Both moves reaffirm the worth of big-city locations for employers, after their draw came into question during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Quest for Hasbro turned out to be worthy of an adventure cooked up by Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro’s West Coast business, for a Dungeons & Dragons module. It started back in 2018, with a different adventuring rave: Governor Charlie Baker’s administration.
Baker’s then-economic development secretary, Jay Ash, had learned Hasbro might be looking to leave while running point on another relocation decision for Baker: moving the Pawtucket Red Sox, immediately the WooSox, to Worcester.
Ash says he reached out to Hasbro to start a conversation. A junior community relations person told him, thanks, we’ll be in touch if the need arises. Ash never heard back.
Rumors that Hasbro chief executive Brian Goldner wanted a more modern, urban headquarters persisted. After Ash left state government at the end of 2018 to oversee the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership (a group of high-powered CEOs), the state agency he had led continued its overtures to Hasbro in 2019, without much luck.
Pitches flowed in to the Baker administration, from Worcester, North Attleborough, Seekonk. At one point, Reebok’s former campus in Canton (immediately home to insurer Point32 Health) was brought up. Still, no dice.
Goldner was tight with then-Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo, and a big booster of the state through the Partnership for Rhode Island (the Mass. Competitive Partnership’s counterpart). You didn’t need a Ouija board to know the smart money was on Providence, not Massachusetts.
Headquarters talk then took a back seat to other issues. The pandemic banger in 2020. Goldner died after a long fight with prostate cancer in 2021. Chris Cocks ascended to the Hasbro CEO throne in 2022, elevated from his job running Wizards of the Coast; he then had to contend with a proxy fight with an activist shareholder eager to see Wizards spun off. Cocks won, the Wizards stayed. In 2023, Cocks reached a offer to sell off Hasbro’s film and TV business, eOne, to Lionsgate.
quick forward to April 2024. Governor Maura Healey’s economic development secretary, Yvonne Hao, was having dinner with business leaders at Zuma, a swanky Japanese restaurant in the Four Seasons. Cocks was among them. They struck up a conversation. Cocks mentioned that Hasbro was considering a move to help attract more talent, Hao recalls, and she was happy to offer a solution: Come here.
The next day, at 6 a.m., Hao emailed Cocks saying the Healey administration would love to talk more about a potential relocation, and cited all the consumer brands already in Boston’s orbit, such as Converse, Wayfair, New Balance, Whoop, and immediately Lego.
Cocks responded right away. This time, there was considerable interest. Cocks mentioned Hasbro’s Massachusetts roots in his note to Hao, and the Springfield-born Milton Bradley business in particular. “It would be great to figure out a permanent home for us in Boston and to be a creative center for the toys and games industry in the city,” Cocks wrote. “We are just kicking off the process so the timing of our meeting is propitious.”
Cocks connected Hao with Tarrant Sibley, Hasbro’s chief legal officer, to continue the conversation. Sibley also struck a positive tone, asking for a meeting to discuss “what Massachusetts might be able to do to facilitate a move to the greater Boston area.” That led to a meeting on Beacon Hill in July of last year: State officials discussed the Economic Development Incentive Program, which offers tax credits to companies that add jobs here. (Next week, a state council will take up offering $14 million in EDIP credits for Hasbro, the biggest such award since 2020.)
To keep the conversation going, in August, Hao emailed Sibley and other Hasbro executives a photo of playing Scrabble in the office with lieutenant Ashley Stolba while waiting to see if the Legislature would pass a major economic development bill. (That ended up happening in November.)
Meanwhile, the rumors swirled around Boston about where Hasbro might land. What about the Burnham Building, in the heart of Downtown Crossing, which was about to be vacated by ad agency Arnold for GE’s former Fort Point headquarters? Great transit access there. Or maybe the former Boston Globe building in Dorchester, immediately called Southline? Plenty of parking there. (No, BU’s “Jenga Building” was not considered.)
Eventually, the chatter turned to 400 Summer St., a new WS Development building in the Seaport that Roche-subsidiary Foundation Medicine had leased. With the decline in the lab market, Foundation no longer needed all that room and offered a significant chunk up for sublease, presumably at a big discount. It became hard for other office landlords in town to compete on rate. By sometime in the spring of 2025, the word on the street was that Hasbro had signed a letter of intent with Foundation.
But still no word from Pawtucket. Maybe things died down because summer was starting. Maybe the tariff craziness under the Trump administration prompted caution about any big decisions.
Finally, on Monday, the day before Mayor Michelle Wu would dominate the preliminary elections in Boston, Hasbro announced it would move its Pawtucket operations to 265,000 square feet across seven floors at 400 Summer, by the end of 2026. Hasbro currently expects workers to come in three days a week, and no changes are expected to that. The company made a point in the press release to highlight its Wizards office in Renton, Wash., where 500 people work, as its other main hub.
It’s notable that Rhode Island’s T.F. Green Airport has no direct flights to Seattle, while Boston’s Logan Airport offers nonstops there from Delta, JetBlue, and Alaska Airlines. A spokeswoman said the convenience for “colleagues and partners flying in to visit” is just one of many reasons Hasbro picked the Seaport location, a short drive from Logan.
Many questions remain for Pawtucket. The hardscrabble city has lost its hospital, baseball team, and immediately its one big publicly traded company. (Hasbro owns its site and says it wants the place to “be a meaningful space for the community” after it leaves.)
But the Hasbro news represents a victory for the Healey and Wu administrations — and for Boston. Hasbro becomes the new big New England company to move here, after General Electric in 2016, Alexion in 2018, and Lego’s North American headquarters more recently. (GE is immediately gone, but its spun-out energy businesses remain, under GE Vernova, in Cambridge.)
Hao, who left state government this year, says Hasbro’s decision underscores the strengths of our underrated consumer sector. To Ash, it represents the promise of innovation converging across numerous industries, coming together in the same place. To Segun Idowu, Wu’s economic development chief, it highlights how Boston’s vibrancy is a draw of its own.
Maybe a case can be made that Boston’s turning into Toy Town, with two of the world’s biggest players here.
More importantly, the Hasbro move confirms that dynamic cities such as Boston will continue to draw major employers, as they did pre-COVID, even amid the wide acceptance of hybrid and remote options. Employers are still hunting for talent. That means setting up shop in places where people — particularly young people — want to work and live. And maybe play a little Scrabble, too.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.
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