Hallelujah, British summer time is finally here – this is not a drill folks. Sunglasses and shorts on, enjoy it while you can, as my weather app is saying it may not last into next week (although hopefully this wasn’t it…. Summer ’24 – a couple of days in the middle of July). Cue retailers frantically moving outdoor toys to the front of the store in the hope that parents will react to the sun finally making an appearance by stocking up on paddling pools, water blasters and balloons, bubbles and the like.
It helps that the kids will be breaking up for their summer holidays any day now (if they haven’t done so already) – and parents have six long weeks to keep them amused and occupied. Come rain or shine, toy stores will have something to relieve boredom and keep the kids away from screens – so let’s hope the summer holidays kickstart trading. Then when kids go back to school in September, the countdown to Christmas will begin in earnest.
In the meantime, we’re already seeing predictions for the toys that are likely to be in demand in the run-up to the festive season. Any day now, one toy retailer will come out with its official Christmas Top Toys list, and the floodgates will open. I liked the list of runners and riders that Midco’s Dave Middleton posted on LinkedIn this week – it seemed genuine, authentic and credible, and it contained a lot of the lines that the Toy World team were impressed with during Toy Fair Season. It also came from the heart – it features the toys Dave personally believes in and thinks will be popular with his customers, which is refreshing.
Because I think it is fair to say that some other retailers’ lists may be more commercially driven. Now, personally, I don’t have a massive issue with that. If a retailer wants to use a place on its top toys list to secure a bit more marketing budget, a little extra stock or additional margin, or even just to reward suppliers for their ongoing support of the account, I think that’s perfectly valid. Rather like a lot of the toy/licensing awards, surely only the most naïve think there is any overriding purity or integrity to the process. They’re overwhelmingly commercial initiatives and should be viewed through that prism – which is perfectly fine, as long as you don’t try to pretend they’re something they’re not.
Anyway, there is no definitive list of top toys – and in reality, there never can be. How can you compare what a 2-year-old girl wants with the wish list of a 10-year-old boy? How can you narrow thousands of great new toys down to a list of 10 or 12? In practice, all of the top toy lists have the same aim – to start parents thinking about what to buy their kids for Christmas. So, I don’t tend to get too worked up about the exact make-up of each individual list or nitpick over specific lines that have been included or left out – for me, that’s rather missing the point.
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