Hispanic Enterprise - December 2007/January 2008 - (Page 14) BRIEF- TRENDSETTER By Conrad Dahlson FUNNY BUSINESS Childhood imaginary friends and a passion for drawing spurred former chemist and biologist Martha Montoya into the cartoon industry. s a child, Martha Montoya spent a lot of time in hospitals battling kidney problems, so she created imaginary friends to help her cope. “We all have them [as children], but mine stayed with me,” Montoya says. Although she studied chemistry and biology and eventually became a teacher in her native Colombia, her little friends never left her. “I created characters—200 of them— from the periodic table, so I could use them to combine formulas for the kids to understand chemistry.” By 1986, she had given up teaching and had arrived in the U.S., settling in Orange County, California. She worked a series of jobs—from cleaning a house for three months, to working as a librarian—before becoming an executive in international agricultural development firm. In her spare time, Montoya read about the cartoon industry and cartoonists. While overseeing a $25 million mango program in South America, travel between Peru and Ecuador became problematic due to fighting between the two countries. She was pregnant with her first child and thought, “I’m going to have a family; this is not going to work. It was time to let it go.” She did, but it took her a couple of years to break into the cartoon business. In the early 1990s, Montoya met Charles Schulz, the creator of Charlie Brown and Snoopy. “He told me: ‘If you have too many characters, your creativity goes all over the 14 A place,’ ” she says. He advised her to focus on only a few characters, so she settled on five: Picarito, Pikito, Mima, Kolito and Pigoleto. They became Los Kitos, a derivation of the words los muñequitos, or little dolls. Her first break came when La Opinión agreed to publish her, but with her business background, she soon she realized she wanted for more. “International business is very addictive,” she explains. “Things happen fast; it’s empowering.” In 1997, Montoya launched Los Kitos Entertainment, LLC. Los Kitos quickly evolved— first into comic books for corporations, then a radio show and finally licensing agreements, DOSSIER Name: Martha Montoya Position: President Company: Los Kitos Entertainment, LLC Location: Santa Ana, California Sector: Cartoon Industry Employees: 8 Years in business: 10 Hometown: Bogota and Medellin, Colombia Education: Chemistry/Biology Tip: “Read a lot of biographies and books. Share knowledge, and it comes back.” giving corporations the rights to use her characters to promote products and services. Animation followed. Success didn’t come easy. When she first started, licensing for Hispanics was virtually unheard of, she recalls. Her first client was the United States Postal Service, which she called directly with a “diversity for small business pitch” to encourage Latinos to embrace the mail system. “I told them, ‘I have this cartoon’ and they replied, ‘Put a one-pager together and show us what you can do.’ ” She landed the account with a bilingual poster. “That became my anchor.” Other projects followed for major corporations—State Farm, IBM, NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods and most recently Wal-Mart. Montoya now lives in Santa Ana, California with her family, which includes two children. She’s now pushing another idea: flexible work environments. “I’m a believer of home business; my entire team works from home.” As a result, she says, her employees—eight in total including her—are very productive. They meet once a week at a company office. Today, there are major trade shows promoting cartoons, which according to Montoya is a $60 billion industry. She recalls attending one of the very first licensing shows. For her, it all began with a big imagination. “I have no [formal] art training; that’s why my characters are so simple,” she says. “I’m 100 percent self-taught.” December/January 2008 HISPANIC ENTERPRISE
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