Pace to sell $20 million worth of merchandise this year
The company is on pace to sell $20 million worth of merchandise this year, more than double what they sold in 2010.
“I’ve always loved toys,” said Brian Mariotti, the company’s president. “To be in this business you have to have a passion for collecting. Your enthusiasm will come through and you can usually achieve some pretty great things if you’re passionate about what you’re doing.”
The company has grown from a staff of three to 29 employees. Three weeks ago it moved from a 17,000-square-foot office on 196th Street to a nearly 62,000-square-foot leased location at 6306 202nd St. SW. The new space includes a warehouse, a private showroom, a sales department and an art department.
“Our old space was nice but we’ve grown fast in the last year or two,” Wilkinson said. “We just need room for it all and room to expand because we’re just adding more and more lines and different toys.”
The company was founded in 1998 in the Snohomish home of Mike Becker. The early product lines included bobbleheads and coin banks based on cereal advertising characters and other retro figures like Popeye and Evel Knievel. The company moved into a small office in Everett in 2000, Wilkinson remembers. Funko was in a Snohomish office in 2005 when Becker sold the business to a friend.