THE PAW PATROL PRINCIPLE

How a toy company built a children's-television juggernaut

- BY ALANA SEMUELS

LONG BEFORE HE STARTED WATCHING TV, PEOple started giving my son stuff decorated with cute cartoon puppies dressed in distinctive outfits. There was a Dalmatian dressed as a fireman.

A bulldog construction worker. A German shepherd police officer. I could not figure out why these brightly colored dogs seemed to be on roughly half the gear in our house, from shirts and hats to umbrellas and fire trucks.

What I learned was that the puppies were characters in a TV show called Paw Patrol, which is about the adventures of a 10-year-old boy named Ryder and a crew of puppies who help people.

The show is a children's-entertainment juggernaut. Paw Patrol, which airs on Nickelodeon and is available to stream on YouTube, Paramount+, and other platforms, has been the third most indemand children's TV series worldwide since at least 2020, beating out shows like Cocomelon, Bluey, and Peppa Pig, according to Parrot Analytics. (In the U.S., only SpongeBob SquarePants and Sesame Street ranked higher.) In 2021, Paramount premiered a Paw Patrol movie-one of the first films targeted at the preschool set-and it grossed $144 million worldwide. A sequel in 2023 raked in even more money, and a third is in the works.

But where Paw Patrol is really without peer is in the realm of children's merchandising. Go into a Walmart or a Target and you'll find Paw Patrol everywhere on the diapers, the toothpaste, the Band-Aids, the cereal, and, of course, in the toy aisle. Paramount estimates that there are around 100,000 different Paw Patrol products. It was the top preschool toy property in each of the past two years in the U.S., the U.K., Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Canada, Belgium, and Australia, according to the market-research company Circana.

To date, Paw Patrol toys and other consumer products have racked up more than $15 billion in retail sales worldwide, according to Paramount, which owns Nickelodeon.