The World May be Ready to Wumbler

The world may be ready to Wumble
Tenafly mom's cartoon on rise
By JOAN VERDON, STAFF WRITER, North Jersey Media Group
The Record (Bergen County, NJ) June 30, 2004 Wednesday All Editions

Laura Wellington is comfortable in both the world of high finance and the world of Wumblers.

Wumblers are cartoon characters Wellington invented when she was a teenager growing up in West Milford. She set them aside while she and her husband, Dean, were building a financial services and computer software company based in Fort Lee.

But Wellington's spare-time investment in her Wumblers is finally starting to pay dividends as well. Peak Entertainment Holdings Inc., a British multimedia company that develops television properties, has signed a deal to develop an animated TV show for preschoolers based on the bulbous-nosed creatures. A British animation company is producing 52 episodes, and the show is expected to begin airing in England next spring.

A Peak executive said his company is betting that the Wumblers will be a hit with children around the world.

"The whole board of directors at Peak was taken by the property, and by the way it was totally fresh," said Phil Ogden, managing director of Peak.

"Most of the preschool properties that are being pitched around the globe at the moment very much smack of a group of television network executives sitting around a board room table trying to come up with the next fabricated Teletubbies. And the Wumblers, because it was born in a young girl's imagination, hadn't really been tainted by any TV executives."

The tale of how the Wumblers went from Wellington's imagination to a television deal is "a nice little story, quite bizarre, really," Ogden said. "It came to us totally out of left field."

Wellington, 37, of Tenafly, returned to the characters a few years ago as her husband was fighting cancer.

"When Dean got sick, I started writing the stories again. It was one of those times in life when, as busy as you are, there are certain things that help you escape," said Wellington, the mother of four children, 5 to 11.

Her husband died two years ago after a three-year battle with cancer, leaving her to run Wellington Financial Services, which provides and manages the Unitrex computer trading system for Unit Investment Trusts, an investment vehicle. The company generates $3 million in annual billings, she said.

For relaxation, she began expanding stories about the Wumblers, giving them names, personalities, and an unusual birth experience. Wumblers "hatch" from watermelons, a story idea that was inspired by Wellington's own motherhood experiences. "My son was 9 pounds, 6 ounces when he was born, and I always said having children felt like you're pushing out a watermelon," she said.

Friends told her she should "do something" with her charming characters and stories, and introduced her to mutual friends with backgrounds in television production who helped her develop the concept.

She formed a company called The Silly Goose Company LLC to represent the Wumblers.

A coincidence then connected her with Peak Entertainment. Peak was seeking financing for a business deal it was involved in, and someone helping to arrange financing introduced Wellington to Peak, Ogden said.

Ogden pointed out that the Wumblers are multicultural characters, and not associated with any particular country. The story lines can be translated into many languages, and the central theme of the plot lines is "differences don't have to divide; they can unite," as Wellington puts it. Wumblers come in all colors, even pink, purple, and orange, and one of the lead characters speaks Spanish.

"It has all the elements production companies are looking for in an international property," Ogden said. "But this wasn't built into it from a marketing perspective; it was built into it because that's the way she envisioned it. She's either a genius or she's put something together that most of the big companies aren't able to achieve."

Wellington, who worked as a preschool teacher before joining her husband in financial services, said her main motivation for writing the Wumblers is a desire to "give children the tools to make this world a better place."

The messages in the show are designed, she said, to teach children "to make good decisions, and to be creative in their problem solving."

Thus far, Wellington said, she has invested about $1 million in the Wumblers, attending trade shows, making sample tapes, and creating a "buy book'' to show prospective partners.

If the show takes off, it could generate millions in licensing and syndication fees, but that's still in the future.

Ogden said a pilot episode of the show was well received at a children's television conference in Cannes, France, and at the international licensing show in New York this month. He said it will take a while before the world hears of Wumblers - "after all, it took five years for the Teletubbies to establish themselves in the United States."