What We Do
For product, design, and marketing leaders at toy and consumer brands.
Innovation Sprints
What will make your next product line stand out? We uncover overlooked market opportunities and turn them into fresh product ideas, compelling concepts, and collection directions. Find what's next for your product line. Whether you're refreshing an established product line, expanding a brand, or exploring a new category, finding something genuinely new isn't easy. Made Concepts combines market intelligence, consumer insights, and creative product thinking to uncover opportunities others may be overlooking—and explore what those opportunities could become. What We Help You Do Find the whitespace. Explore the competitive landscape, emerging trends, consumer behaviors, and gaps in the market to identify where new opportunities exist. Create fresh product directions. Turn promising insights into compelling product ideas, play patterns, formats, and collection concepts that stand out. Shape the next product line. Explore how the strongest ideas could translate into products, collections, and assortments with real commercial potential. What You Walk Away With Depending on the project scope, you'll have market and consumer insights, identified whitespace opportunities, and tangible product or collection directions your team can see, evaluate, and take forward. Not just research or recommendations. Fresh thinking made visible.
AI Enablement
AI is everywhere. Is it actually making your team's work easier? We build practical AI solutions that help creative and marketing teams improve how they work. Make AI part of how your team works. We help creative and marketing teams identify high-value AI opportunities, improve existing workflows, and build practical AI solutions they can actually use. Combining business experience, process expertise, and hands-on AI capabilities, we help teams move beyond experimentation and put AI to work. Start with one meaningful workflow. Prove the value. Build on what works. Optional starting point 01 — AI Opportunity Workshop Find the right place to start. Identify where AI can make the biggest difference. We'll examine existing workflows, uncover bottlenecks, and prioritize opportunities worth pursuing. What you get: A prioritized opportunity map and clear plan for moving forward. Primary service 02 — AI Workflow Implementation Build AI solutions your team can actually use. Move beyond AI experiments. We'll redesign a high-value workflow, build and test a practical AI-enabled solution, and help your team put it to work. What you get: A working AI-enabled workflow, documented processes, hands-on training, and clear measures of success. Follow-on engagement 03 — AI Adoption & Optimization Support Help your team build on what works. Keep improving after implementation. We provide ongoing guidance, additional training, feedback-driven refinements, and support to help your team confidently use its new workflows. What you get: Practical support for continued use, improvement, and expansion.
The MADE Method connects market insight, product innovation, and practical execution through four stages.
Map the Landscape
Explore the category, consumer, retailer, brand, and competitive landscape.
Analyze the Opportunity
Identify whitespace, unmet needs, emerging signals, and promising opportunities.
Design the Concept
Turn the strongest opportunities into product and brand concepts that stand out.
Execute the Roadmap
Define the priorities, decisions, and roadmap needed to move the strongest ideas forward.
The MADE Method™
Let's Talk About What's Next
Whether it's finding your next product opportunity or getting AI working inside your team, start with a conversation.
Why Brands Work With Made Concepts
Industry Experience
Deep experience across toys, games, entertainment, licensing, and consumer products.
Connected Thinking
Market insight, product strategy, design, development, and commercialization in one process.
Senior-Led Collaboration
Direct involvement from experienced leadership throughout the work.
Meet the Founder
Frank Kautzman
Founder, Made Concepts
Frank Kautzman works at the intersection of product development, innovation strategy, and business operations, helping toy and consumer product brands find their next opportunity and build the product lines that capture it.
Today that means building AI into how companies develop products, and into the marketing, supply chain, and operations workflows around them. Not AI as an experiment. AI as infrastructure.
That focus is built on 3,000+ products developed and $3B+ in sales across toys, CPG, and consumer electronics, for properties including Pokémon, Star Wars, Play-Doh, and Spider-Man, with organizations from startups to Hasbro, Spin Master, NBCUniversal, and Burger King.
He knows where product development breaks down: schedules slip, costs creep, samples take three rounds instead of one, and teams spend more time chasing the work than doing it. He spent years running the teams that lived those problems. Now he fixes them.