Marx was the initial inductee in the Toy Industry Hall of Fame, and his plaque proclaimed him 'The Henry Ford of the toy industry.'Īn O Gauge Marx lithographed train set made in the late 1940s to early 1950sĪt its peak, Louis Marx and Company operated three manufacturing plants in the United States: Erie, Pennsylvania, Girard, Pennsylvania, and Glen Dale, West Virginia. Marx was the star article of the magazine with his picture displayed on the front cover. Fortune Magazine in January 1946 had declared him 'Toy King' suggesting at least $20 million in sales for 1941, but again in 1955, a Time Magazine article also proclaimed Louis Marx 'the Toy King,' and that year, the company had about $50 million in sales. Marx was the largest toy manufacturer in the world by the 1950s. By 1938, Marx employed 500 workers in the Dudley factory and 4000 in the American factories.

He was declared 'Toy King of the World' in October 1937 in a London newspaper. By 1937, the company had more than $3.2 million in assets ($42.6 million in 2005 dollars), with debt of just over $500,000. Unlike most companies, Marx's revenues grew during the Great Depression, with the establishment of production facilities in economically hard-hit industrial areas of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and England. During the 1920s, about 100 million Marx yo-yos were sold. The yo-yo is an example: although Marx is sometimes wrongly credited with inventing the toy, the company was quick to market its own version. Initially, Marx reevaluated and produced a few original toys by predicting the hits and manufacturing them less expensively than the competition. By 1922, both Louis and David Marx were millionaires. Marx listed six qualities he believed were needed for a successful toy: familiarity, surprise, skill, play value, comprehensibility and sturdiness. Another success was the 'Mouse Orchestra' with tinplate mice on piano, fiddle, snare, and one conducting. With subtle changes, Marx was able to turn these toys into hits, selling more than eight million of each within two years.

Enough funding was raised to purchase tooling from previous employer Strauss for two obsolete tin toys – the Alabama Coon Jigger and Zippo the Climbing Monkey. Marx raised money as a middleman, studying available products, finding ways to make them cheaper, and then closing sales. All product production would have to be contracted out for the first few years. Initially, after working for Ferdinand Strauss, Marx, born in 1894, was a distributor with no manufacturing capacity. 100 Doughboy Tankįounded in August 1919 in New York City by Louis Marx and his brother David, the company's basic aim was to 'give the customer more toy for less money,' and stressed that 'quality is not negotiable' – two values that made the company highly successful. In pre-WWII America, it was common for Kresge's and Woolworth's to place yearly orders with Marx for at least $1 million each. Penney and Spiegel especially around Christmas. Marx's less expensive toys were extremely common in dime stores, and its larger, costlier toys were staples for catalog and department store retailers such as Eaton's, Gamages, Sears, W.T. Marx also made several models of typewriters for children. Marx's toys included tinplate buildings, tin toys, toy soldiers, playsets, toy dinosaurs, mechanical toys, toy guns, action figures, dolls, dollhouses, toy cars and trucks, and HO scale and O scale trains. In fact, the Big Wheel, which was introduced in 1969, is enshrined in the National Toy Hall of Fame.

Although the Marx name is now largely forgotten except by toy collectors, several of the products that the company developed remain strong icons in popular culture, including Rock'em Sock'em Robots, introduced in 1964, and its best-selling sporty Big Wheel tricycle, one of the most popular toys of the 1970s. Reputedly, because of this name confusion, the Italian diecast toy company Martoys, after two years of production, changed its name to Bburago in 1976. As the X sometimes goes unseen, Marx toys were, and are still today, often misidentified as 'Mar' toys.

The Marx logo was the letters 'MAR' in a circle with a large X through it, resembling a railroad crossing sign. A child on a Big Wheel in 1973 ( Rogers Park, Chicago)

1963 jaguar markx