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Happy Kids Productions is hoping a more targeted mailing schedule and partnerships with well-known brands will help it increase revenue by 10% to 15% this year.

The Mount Kisco, NY-based marketer of calendars, books, music and personalized songs for small children participates in cooperative mailings and package insert programs and places freestanding inserts in newspapers, distributing some 15 million inserts a year combined. Its inserts also are sent along with Children's Book-of-the-Month Club continuity mailings and Artistic Greetings fulfillment packages — programs that appeal to mothers, says CEO Michael Rosenbaum.

To refine its insert placements, Happy Kids plans to pull out of at least one widely targeted co-op coupon program. It's also moving away from FSIs because they have too broad a reach and are too expensive, Rosenbaum says. “Last year we did maybe 5 million [FSIs], but in the early '90s, we did 30 or 40 million.”

Nevertheless, Happy Kids is sticking with more precisely targeted co-op mail programs, such as those offered by Madison Direct Marketing, Stamford, CT.

Happy Kids, which has been in business since 1989, has a customer base of about 80,000 that receives an annual 16-page catalog and monthly notices of special deals. Happy Kids doesn't send prospect catalogs or even solo mailings for budgetary reasons. According to Rosenbaum, “Solo mail would cost 10 times as much as inserts.”

The firm is assisted in its insert marketing efforts by ARA Media Solutions, New York.

Rosenbaum is a former art director at Ogilvy & Mather Direct. He started Happy Kids with his wife Cindy, offering to compose and sing songs for little children.

“For the first four or five years we were in business, personalized cassettes were our top seller,” says Rosenbaum. “Since then, it's leveled off and calendars have become our top seller.”

This year, he says, Happy Kids — which already has made partnership deals with such entities as entertainment company Nickelodeon — will continue searching for licensed characters to sing the personalized songs, which are issued on compact disc.

These days Rosenbaum sings the songs. “In the beginning I hired professional singers. But as I grew more confident, I decided to take over the singing.”

Happy Kids also markets through Web site Happykidspersonalized.com, but the overwhelming majority of its business comes from inserts.

“I'm still trying to find a way to make the Web work for me,” says Rosenbaum.