At this business, it’s all work and lots of play

For more than 50 years, Cardinal Industries has rented space for its showroom in New York City’s International Toy Center. Soon, the Fifth Avenue “Toy Building” will be converted into apartments. The toy and game companies that occupy the space will have to move elsewhere, yet Cardinal CEO Joel Berger is taking it all in stride. Adapting to changes in the marketplace is just part of a typical day’s work.

Berger’s father, Les, started the family business making mah-jongg sets and dominoes in the 1940s. Today, Cardinal Industries manufactures those games as well as chess, checkers and backgammon sets for all of the national retail chains, including WalMart, Kmart, Toys R Us and Target. They also create new games that cater to popular trends and favorite TV shows.

“My son came home from camp one day and said, ‘You’ve gotta make more poker.’ He had apparently spent most of his time at camp playing Texas Hold ’em,” Berger says. He adds that he’s glad he took his son’s advice. “The poker TV shows made it big. At its height in 2004, we were delivering 40 million poker chips per week. Today, we supply the majority of poker sets in North America.”

While traditional games are the company’s core business, it has branched out in recent years to develop trivia games for popular TV shows such as Friends, The Simpsons, Sex and the City, Sopranos, Desperate Housewives, OC, Lost and Family Guy. To decide which shows can be developed into successful games, Berger looks at those with the biggest ratings, high percentage of female fans and a “cult following.” Then, he hires the show’s writers to create the trivia questions for the game.

So far, Cardinal’s top-selling TV show game has been Friends, while poker was the biggest “one hit” success when it was first released. Dominoes is “consistently wonderful,” and Berger has no idea how long the Sudoku craze will last. “When Sudoku started to become popular, we had three weeks to make the game and ship it. Christmas was coming, and if you don’t get out there first, someone else will,” he says.

Berger is clearly invigorated by the excitement of developing new games in hopes that they’ll be the next big seller. “We’ve kissed numerous frogs,” he says. “But, it’s like baseball. You’re OK as long as your average is good.”

While many of their games now cater to the growing market among adults, Cardinal recently has developed new games for children. A set of Dora the Explorer games for Nickelodeon takes classics such as checkers and bingo and allows younger children to enjoy them by playing against Dora characters. Since Dora is Hispanic, they’ve made every game bilingual.

The company also is about to release an educational series of Leap Frog games, which offer a non-electronic alternative to the popular electronic learning toys. “We learned that parents want games that encourage social and family interaction. With electronics, kids are playing by themselves. A board game is something they can do together as a family,” Berger says.

Berger jokes that his own family “fought too much” when they tried having a weekly game night, but he anticipates the possibility of going into business with his daughter, Carly, when she graduates from UD as a fashion designer. “I don’t know if she’ll ever join the toy business, but she’s told me I have three more years to enjoy it because then I’m going to be her partner in the fashion accessory business,” he says. “She was always the most accessorized child. Even in kindergarten, her stick figures had matching bracelets, hair bands and rings. She has a good eye.”

—Sharon Huss Roat, AS ’87

Joel and Jody Berger live in Old Westbury, N.Y, with son Justin. Their daughter, Carly, is a sophomore fashion design major at UD.