Roosevelt-raised 'toy coach' Azhelle Wade competes on NBC's new 'On Brand with Jimmy Fallon'

A Roosevelt-raised toy designer will be among the marketing mavens pitching ideas for brands ranging from Dunkin' to Marshalls to Captain Morgan and more on the new NBC reality competition "On Brand with Jimmy Fallon," premiering Tuesday at 10 p.m.

"They saw me on YouTube," said Azhelle Wade, 37, who has branded herself The Toy Coach to serve as a mentor to toy- and game-based startups. The casting people "were, like, ‘Would you be interested in being part of a creative competition show?’ And I said, ‘Hmm. I'm creative. I'm competitive.’ Maybe they didn't use the word ‘reality show.’ If they'd said that, I might've said no!" she adds, chuckling.

The eight-episode series, with Fallon of  "The Tonight Show" as host and an executive producer, pits 10 creatives against each other as they devise ideas to impress the brands and, with the resources on the show’s On Brand Agency, attempt to implement their ideas in the marketplace. Veteran business executive Bozoma Saint John serves as "chief marketing officer." The winner, following episodic eliminations, gets $100,000, a feature in the trade magazine Adweek and a trip to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, next held June 22-26 in Cannes, France.

"The hardest thing was definitely pitching," said Wade, daughter of talent/model manager-agent Kathryn Westbrooke and retired New York City Correction Officer Vernon Wade. "Pitching toys and toy services I can do. But I actually was surprised at how different" it could be for other items. "And I learned from other contestants: The things they would say to explain why something was a good pitch were not things I would think about."

Wade, who was born in Manhattan and briefly raised in Queens before moving with her family to Roosevelt, graduated from Long Island Lutheran High School in Brookville. After earning a bachelor of fine arts degree in toy design from Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology in 2010, she worked for companies in toy design and product development — eventually serving stints as manager of product development and design for the Toys R Us spinoff Babies R Us and as a vice president of brand and product at Creative Kids.

Her impetus for designing toys came "not so much that I love being around kids, but I just saw so much hope in kids. There's this quote by Pearl S. Buck," the late Nobel- and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and humanitarian, in her 1964 book "Children for Adoption": “ ‘If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.’ So I just wanted to create products for a world that doesn't fail children."

Wade is married to Hasbro senior director of game design Christian Castro and now living in Rhode Island, where the company is based. She became The Toy Coach in 2010 when she transitioned into mentoring. "I was, like, ‘Oh, The Toy Coach sounds good,’ " Wade said. "And I was shocked that the URL was available and the trademark was available! So I snatched everything up immediately!"