Q: What's black and white and red all over? A: A hot line of toys - Susan M. Vincent's TOT Inc. toy business

Nation's Business, Sept, 1990 by Bradford A. McKee

Q: What's Black And White And Red All Over? A: A Hot Line Of Toys

In three years, Susan M. Vincent has used an obscure bit of knowledge about child development to build an enterprise with sales nearing $1 million a year - even while working full time as a registered nurse.

Vincent has been observing children during her 13 years of working with newborns at Georgetown University Hospital, in Washington, D.C. "Babies do not see pastel colors, like pink and blue, until they're nearly a year old," she says. An infant's retinal rods and cones, she explains, haven't developed enough to distinguish anything but positive and negative images - black and white - until the child is several weeks old. Then the infant sees its first primary color, red.

Even so, our culture dictates that infant's rubber duckies and plush bears come in colors like lime green and lemon yellow - colors that babies can't appreciate, Vincent says, until they're already old enough to know Mickey Mouse's name.

When showing off a new baby's faculties to its parents, Vincent would draw a black-and-white face on an index card to demonstrate how an infant responds to a stimulating image. Several years ago, a father came to Georgetown Hospital for the birth of his second child and pulled out a faded drawing Vincent had made for his first baby two years earlier. Vincent recalls: "I said, `My goodness, you still have that old thing? Why don't you just draw another one?'" The new father told her, "You're the expert."

Vincent decided he was right. She invested $10,000 to start her company, TOT Inc., in 1985. She and a team of artists began by designing stuffed zebras for babies' cribs. Then she added other black-and-white creatures and objects: killer whales, cows, dogs, rabbits, and a checkered stuffed taxicab.

The toys, trademarked under the name Baby's First Choice, fit into an infant's visual field - 8 by 10 inches at a distance of 8 to 12 inches from the eyes. Babies' eyes follow the sharp lines that separate darkness and light. The high contrast, Vincent says, enables a baby to latch on to the toys effortlessly. "The baby can start seeing without learning how to," she says. Better still, the stimulating angles and shapes cover familiar forms that parents feel comfortable giving to their babies.

Now TOT ships more than 2,000 units a week - most of them made by factories and home workers in New Hampshire - to toy stores, juvenile-product boutiques, and gift shops nationwide. The photogenic toys also sell well in catalogs, Vincent says.

Last year she introduced a three-plane crib mobile in black, white, and red, and it has been selling unexpectedly well at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. "We don't sell it as an infant's mobile" at the museums, Vincent says. "We sell it as an updated, avant-garde developmental product for the yuppie infant."

No matter how Vincent sells her toys, though, the core message is the same. She is teaching parents about babies' abilities, her toys, and why they go together. "I'm educating while I'm marketing," she says.

PHOTO : Susan M. Vincent, a Washington, D.C., nurse, parlayed her knowledge of how infants see into a thriving toy line.