As UK retail continues to gently tick over as we head towards Easter (and I appreciate it might be said that I am being quite generous there), the biggest toy retail story of the week comes from Spain, where the specialist toy retail chain Poly Juguetes has sadly started the liquidation process. All stores currently remain open, in the hope of finding a new buyer to take the business forward. The Poly Group was, of course, acquired by The Teal Group – parent company of The Entertainer – in 2018, as part of its ambitious global expansion plans. Sadly, things didn’t work out according to plan.
I certainly don’t profess to be an expert on the Spanish toy market. I have a working knowledge of some of its foibles – but I am not immersed in it in the same way I am in the UK toy community. So full disclosure, what follows is heavily based on comments that have been made to me, which may or may not represent the full picture (there are always two sides to every story) – so please accept them in the spirit of ‘some might say’…
I do know from previous conversations with key people at The Entertainer that there have been some challenges with the Poly operation and the Spanish market in general, beyond what they had envisaged when they bought into the business. The Spanish toy community is perceived to be very close-knit and quite traditional. In some cases, people and companies have worked a certain way for decades.
The language barrier was another issue – I was once told that there were only a handful of employees in the Spanish head office who spoke English well enough to accompany the Entertainer team on store visits and to contribute effectively to internal meetings (although equally, how many Spanish speakers are employed in Amersham?). There were rumours of employees unhappy with being asked to change the way they worked overnight, and even darker rumours of a small number who may have been using their positions for personal financial gain for years before the takeover. There were also rumblings of discontent amongst the Spanish vendor community about the change in trading terms and buying strategies.
Keep reading here.
