The Rise and Fall of Matchbox’s Toy-Car Empire
The announcement that John Cena has signed on to be the star of the new Matchbox live-action movie raises a few questions. First—there’s going to be a Matchbox movie? And second—what will it be about, exactly?
We know that Cena is a car guy of broad tastes: He owns a couple of classic muscle cars but daily-drives Civic Type-R, and he’s of course part of the Fast and Furious franchise of films. He’s also the kind of charismatic lead that doesn’t mind a bit of fun at his own expense. (His comedic timing probably comes from his days as a professional wrestler.)
What’s going to be in the script that gets handed to him?
With 2023’s Barbie hitting more than $1.4 billion in worldwide box offices, you just know Mattel is looking over its various intellectual properties and imagining a Scrooge McDuck–sized swimming pool of cash. There’ll be a Hot Wheels movie at some point, and since that franchise already has spawned multiple video games, it’s easy to imagine some kind of film with action-packed racing and huge stunts is in the offing, like a G-rated version of the aforementioned Fast and Furious. Matchbox is different, though, with quintessentially British roots, and a less wildly creative nature than Hot Wheels, its corporate sibling.
What Hollywood should do, but probably won’t, is tell the real story of Matchbox, because it’s the tale of the rise and fall of the greatest toy-car empire in the world. It’s a story of postwar resilience, of a company holding out against hard times and fighting off market change. There are plucky East-End Londoners getting away with schemes on the side, a public-transit system sponsored by a toy-car factory, and, at the heart of things, a skilled and slightly rebellious engineer.
Here’s the real story of how Matchbox grew to become the largest toy car maker in the world, yet ended up being owned by its old rival, Mattel.
Before Matchbox: The Rebel and The Rifleman
Born in 1920 in north London to a family of little means, John William Odell was kicked out of school at age thirteen for what he claimed was a rebellious attitude. He drifted from menial job to menial job through the rest of the 1930s before joining the British Army at the outbreak of WWII. He served in the Middle East and in Italy, eventually attaining the rank of sergeant in the Royal Army Service corps, where he was responsible for maintaining fighting vehicles.
On the side, Odell built up a cache of parts for Primus portable stoves, and ran a repair store to earn some spare cash. By the end of the war, he’d saved a few hundred British pounds sterling, enough to get married and start a family. He got a job in London pushing a broom at a small die-casting firm. As he swept, he noted the relatively poor quality of the company’s products. With his years of experience mending tanks and supply trucks, he figured he could do better.
At the same time, fellow veterans Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith (no relation) had founded their own die-casting business in north London. Rodney had worked for the same diecasting company as Odell was. The two connected, and by pooling resources with Leslie, they registered Lesney Products Ltd on January 19, 1947. They rented a defunct pub called The Rifleman, which had been damaged by bombs during the war, and set to work.
Odell, meanwhile, had bought his own diecasting tools and then faced eviction for pouring molten metal at home. Needing a place to work, he joined the Smiths, and each person naturally found an area of the business that suited them. Jack made the tooling, Rodney the diecast pieces, and Leslie ran accounts and sales.
For the first year Lesney made all kinds of household products, plus bits and bobs for the automotive industry, ceiling hooks, and other miscellanea. Business was steady, then began to tail off as Chistmas 1947 approached. Why not make a small run of toys? Dinky, the die-cast-toy arm of building-set maker Meccano, made a model road-roller, so Lesney bought one and, thanks to Odell, improved upon the design using more die-cast elements. The Lesney road-roller toy was more robust, cost a third as much as the Dinky, and could be sold at any shop; Dinky and Meccano were only sold at authorized retailers. It was the first step.
Matchbox Is Born: The Queen and the Spiders
To this day, diecast manufacturing of toy cars uses an alloy metal called Zamak (also known as Zamac or Mazak) that is almost entirely zinc. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the UK government banned the production of zinc-based toys, fearing that reserves of the metal might prove crucial for the war effort. It was a disaster for Lesney.
Rodney, convinced that the end had arrived, sold his shares to Jack and Leslie, and went into farming. (Later, he’d return to the diecast industry, working for one of Matchbox’s smaller competitors.) Despite having just two at the helm, Lesney managed to weather the hard times because it had quite a lot of zinc on hand. The company couldn’t build toys, true, but it could make automotive parts while others were struggling for the necessary raw materials. The decision helped the company bridged the gap until the war ended and restrictions were eased.
In 1952, the king of England died. Luckily for Lesney, Odell had already put together a very elegant model of the royal carriage, intending to sell it on the coattails of the 1951 Festival of Britain. They pulled the mold out of mothballs, modified it by basically sawing the figure of the king off at the knees so that only a queen rode alone, and released the model to the public. Available in two sizes, the smaller of them sold over a million copies, not just as a toy, but as a decoration for coronation celebrations all over the UK.
Flush with cash, Lesney was primed for the innovation that would set it on the path to greatness. Here we must introduce the young and mischevious Annie Odell, as much of a rebel as her father ever was.
The oft-repeated story is that Matchbox got its name because Annie’s school only allowed children to bring toys small enough to fit into a matchbox. According to Odell himself, Annie had a habit of catching spiders and other creepy-crawlies, putting them in matchboxes, and then springing them on classmates and family members. By way of a bribe, he made her a scaled-down version of that original road-roller in 1952, sized to fit in a matchbox.
When put into shops just before Christmas of 1952, the mass-produced Matchbox models were not an overnight success. Their low price was a double-edged sword—they were accessible but not quite special enough to be the main-event Christmas present. After the holiday, however, as kids came into the shops with their pockets jangling with coins, the models fairly flew off the shelves.
Matchbox Reigns: One Hundred Million Little Cars
By 1967, Lesney sprawled across much of the Hackney borough in London’s east end, outbuilding after outbuilding huddled around a huge factory made of concrete. It employed several thousand workers, most of them women. The size of the Lesney workforce and its location in east London meant that there were a few cheeky liberties taken here and there. The children of Hackney were never without a few Matchbox toys that had “escaped” the quality control bins. In one of the more devious schemes, a small group of employees purposely built models with erroneous details, then smuggled them out of the factory on double-decker buses. For the same reasons that coin or stamp collectors prize rare examples with forged or printed mistakes, these models were sold into the Matchbox collector market for a tidy profit.
Odell was Matchbox’s mechanical genius, and a shrewd businessman in his own right, but Leslie Smith was also a big part of the company’s success. Under his direction, a large fleet of double-decker buses were purchased and repainted in yellow and blue Matchbox livery. Yes, you could buy these in 1:64 scale, but there were also full-sized Matchbox buses taking employees and their children all over town. Matchbox was possibly the only toy company in the world with its own public transit system.
Matchbox was also far and away the largest maker of toy cars on the scene, easily outperforming its former rival Dinky. By 1969, Lesney was building a thousand toy cars per minute. The models were shipped all over the world, and since the lineup included many American cars, Matchbox cars became popular across the Atlantic, too. This situation was not at all enjoyed by Elliot Handler, the co-founder of Mattel. In fact, when he saw his own grandkids playing with the UK-built toy cars, it was the match that lit his fuse.
We won’t go into a full history of Hot Wheels here, but suffice it to say Matchbox was caught flat-footed by the tiny, SoCal-infused hot-rods that exploded out of the U.S. starting in 1968. You could buy a Matchbox copy of your dad’s Austin or your mom’s Chevrolet—or you could buy a hopped-up custom Camaro with redline wheels that would blow the (non-opening) doors off anything. It wasn’t a hard choice.
Lesney pivoted quickly to a new line of cars called Superfast, but, again, hard times came along, and shares tumbled. Success returned eventually, just in time for a critical recession in the UK that would change things forever. As the 1980s dawned, the bustling industry of East End toy manufacturing came to an end. Lesney wound up its business in 1982, not out of mismanagement, but just because so many UK-based industries were dying off. The company was bought out by Universal Toys, and production moved to Macau and Hong Kong, and, later, to mainland China.
Hot Wheels and Matchbox, Unlikely Teammates at Last
After a series of business deals sold Matchbox to various owners, the brand moved under the Mattel umbrella in 1997. In those early days, there was some confusion about what to do with two similar car brands. Matchbox had sought to emulate Hot Wheels’ California car culture with its Superfast line, but the British brand and that automotive niche weren’t really a good fit. The first Matchbox was a road roller, after all, and many of the first run of models were construction vehicles. The difference between the two brands is evident even today: Whereas a Hot Wheels is designed to race down those iconic orange tracks, and often feature wild customizations or complete fantasy builds, a Matchbox is more realistic and accurate.
Matchbox vehicles are a different kind of fun than Hot Wheels’. Matchbox’s lineup includes a lot more construction toys and trucks for kids who are into sandbox play. The 2024 lineup also has very faithful representations of cars like the Lotus Europa, first-generation Toyota MR2, and Mk 1 Golf. There’s even a Morgan Plus Four, as you’d expect from a brand with English roots. Matchbox is also setting itself apart with its Moving Parts line, which features opening doors or engine components, features that used to be Matchbox hallmarks in the 1980s and 1990s. They add a layer of realism that’s a nice foil to the Hot Wheels style, which borders on the cartoonish.
Matchbox designers often work with the Hot Wheels design team, and while they are two separate divisions, there’s often a bit of back and forth. Hot Wheels is where things get more creative. If you’re designing a car for Matchbox, you’re trying to get the details right, not an easy task with such small proportions. It’s the kind of work in which Jack Odell would have taken great pride.
The end of Lesney wasn’t the end of toy making for Odell. Long ago, he’d started his own line within the company, focused on turn-of-the-century machinery—old, steam-powered farm equipment, and the like. After Lesney was sold off, Odell started his own company called Lledo using some of the old tooling equipment, and worked there until 1999. He died in 2007, aged 87. His obituary in the New York Times ended as he requested: “I want it said I was a damn good engineer.”
The story of Matchbox is a great one, that of a self-made man who built a company which still brings joy to the lives of children all over the world. John Cena’s not a small guy, but he—and Mattel’s Matchbox movie—have some pretty big shoes to fill.
The same thing happened to Matchbox as the British Automakers. The economy and the country just were not suited for modern production and investments. Matchbox became reactive and Hot Wheels just made the right moves with the right products at the right times.
I was always a Matchbox fan as they were real. They were like the real thing. I loved the older black wheel cars. I still treasure my Lusso with wire spoke wheels. I also collected Hot Wheels as these were the cars you raced. One was more an activity and the other was imagination.
Mattel has brought that back again. I hope it works as they are doing some really nice cars.
I’m 60 years old now and I still have all my cars and much of my track. My Tune Up Tower is on my slot car table.
These cars are what drove me my entire life. My first was a 1960 Bonneville Convertible Matchbox. I still have it. My life revolved around these toys till I got old enough to work on the real things and race the real cars.
Today I have made my living for over 30 years in the automotive and racing industry.
When you see these car companies market to kids with Tonka pick ups and other cars. It is true it makes an impression.
Our lives run down parallel paths. I too was a Matchbox kid who also found the fun of Hot Wheels (I had the “Super-Charger” station that propelled Hot Wheels cars through the station and around the track). My nephews got into my Matchbox collection when I was off to college, and did a real number on them in the sandbox, so mine are not pristine. I ultimately built a 16″ x 16″ wood tray, set the cars on it and poured epoxy over the collection.
I still admire these cars today, and they likely fueled my 35 year automotive career.
Well said sir, I am 57 and considered Matchbox the staple of imaginary towns that sprang up throughout the bedrooms, living rooms and back yards growing up. I personally didn’t care for hot wheels and their flimsy axles, although I did enjoy Corgi Junior Whizzwheels line for their great run of racing and sport cars. I too have a slot car set ( mine is in my living room ) and enjoy look8ng at the oldies still looking good on the sidelines.
Great story by the way,
I’m 70, and I too still have most of my original Matchbox cars and Hot Wheels. The Matchbox cars I have from my youth go back to some of the very early Matchbox’s with the gray metal wheels, that were used before they went to the black plastic ones. I was in my early teens when the Hot Wheels came out, so my original collection of them is much smaller, but does include 7 or 8 of the 1968 first series of cars including the Camaro, Firebird, Eldorado, T-Bird, Barracuda, Corvette, Beatnik Bandit, etc. I also have half of the 69 releases and many of the little tire shaped tin buttons that came with each car. I’ve also managed to keep all of my Aurora Thunderjet and AFX cars and track, a few original “vibrator” cars, all my 1/24th scale slot cars and many of the model cars I built in the 60’s and early 70’s. Unfortunately, somehow my collection of Corgi and Dinky cars disappeared when I was away at college, and no one in my family would claim any knowledge of where they went.
I can’t really claim that Matchbox cars were the reason for my lifelong involvement with cars (as both a hobby and business at various times of my life). I had a cousin who was 6 years older than me and into cars, who was my main influence, but there’s no doubt those little British diecast toy cars did contribute mightily to my life long addiction.
I also started buying my first hot wheels in 1968, 69. I had the original Red Baron with a white interior, chrome helmet for the roof, also had assembled the plastic model version.
One day in my early teens I came home from school to see my collection and my black mag wheel carrying case in the new neighbors lawn and found my mother had given myway collection to the new kid next door a gift ! To this day I never forgave herto for that.
I still have a dozen of my H.O. Aurora slot cars with a few early AFX in with them. Thank gosh I immediately hid those from my wonderfully nice mother.
Those days were great going to the local hobby shop to see what was new with Matchbox, Hot wheels, and Auroras, and AFX cars. A lot of fun way before video games, and using a lot of imagination.
Ahhh my post disappeared !!!!
No, it’s still here
When your Hot Wheels loses control and you puncture your lung after slamming into a cement truck you call a Matchbox Fi re-Rescue ambulance.
I was five years old in 1966. My father opened an upholstery shop on Paramount Blvd. in an area called Hollydale, CA. Three doors down to the south, was Wheeler’s Toy Store. That place was probably built sometime in the 1920’s. Wood floor, open beam ceiling, the whole package.
My dad watch me when my mom needed a little break. Once in awhile, he would give me enough change to buy a Matchbox car at Wheeler’s.
I thought those cars were awesome. They looked like the cars my dad drove. When Hot Wheels started hitting the market, I wound up with a couple of them. The Red Baron, and the Dodge Deora with the orange and yellow surf boards in the back. I have no idea what happened to those cars.
I would eventually own all 72 Matchbox cars, and kept them in the large carrying case. They remain in that case today.
Fast forward to 38 years later, and I worked for Mattel Toy Company in El Segundo as a Senior Model Maker at Mattel’s Design Center.
I have Matchbox King Size trucks and a full case of Models of Yesteryear. This is what got me into vintage cars.
I’d like to send a big “Thank You” to the people of Lesney Ltd. of Great Britain for making my childhood a very memorable time.
I started with Matchbox in 1973 with a 9-piece set from the Sears Christmas Catalog. I still have them, plus all the Matchbox models I’ve bought since then. Matchbox makes up at least half of my 15,000+ collection.
I also have the Matchbox Big Banger sweatshirt I bought from Sears in 1976.
I have to admit I do have concerns regarding Mattel’s treatment of Matchbox since they bought it in 1997. I like the Moving Parts and Collectors series, but the mainline, in my opinion, is slowly being choked. Reducing case size from 72 to 24 models, reducing shelf space and moving models to endcaps, and staggering distribution is like an attempt to say the brand is a slow seller and may need to be shut down. Mattel did the same thing to Corgi when they bought it in 1987; Corgi’s management bought the brand back from Mattel in 1994.
Matchbox is more than a regular toy, it’s a legacy and a big part of history. I can only hope the movie gives Matchbox the respect It deserves.
Across the street from the grade school I attended (this was early 1950s) was a small neighborhood store. You could get an all-day sucker – that TRULY lasted all day! – for a nickel. They also sold a fairly large selection of Matchbox vehicles. If one could scrape together more than a few nickels, one could take home a favorite car or construction rig. The beauty? That little box could easily be smuggled past both the lunchroom teacher/monitors and watchful mothers to be added to the collection growing under one’s bed.
I was always a Matchbox kid, my dad was born and raised in Hackney, East London and during WWII was royal engineers transport division. I still have a few matchbox collectibles. But on getting my driving license moved over to the real things. I’m now 57 moved to Texas and restore cars as a hobby.
I got a Matchbox Superfast race set in 1970 when I was 9. I still have it, and the Lotus Europa and Ford GT-40 cars that came with it. I’ll probably never have a real GT-40, but that little Europa had me fascinated, and I now have a 71 S2 project that will someday be on the road.
That Europa captivated me. Knowing that although they were all real models, some were English and not available here in the States if at all. While working at my first job in high school, a restaurant, one Sunday I went out the back door to find one sitting right there in front of me! The same color blue! My little car all grown up! It turned out to be the owner’s son’s car. On that day I knew that I could really own one one day and am real close to turning my passive search active.
I am a lifelong car geek and Matchbox and Corgi Toys are the reason I suffer from AADD – Automobile Attention Deficit Disorder. Matchbox cars were in every Christmas Stocking or Birthday present and they were cheap enough that I could save my allowance and by them pretty often. They really spawned my interest in European cars. My brother and I would play outside in the dirt with them, designing cities and streets of packed clay on the abandoned construction site across the street from our home. Then we used them on our HQ scale train board – my brother in charge of train engineering and me responsible for automobiles, roads and structures. I still have most of them in a carrying case but they are beat to Hell from years of use. Ironically, I ended up majoring in Urban Planning in College and that became the basis of my career. I’ve owned so many cool cars over the years and feed my addiction with a large collection of promo models and other diecasts that substitute for the real dream cars I could never afford. Thanks to the Lesney Company for bringing so much joy to my life and thank- you Hagerty and Brendan McAleer for a wonderful, informative backstory.
Thanks for reading, Michael, and for sharing your story! I love to hear about how playing with cars as a kid influences decisions down the road.
Awesome story! I hope the movie is just as good!
But wait, there’s more… when Lledo (Odell spelled backwards) went bankrupt in 1999, the tooling and intellectual rights to their Vanguards line were bought by the newly independent Corgi Classics. Corgi had just escaped from Mattel themselves, and the Vanguards line formed the basis of the Corgi automotive line still made today. However, direct competition to Matchbox (Husky/Corgi Juniors/Rockets) is all long gone.
Great story! Thanks for publishing it. I too, started collecting after my grandmother bought me a couple of Matchbox cars (Jimmy Clark’s Lotus and a Sugar Lorrie). As a young father, I would buy my son Matchbox cars when on assignment for the Associated Press. Eventually he graduated to model cars, radio control models and finally real cars. He was a tuner kid but with a Mechanical Engineering degree. That led him to be an engine design engineer at Honda R&D. But he was restless and ended up moving to the UK where he pursued a master’s degree in Race Engineering. After his dissertation was published in the SAE Journal, he received a call from Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 team. And the rest is history!
Interesting tales of how some British diecasters helped fuel a whole generation (SEVERAL generations actually) of car enthusiasts. I always fashioned myself a “Matchbox guy”, starting with the 1st gen MGA my sister brought back from her Chicago field trip for me. Our local hobby shop would sell out the previous year’s extras (sans boxes) for 35 cents, and I massed a small collection of mid-range Brit sedans and trucks from my grass-cutting allowance. I was always a ‘grey wheels’ fan, and I still have my original #53 maroon Benz 220SE (in great condition) in a repro box, the first Regular Series with opening doors. Eventually, I also amassed a complete collection of Matchbox’s original ‘Models of Yesteryear’ in their original line-art boxes, a product line of antique cars, trucks and other vehicles (conceived, I believe, by Jack Odell), which I still have on display. Then, about 2 decades ago, Kroger started putting hang-card Hot Wheels displays at the end caps in their store; modern Hot Wheels are intelligently curated for mature car geeks, and there are a lot of tasteful original conceptual designs that couldn’t happen in full scale. I snagged one every shopping trip and have quite a collection, Now my granddaughter is 2+ and shows all the signs of ‘gearheadness’, so the Hot Wheels (and maybe, eventually, the Matchbox MoYs) become part of a gradual inheritance plan. Passing the torch.
I always preferred Matchbox cars to the other brands. I thought the Hot Wheels looked cheap and by the time they had arrived I had moved on to real cars anyway. I started buying Matchbox cars in 1959 and still have every one that I purchased. I’m told that some may be relatively valuable now but have never checked that out.