Why billionaire Manny Stul refuses to sell Moose Toys, despite $1.3bn revenue
From a background as a Polish immigrant to owning a $1.3bn toy empire, Manny Stul and stepson Paul Solomon say they have bigger plans on the horizon as they knock back offers to sell.
Manny Stul is talking about fart guns, Bluey and MrBeast.
The billionaire is laughing and gently poking fun at stepson Paul Solomon, while discussing the intricacies of the fart gun they made for the global Despicable Me film franchise, in their office in suburban Melbourne.
Yet behind the laughter and jokes is a team that has built a stunningly successful business from one Stul quietly acquired 25 years ago when it had just eight employees.
Stul and Solomon, chairman and chief executive of Moose Toys respectively, oversee a company that will have revenue of more than $1.3bn this year, has 750 staff around the world – including 200 at its Melbourne headquarters – and is responsible for some of the best-selling and most creative toys sold globally.
Including that fart gun, as Solomon attempts to explain at least semi-seriously while Stul chuckles in the background.
“With the Despicable Me 4 movie last year, they granted us the [licensing] rights. Why? Because of our innovation. Of course, we have global reach and we execute well. But what sets us apart is our innovation,” he says.
“So we went and created the Despicable Me fart gun. It’s the first [toy] fart gun that blows a smoke-filled fart. It’s scented! So you can imagine the appeal to our audience.”
Much laughter ensues.
That audience is, of course, children, who have bought one million of those fart guns in the past year. Or the young at heart like Stul, 75, who is still having a great time at the helm of what is likely the most fun company on The List: Richest 250 to own. “Having fun at work is very important,” Stul declares.
Solomon, 49, adds: “We’re outrageously playful.”
Also outrageously successful. Moose has had a string of its own hits in the past two decades, creating their own intellectual property with products including the Shopkins collectible plastic figures that have been hugely popular with girls aged four to 11.
Credit for the Shopkins success goes to Jacqui Tobias, Moose’s director of girls products and also Stul’s wife and Solomon’s mother, who came up with the concept of making a girls’ collectable toy.
There has also been the award-winning Magic Mixies Magic Cauldron interactive toy that comes with a cauldron, spell book and wand, and plenty of others such as the interactive Little Live Pets range.
In more recent years, Moose has also successfully licensed toys for existing brands such as the ABC hit children’s series Bluey, including figurines and toy sets, plus American YouTube personality MrBeast, with the MrBeast Lab collection of action figures selling in huge numbers in the US and the UK.
Ten years ago, Moose was a $100m business. Five years ago, turnover was about $700m. Sales have just about doubled since. All from a base in an industrial section of Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs.
In a rare interview, Stul and Solomon are reflecting on the growth of the business since Stul purchased it in 2000, and what they are planning next.
It’s now corporate folklore that Stul’s original deal took more than a bit of convincing from Tobias – then working at Moose, which mostly sold games and imported novelty toys like hula hoops – while he was pondering what to do next after selling his ASX-listed gift business, Skansen.
Moose toys nearly goes under
Stul arrived in Australia in 1950 with his Polish parents as World War II refugees. They were bound for Melbourne, but their ship stopped in Perth so occupants could be counted in the national census.
Stul’s family ended up in wheat-belt country about 100km north of Perth, later moving back to the state capital where Stul left school at 15.
After several jobs, including working in construction and as a bank teller, he started Skansen after coming across a Scandinavian cutlery set and then importing them, later selling calendars, cards and other giftware. It floated in 1993 with $20m annual revenue, before Stul sold out a few years later.
The 2025 edition of The List – Australia’s Richest 250 is published on Friday in The Australian and online at www.richest250.com.au
By 1999, he was in Israel looking at business opportunities when his wife suggested he take a closer look at Moose. About 400 pages of information was faxed to his hotel, but the print was small, so his accountant brother-in-law did the due diligence.
Moose was turning over $4m, but Stul bought it thinking he would be a hands-off chairman. He quickly realised it needed turning around, and convinced his then twentysomething stepson Solomon to leave a job at then fast-growing skate and streetwear company Globe International.
The company survived almost going under in 2007 when it had to recall 40 million Bindeez kits (also known as Aqua Dots) worldwide after children became ill from swallowing the beads due to the wrong chemical being used in its Chinese factory.
Voluntary administration was recommended, but Stul struck 34 separate deals with creditors and the company slowly clawed its way back to respectability. In 2016, he became the first Australian to win the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur Of The Year award.
“It’s just been an extraordinary experience,” Stul says. “And the good thing is, you learn so much along the way. Life would be very boring if you just kept doing the same thing over and over.
“If you’d asked me [in 2000] would I ever get back into business, the answer would have been a very firm no. So that’s a good lesson. Never say never.”
Today, Moose Toys is run from a colourful warehouse office just across from a Discount Factory Outlet (DFO) complex and a bicycle parts warehouse.
There are statues out the front featuring the company’s logo, a moose head. A colour scheme throughout the building interior is heavy on pink, green and purple, while a man-made treehouse grows from the ground level to the top. The shell of an old plane has been repurposed as a meeting room.
When The List visits, a noisy school-holiday program is being hosted in a playroom for children of the staff. Otherwise, there’s ongoing childcare for employees, a herb garden, gym and pickleball court and plenty of other onsite perks.
Innovate or die
Stul believes companies or leaders can get caught out by overcomplicating cultural aspects of a business, or forgetting its basic goals or values.
In Moose’s case, innovation and creativity must be at the heart of everything the business does. “As long as it comes from the top, everyone understands clearly what’s required,” Stul says.
“One of the requirements here is innovation. It is not even open for debate. Innovation, getting on well with everyone around you, treating people with respect. All that basic cultural stuff.
It’s just like a relationship, something you work on, and you have to keep working on it. But I don’t think it’s that difficult.”
Stul admits “the numbers have to stack up” for whatever strategy Moose pursues. “Obviously the money is great. But people should not just be driven by money, I think. It is a poor way to live.”
He says he wants his company’s culture to always “not be too precious, not too hierarchical”.
“It’s family, basically,” he says, adding this is a central reason why Moose has remained privately owned.
Solomon picks up on the theme. “Find something you enjoy. It’s about being playful, being fun. Thinking differently, inspiring creativity. These are our values. They are the ‘wow’. We are family, we’re outrageously playful, we’ve got wild imaginations.
“They’re the three things that form part of the ‘wow’ that we think we have.”
Stul adds: “If you ask me how we’ve been able to maintain this thing over 25 years, it’s because we’ve held very strongly to our core values. We are making money from children. So our focus is on children when it comes to charities, for example. We have to do that.”
Mixing family and business
That doesn’t mean Stul and his family aren’t pursuing commercial outcomes. He wanted Moose to think outside of Australia from day one, otherwise it was not a company worthy of his time.
“We were ambitious. I mean, I had a gift company based in Perth that was focused on Sydney and Melbourne. You had to do something different. The ambition [with Moose] was Australia and then global.”
Solomon joined the business in 2001, after working in what he describes as a dream job at Globe. Stul had interviewed other candidates for leadership positions at Moose, but couldn’t find anyone suitable. Solomon was initially reluctant to move from what he thought was a cool company to work for, to the family firm with eight employees in a small office beset with rising damp.
“[Manny’s] exact words were, ‘You should be paying me for what you’ll learn and the experience you’ll get,’” Solomon says with a laugh. Stul told Solomon he just had to give it two years – “I came up with an arbitrary number,” Stul says – and somehow Solomon was convinced.
“If he didn’t have the goods, he would not have stayed,” Stul recalls. “The very simple reason is, if you’re running a business, you do what’s objectively right for the business. It has got nothing to do with family. It’s the right people in the right seats, taking care of stuff.
“He [Paul] had the goods. It’s a bit like a little computer. You start programming it and suddenly the computer is taking care of everything. Paul is a force of nature and I think he is an extraordinary talent.”
It helps that the pair have generally maintained good terms. Stul says any disagreements don’t turn into full-scale arguments. Their offices are next to each other, but there’s a wall between them if they need space.
They have travelled regularly to toy fairs and trade shows over the years, and Solomon also had a stint living in the US.
More recently, he has done more of the travelling to clinch important deals, while Stul has gradually stepped back from the day-to-day running.
Big deals with MrBeast
Two years ago, Moose turned its focus to clinching a licensing deal with Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, who is the world’s most popular YouTube personality with more than 350 million subscribers. As did every toy business on the planet.
But Solomon persisted, and after the team in Melbourne spent “a lot of time” on mock-ups, models and prototypes of MrBeast toys, he managed to get some concepts in front of MrBeast’s manager.
Solomon then decided on a more direct approach, flying to Donaldson’s home town of Greenville, North Carolina without an appointment booked.
“I said to his manager, ‘I’m willing to take that risk,’ so I got on a plane, arrived in Greenville and managed to meet [Donaldson] the next day. I think we were meant to have five minutes, and it probably ended up being two to three hours. And by the end of it, he walked away saying, ‘I like you guys, and like what you’re doing, and I’m keen to pursue this further.’”
Stul describes the toys that Moose itself has created with its own intellectual property as its “secret sauce”, but notes merchandising deals including MrBeast and Bluey have helped diversify its revenue and broadened the company’s appeal to more customers. But he stresses that still means creating innovative toys, not just “label slapping” on other brands’ products.
Board games are the company’s next growth target, a strategy which could include bolt-on acquisitions, as is selling directly into more foreign markets rather than through third-party distributors. Stul and Solomon are also keen on products in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) sector of the toy market. Online sales account for between 20 to 30 per cent of revenue, and that could also grow.
Mostly though, Stul is keen to keep Moose in family hands, and says he has rejected numerous offers from private equity firms and rival toy companies over the years.
“Fortunately, Paul and I have gotten on like a house on fire. We’ve travelled the world together, side by side. It’s been a lot of fun,” he says.
“We’re having too much fun to sell.”
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