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There are products, programs, meals, events and more that spark in the social imagination nostalgia and evocation of bygone times that were better for many. There are also people who contribute to creating this feeling. Nicola Ulivi He is one of them.
An entrepreneur and manufacturer of things that dominated Argentina and his childhood, he came to the country A series of games that became champions For entertainment and youth gatherings from the early 1970s onwards. He was always out of the public eye. And there is a reason that stands out: “I have had many successes, but also many failures“For this reason, he keeps a low profile, even though those successes have become firmly established in the collective memory.
“For 40 years, I have been making a huge amount of toys, and now, when I saw that children liked the iPhone more, I focused on candy,” he begins. He points to his current activity with Confitel, which today produces the Bluper brand.
Nicholas was born in California, United States. His mother was from North America, but he came to live in Argentina with his family when he was a child. He returned to that country to study engineering and when he finished he settled here and began working. You can say he has entrepreneurial blood: His father was the creator of the Plasticola brand.
In 1971 he owned a line of cleaning products, when his brother, who was in the United States, sent him a message Clackers I told him there was a lot of anger there. He suggested that he do the same in Argentina. He liked the idea. It was a simple design: two hard plastic balls suspended tied by ropes and held together by what looked like a tab. Players had to make them collide with each other, looking for the clean and jerk. Up and down, up and down, faster and faster. It was about to Previous Tiki Taka. “I saw the game and thought it was interesting,” he says. “I started thinking about how to imitate it.”
There weren’t many differences between one and the other: the first had clear plastic balls, like glass. “We didn’t know how to achieve this format. Someone advised me to pour resin into glass balls, the ones used in a Christmas tree. So we bought several of them. We poured the liquid, which solidified after 30 minutes. Then we broke the glass and the perfect ball remained. But they all came in different sizes, and we wanted them to be the same size otherwise they wouldn’t hit. So we had to label them.” I thought that’s what they did there.Manual work,” he explains in detail.
He was able to copy the design his brother sent him. The key part was missing: market entry. This included advertising and publishing it. It was only a short time later, about three months after he started trying, that he came across an acquaintance who could connect him to three main characters on TV in the 1970s: Gabi, Fufu and MilekiWho came to record from Spain on Channel 13.
He accompanied him to the studios and presented him to the Authority and they reached an agreement. He had to give an advance of money, and in return, The clowns were going to use the game in the show. “Within a few days we had tremendous demand,” he says. “What we did was prepare an employee who played tiki-taka for a month: with one hand, with the other, with his mouth. We sent him out with Gabi, Fufu and Mileki. It was a huge success.”
He defines the rush of children running to buy the toy as madness It only lasted six weeks.: “I wasn’t used to something like this. Suddenly, all the kids wanted to play. We worked Full During that period.” They couldn’t meet the demand. Then he had what he thought was a stroke of luck: It rained torrentially for three days, sales slowed, and he seized the opportunity to get Stocks. He bought a lot of resin, a lot of glass beads, and began working tirelessly to go beyond what he assumed would last, given what was happening. “On the fourth day, the rain stopped. And we… We didn’t even sell another one. It has been completely cut off. These toys become popular, and after five or six weeks, children feel tired.
He was left with a lot of materials left over and lost part of the money he had earned Boom first. Tiki Taka has been discontinued.
It’s been 10 years. It was 1981 and the game was “forgotten”. He had long since finished what remained after the storm. A decade later, while looking for programs to watch on television, he found a note in the newspaper saying that clowns were back in the country. At that time they would have shown up at ATC and would have been called Gabi, Fufito, Mileki and Melekito showsince after the death of Fufo, i.e. Alfonso of Aragon, the sons of the original characters joined.
Nicholas approached the channel with the idea of repeating his previous steps, relaunching the product and resorting once again to the kind of advertising that had brought him the fleeting success of 1971. But he did not find the clowns, and when he was leaving, chance – “the kind that happens to you once in a lifetime” – worked in his favor: he met the same man who had made him call Channel 13. He asked him for a percentage of the profit and got a new deal. They started recording, giving between four and five shows a day.
In total there were about 30 programs broadcast. But a week passed and nothing. Two weeks passed and nothing. Three weeks passed and nothing. Tiki Taka, this time, wasn’t selling. “What is happening?“He asked himself. He called an ad agency to figure it out, and they told him so The space had an audience of just 1%“There was almost no one watching.”
He thought he wasted the investment. But in the fourth week, on Monday, the phones started ringing: “One week we could no longer cope with the situation, it suddenly exploded. You can see that there has started to be an ‘infection’ of children in schools. But I had already gone through the 1971 experience and knew it would stop in six weeks.. In fact, we worked so well at the time that after a month and a half the product was cut.
Tiki-Taka had another rebirth in 1996. That year, she shared the success with two other children’s productions, and they quickly began appearing in schoolyards. He was the maker of them all.
First, between April and August of that year, he produced Yo-yo with Magic brandThey sold 1,500,000 units. In August Tiki Taka was launched again. It was the year that saw the most traffic: in ’71, the first time it did it, it sold 220,000, in ’81, about the same amount, and in ’96, it went up to 700,000. He promoted them in another way: he trained “champions” to learn tricks and introduce games in parks and schools.
At the same time, he had a similar experience that brought him closer to… Clackers First, this time, with the third leg of the trident that formed the main games of the mid-1990s: Diapolo Bronco. He also used the “Heroes” technique to move it.
“A friend of mine brought it to me from Spain, and she told me it was very angry there. I looked at it and said: ‘This is a very difficult game, I’m not going to take it out’. And I kept it. A few months later, in the summer, I went to Chile and found that all the kids were playing with it. I said to myself: ‘Oh, damn it’. Then I came to Buenos Aires and talked to the magic people. We made Diabolo.”
In 2001 he came Mickey MokoAbu Al Wahal, which came in a green plastic cup with an eye in it. Miki-MOco, out of everyone, was the one who caught his attention the most, because It remained on the market for two yearsIn Peru, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.
Moreover, in 2006 It entered into an agreement with Telefé to manufacture the program’s puppets 100% fight. They were to appear on the program on Sunday. The first time it was announced was A spot Short, he thought he “wouldn’t walk.” Two days later, after a trip to La Plata, he returned to the factory, and they asked him to sit down: “They are bombing us with the orders of the fighters,” he heard in surprise. Once again, he created a product that exploded shortly after being promoted. They have sold over 1,500,000 as well.
But back to Tiki Taka, 1996 was the last year they succeeded. Although they may be for sale today on some websites, they are modifications of the product that Nicholas knew how to replicate. He never tried to take it up again, due to the change in context: “At that time I was using live shows a lot, there was Carlitos Bala, Captain Peluso… A live show is completely different when you put out a 20-second ad, with a character showing it. But that’s not the case anymore. Moreover, Kids don’t watch cable anymore. “So, it’s difficult for these types of games to come back,” he explains.
Today he continues to work with the Bluper Candy brand, which is primarily run by his daughter and son. They also have several well-known products in this field: chewing gum. Crazy rollthe Baby bottles With colorful gum, watermelon balls and much more. Although he stopped making classic games, the activity he developed for 40 years undoubtedly made him the businessman who left an indelible mark on Argentines.
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