We really are in the midst of peak holiday season – the sun is shining, the roads are quiet, the number of ‘out of office’ replies has skyrocketed and we’ve already had a few ads move back to the October issue because copy or approvals can’t be pushed through in time for September (which is still going to be an absolute whopper of an issue, even without a couple of the less organised toy companies…). To be fair, the same thing happens every year – although it is arguably more of an issue when dealing with partners based in Southern European countries, where it is traditional to close companies down for three or even four weeks in August. I guess it has been that way for many years and is very much ingrained in the working life and culture. There is also the argument that if everyone is off at the same time, you aren’t missing as much (especially if your business is heavily predicated on your local market).
To be fair, it gets pretty hot in Italy, Spain, France, Portugal and nearby countries at this time of year – although we’ve seen equally high temperatures in the UK over the past six weeks. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that I read an article this week suggesting that we would all be better off if we copied the Southern Europeans and took the month of August off. I have a strong suspicion that the person putting this idea forward has never run anything other than a raffle or a bath, yet alone a company. We’ve had a storming August, so we would have lost an awful lot of money if we had been out of office for the past few weeks. Anyway, being British, we use the summer to catch up on some of the things that it’s harder to do when we’re frantically busy, take our holiday and thank our lucky stars that we aren’t American and only get a couple of weeks holiday a year.
Without doubt, the biggest news of the past week has been the announcement that Yogi Parmer will be stepping down from his role as MD of Toymaster. The many comments on our various social media posts sharing the news are a perfect illustration of the fantastic impact he’s made in the role, and how much toy suppliers and Toymaster members have appreciated working with him. The advertisement for his replacement appeared on the Toy World website this week, and it is going to be very interesting to see who applies for the role. Big shoes to fill, but a great opportunity, and a wonderful time to be joining Toymaster.
I also touched on the US tariff refund situation in last week’s Blog, where I suggested that refunds were going into corporations’ pockets, rather than the consumers who actually paid the additional sums. This week, we saw the first company to come out and publicly state that it would be using the tariff money to hold prices down, rather than raising them in the second half of the year due to rising costs as a result of the ongoing (now bordering on farcical) situation in Iran – and it’s great to see that it’s a toy company leading the way, So, well done Spin Master for showing other companies that it can be done. Having just purchased a new iPhone, it would have been nice if Apple had chosen a similar path – but I am not going to hold my breath on that one.
Read the rest here.
