We all know that 2024 was anything but an easy year – but up, down or flat, wherever you ended the year, it’s all in the past
WRITTEN BY JOHN BAULCH — PUBLISHER OF TOY WORLD MAGAZINE
Toy Fair Season gives the toy community the opportunity to draw a line under the past year and look forward to (hopefully) brighter things on the horizon. Toy companies inevitably start the year revved up about their new launches and their “best range ever”.
No surprise then that everyone arrives at the shows energized and full of enthusiasm. I also think that the very act of the global toy family coming together brings its own sense of communal well-being. We may have been a little battered and bruised in October & November especially, but we survived it and we’re here to fight another day.
Most importantly, Toy Fair Season gives us the chance to see the key new launches which are going to be driving the toy market this year. Sometimes a tough year can lead to less innovation and risk taking, but I think most toy companies have worked out that approach becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, so thankfully there was plenty on show in London and Nuremberg to get excited about. I also get the sense that retailers are becoming more open to new ideas that diverge from the traditional definition of ‘toy’.
We know we’re losing girls from the market at an increasingly younger age to fashion and beauty, so it’s good to see toy companies trying to address that. Unsurprisingly, ‘kidult’ products also continue to proliferate – and toy retailers are embracing them. There was undoubtedly a point in the past when many toy retailers were unsure if these kind of products would fit into a traditional toy store – but in 2025, what exactly constitutes a traditional toy store? Retailing is about giving the people what they want, and toy customers have never been a more diverse bunch of people – which is surely a good thing (especially given the declining birth rates across the developed world).
As we traditionally find at toy trade shows, promises were up, but several people pointed out that after meetings in London, orders followed almost immediately the next week, which hasn’t always been the case in recent years. Let’s hope that trend continues. I never get too fixated on visitor numbers at any trade event. Let’s be honest, after mergers, acquisitions and post-pandemic natural selection, there are probably fewer individual retail buying points than there used to be.
Busy aisles don’t validate a show – the quality of meetings and the mood of attendees is a far better litmus test (how many meaningful meetings can you realistically have across a three-day event – 50 at most, possibly fewer?).
In the UK retailer of the Year awards in London, Smyths picked up three awards, including the overall toy retailer of the year, while Very picked up the award for online excellence. Meanwhile, Wow! Stuff was the well-deserved winner of the overall Toy of the Year award for its Stitch Puppetronic – a line which blew me away when I first saw it hidden away in a closed section of the stand at the New York Toy Fair in September ’23. You have to go back to the late 1990s to find a winner that wasn’t from one of the major toy companies, so it was a fantastic achievement for Richard North and his team.
As I made my way around London and Nuremberg, I got a real sense of confidence and resilience about what lies ahead in 2025. Let’s not beat around the bush, we all know it’s not going to be an easy year at retail, but the best way to tackle the challenges is to do it together. And with the news from Circana that UK toy sales in the first two weeks of the year were up +7% – the first January increase since 2019 – we have a solid base to build from. And when all is said and done, we work in toys – and however challenging it may get, we should surely wake up every day thankful for that.
This article originally appeared in Edition 14 of The Toy Universe Magazine
