![]() 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. ![]() Logo and offerings A child on a Big Wheel in 1973 ( Rogers Park, Chicago) Its products were often imprinted with the slogan "One of the many Marx toys, have you all of them?" Some of their notable toys are Rock'em Sock'em Robots, Big Wheel tricycles, Disney branded dollhouses and playsets based on TV shows like Gunsmoke. ![]() They made many types of toys including tin toys, toy soldiers, toy guns, action figures, dolls, toy cars and model trains. Louis Marx and Company was an American toy manufacturer in business from 1919 to 1980. Lithographed tinplate, plastics, wood products ![]()
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