Happy New Year – I hope you had a splendid Christmas and managed to get some time to relax and recharge ahead of Toy Fair Season. Judging by the quiet roads on the way to the office this morning, I suspect quote a few people have put off returning to work until Monday.
While toy companies and major buyers have the luxury of being able to delay the return to the office, independent retailers and store workers had a much shorter break – the week after Christmas is becoming a very important trading period. I must admit that I didn’t brave the Boxing Day sales, partly because we still had a house full of guests, and partly because I have found Boxing Day a rather disappointing experience in recent years. Apart from a few exceptions, the ‘sales’ aren’t really that special anymore – so it’s no great surprise that the BBC was reporting footfall being down by mid-afternoon. Miraculously, the story changed the following day, claiming that shoppers had descended on stores late in the day – indeed, the story claimed that footfall grew “between 5pm-11pm.” Which is strange, because most stores around here (including the grocers) all seemed to shut at 6pm. Maybe the writers had been over-indulging with the festive spirit, or maybe they’d just left it to AI to write…
The good news is that I did see plenty of evidence on LinkedIn and social media suggesting that footfall and sales in the week after Christmas were healthy – if you have to come straight back to work after Christmas, you want to know it’s worthwhile. Admittedly, when I ventured into town, just as many people seemed to be queueing to return things as to buy them, but hopefully that wasn’t the case in toy stores. Online retailer Asos will be introducing a handling fee for what it describes as ‘serial returners’, which I think is entirely sensible. As ever, profit is going to be a key discussion point in just about every retail conversation this year, and measures like this can’t be off limits anymore.
The search for (greater) profit is one of the main reasons why some people from the toy community will shortly be heading to Hong Kong – it remains a destination to seek out FOB and own label / own brand lines which offer more generous margins than branded lines – vital to help retailers to achieve a healthy margin balance. Of course, it’s undeniable that not as many people make the trip as used to in days of yore (and in this instance, ‘days of yore’ essentially means up to 2020) – on the plus side, the fact there are fewer Americans (and Brits) heading East means you don’t get the crazy situation of people flying out before the New Year bells have even chimed.
Read the rest here.
