Ultimate Guard’s Licensing Manager, Alexander Thieme, on thinking out of the box with Squaroes

Great to see you, Alexander. We learned about your thoughts on Catan when Billy spoke to you during your time at Asmodee… People can read that here. Where are you now, though? And what’s your role?
Thanks Deej. I’m the Licensing Manager for Ultimate Guard, which is a part of Heo Distribution. Ultimate Guard itself is a brand of high-quality protective gear for collectible card games.

Thank you! And can you give us a sense of the kind of product you do?
Ultimate Guard offers everything a player needs to protect their cards and organise their set up for trading card games. We have playmats, for example; we have sleeves, dividers, binders and deck boxes. In fact, we have a very intricate system of premium quality modular boxes for which we’re well known. With those, every component works together, and you can mix and match many of them…

What we pride ourselves on is our extremely high quality. Our products are very sturdy, look incredible – and the touch and feel reflect that same level of care. In terms of design, it’s deep cut: it really speaks to the fans. Last but not least, we’re very proud to help lead the the way in sustainability in this product category. Our Return to Earth deck boxes – or Boulders, as we call them – are made with 97% renewable materials. Our Squaroes are made with 78% renewable material which gives customers a responsible choice without sacrificing looks or functionality.

Excellent. And you mentioned Squaroes, which have really caught my eye… They’re funny and cute; I think they’re great design. They’re punningly styled as “the edgy side of pop culture”. For the uninitiated, what are they?
Squaroes are your childhood heroes in square form… That’s where the name comes from: square heroes. Basically, they’re a type of decorative, collectable box that have a really practical aspect. They’re a protective product to put your cards, dice, tokens or whatever you like in. My partner stores jewellery in those boxes at home as they’re so adorable! They’re also designed so that you can exchange their tops and bottoms…

Oh, is that right? So you can mix and match tops and bottoms as faces and bodies?
Exactly. And some of those combinations can be really funny. At the Las Vegas Fair, for example, I put a SpongeBob SquarePants head on a Star Trek uniform from our Lower Decks series. It was a rather funny crossover I wanted to see!

It’s the mash up of dreams! And which licenses are in the range?
Oh, there are so many! We have a whole range of IPs. We’re working with some big studios, for example: Paramount and Warner Bros. We also work with licensors like Hasbro. So off the top of my head, among others, we have Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, South Park, SpongeBob, Batman, Magic: The Gathering and My Little Pony. There are some anime products already in preparation too.

Terrific! So what is it you look for in an IP for Squaroes?
When we look for new IP and partners, it’s all about those iconic figures. There need to be strong characters that evoke an emotional connection and reaction in people: deep fondness or excitement. That’s what differentiates Squaroes from our usual product portfolio. They’re all high-quality and our range is great, but Squaroes have an extra pull… They’re collectibles in themselves.

I’m going to put a few pictures in here, Alexander, to help show how some characters translate into a box shape because it might be hard to imagine… Dare I say that?
Oh, absolutely! This is why I find Squaroes rather fascinating! If I were just to describe the concept to you, you might lift an eyebrow… I mean, iconic characters as square boxes? Really? You might have difficulty envisaging how that would look good because of space constraints and how you need to stretch the shapes and so on. But then you see them, or take them in your hand, there’s a moment of “How have they done that?!”

Exactly my words!
In fact, when I first joined the Ultimate Guard Team, I made a conscious decision not to over research what they were doing with Squaroes. I knew roughly what I’d be working on, what my tasks would be, but I wanted a fresh impression – straight from the horse’s mouth. Then, on my very first day, I was absolutely flabbergasted! First, by this massive building… Everything is super modern there and made in glass; there were robots moving around – it’s brilliant. Then, by the sample room!

This is as part of your induction?
Exactly. When I walk into the sample room, I see the first series of Squaroes… I see the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle series, I see the first SpongeBob and a couple of the South Park ones… I saw them and thought they were so bloody cool! Every design the team does is researched so thoroughly and with a lot of care and passion. They really explore what makes a character work… That’s important, because they need to work out what makes an iconic facial expression, for example, or which characteristics we need to show in an expression.

This matters because players connect with those details: the facial expression, the personality traits captured in it, and that connection, then shows up at the table. And some Magic players create decks around a particular place style – maybe a deck designed to frustrate opponents, or one that’s bold and aggressive! Fans often match those decks with a Squaroes character that fits the mood, like a Cartman Squareo. Meanwhile, if you have a gung-ho deck, then bish, bash, bosh: you keep it in a Squareo with those traits. For instance, I have my Captain Kirk Squareo for that!

Boldly going! How does the process start, Alexander? How do you work out which IP is going to work?
It starts with picking the right licenses; identifying which characters might work. Our Head of Creative is almost the first person I speak to… Can they see it working? Are there enough characters? Then we speak to the CEO and sales managers. Is this going to resonate with the market? Are there enough fans? Do you recognise someone you love from your childhood? Then, as far as the licence allows, we try to keep the original styles on the product. We might want our Batman to look like the Batman from the comics, for example, rather than the very first TV series.

Yes, there’d be some question about which Batman… Original TV series, early Detective Comics, Adam West TV series, Michael Keaton…
So right! If you look at Batman in the 50’s and 60’s comics, there are colour tones that are so distinct, just as the Batman from the DC Justice League looks distinct. They’re both Batman, but they’re for different generations. Of course, as a fan you might have them both next to each other! They’re both valid in their design language which fits in with the edgy side of pop culture.

And I’m assuming that there are some Squaroes for which no original assets are available? You have to start from scratch?
Yes. As it happens, the Star Trek collection is a great example of that. I’m a Trekkie myself so I know how hard we had to work there… We had to create our own art because there were no assets we could use straight from Paramount. So when we came to do Captain Kirk, the designer was really trying to focus on what makes Kirk pop. What’s his essence? And that’s tricky! But as soon as I saw the digital design, I knew they’d got it… It immediately evoked a feeling of boldness, of gung-ho confidence.

So that’s what the team does with all those characters; there’s a lot of care and research there. For example, as well as the characters, we also have themed collector cases meant to store eight Squaroes. These cases are always a creative challenge because you have a very boxy format with specific dimensions. We need to find something that accommodates whole collections… For the Lord of the Rings Squaroes, it was Bilbo Baggins’s home in the Shire. Staying with the Star Trek theme, it was a shuffle craft of the USS Cerritos on our Star Trek: Lower Decks series.

Makes sense! For the uninitiated, Star Trek: Lower Decks is a somewhat recent animated series that brings a tongue-in-cheek spin to the Trek universe…
Right! So as with all of those collector cases, the team scours the asset library looking for inspiration… Looking for places or objects that would make a good place to hold the characters. Once there is a good candidate, the guys create a rough mock up as a 3-D render to see if it works visually. Then comes to detailing! In one case, we had a two-week back-and-forth with Paramount about a very specific detail.

On the shuttle?
Yes. I think we were trying to ascertain whether there was a particular type of grill at the back of the shuffle craft or not! We were trying to determine what its function was, and whether we needed To see a glow emanating from it.

The team went deep into the archives and exchanged thoughts with Paramount, but the material available was kind of confusing: it wasn’t straightforward. They went so deep into it, they were watching key seems frame by frame to make sure we got it right

Wow! Just to get that one detail right?
Yes! And that shows you a bit of the team’s dedication. But it needs to be right because the products are for fans and there are always fans that know more about the IP than you. If you do products for fans that have so much heart and dedication, then it needs to be right for them because it takes the joy from the product if something isn’t quite right.

Fascinating. Well, like you, I appreciate the amount of thought that goes into the designs. To round things up, is there anything I could’ve asked you about Squaroes today that I didn’t?
Hmmm. I guess you could’ve asked how Squaroes came about! That’s quite an interesting story because they came about almost as a happy accident.

Is that right? Then by all means…
It started in the early days of the Ultimate Guard team looking at what could be done with different licences. We already had a product called Boulders. These are very sturdy, reliable boxes; some with designs on. The team wondered if it could put character faces on these Boulders from a particular IP… So they did, realised the potential of the concept – and that idea eventually became the Squaroes we know today

And I understand that the IP that inspired it all still on its way?!
Hopefully! But yes, the very first one is still not there yet. We’re slowly working on it… There’s a lot of passion behind that. When it comes out, you’ll see. But at the time of the first experiment, the creative team put these faces on boxes… Well, I’ve seen the old samples! If you compare them to the final product that was finally released as Squaroes, you might laugh! But as with all prototypes, you can clearly see the ancestry.

The idea’s there? But the execution is too raw?
Yes, it’s an evolutionary step behind where Squaroes ended up. Nevertheless, those sample designs started the gears moving and made everyone think we really could do something here. We realised we needed to put the work into it… And this is how Squaroes happened!

Great story! Thanks so much for doing such a deep dive into it, Alexander. I love the product and really respect the design.