapla. At a certain point in time through a friend, a parliaments member in Paris, I started giving demonstrations at the ministry of education. The city of Paris bought a thousand boxes. In the louvre in 1987 I got my first exposition of a little castle the result was that I was invited to the toy exchange to make a sculpture. I built a five meter high Eiffel tower in the entrance hall. Everybody thought I was starting to be a big firm, but I still hadn’t gotten anywhere. I had a stand of 6 square meters for which I didn’t actually have the money and the planks were handmade in my piano work place. After that I came on television, newspapers were writing about me and everybody wanted Kapla, but I couldn’t fulfill the amount of requests, because it was still only available in so few shops. Of course I was overly enthusiastic. I still remember that I was in a little piano bar in Bordeaux selling someone a box of Kapla. The man was super pleased with it. He said: “it’s fantastic what you are doing, tomorrow I’m conducting the seventh symphony by Mozart, will you come to hear it?”He was a swiss conducter. After the concert he took me to a restaurant and said :”Kapla is like the seventh by Bruckner”. He started to sing, and said: “Simple motive, but complicated consequences”. I loved to here this. Lesson 4 Being stubborn is not a guarantee for success. Success often leads to lack of cash. I didn’t have enough money to continue. Bankers gave me a small loan for the mortgage on my castle. But they didn’t want to add anything on. All of my attempts failed completely. It was only when I sold my castle and had a Kapla centre in Paris, that I was welcomed with open arms and that my business was seen as a triple A(company with maximum credit worth). The factory in Bordeaux came in the early 90s. The first factory in Tanger in 2003 and the second one this year. The turnover went from roughly 120.000 in the late 80s to 6,5 million in 2011. Our growth was in the middle of the crisis in 2010, fifty percent. In 2011 we went down a couple of percentages but now were growing again in comparison to 2010. It’s not true that if you are not successful in school you won’t be successful in life. Nor is being extremely stubborn and listening to nobody, like I do. In my case this path did deliver success. It’s all very personal. For example the people who work at Kapla all got there because I met them, and had a connection with them and they had a click with the planks. For the hiring of staff I have never used a bureau or advertisements. I undertake like an amateur, in the good sense. I do it because I enjoy it. My primary goal is not to make money. Lesson 5 Beauty is the engine of the economy “How people treat each other is the only thing that matters. Whether it’s between politicians and voters , the media, bosses and their staff. A good leader can offer something to people, he brings something instead of taking it. Whether I’m a leader like this is up to others. That the people from our business meet each other spontaneously on holidays, says something about our interactions. Something that also upsets me is the huge mistake that art is like a cookie with tea, something that’s not so important. Look at the education system: art and music are barely looked at. That idea did not exist in the renaissance. Music and art- if you didn’t die from hunger or cold, or you were sick- were hugely important. During the building of the replica of the 17^th century sail boat Batavia in the Netherlands: “Beauty is the engine of the economy”. I really appreciated this because it’s true. Tom van der Bruggen (Den Haag 1945) left the Maerlant Lyceum in The Hague without a diploma. At age twenty he was a antiquarian with his own shop in Leiden. At the end of the 80s when he was looking for investors for his ‘gnome planks’, no bank wanted to help him, even though there were buyers for his merchandise. Eventually Van der Bruggen had to sell his own castle. His company has now existed for 25 years and has an annual turnover of 6,5 million euro. The planks are made from French pinewood, originating from the environmentally friendly sustained forest in Les Landes, south of Bordeaux. The production process takes place in Tanger, Morocco. Bron Trouw © Annelies van der Woude −14/10/2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_unOFaUC2E