Make it speciale

(Editor's note: This is the fourth in a series of market reports from members of ITMA, the International Toy Magazine Association. Playthings is the U.S. member of the organization.)

In 2000, most Italian specialty toy retailers would have told a foreign visitor that their trade was doomed because of the ever increasing share of the market being controlled by the hypermarkets and other mass market outlets.

Five years later, everybody in the business agrees that the mass market is becoming less interested in selling toys, especially in the important winter season, due to several factors: low margins, quickly fading crazes, and alternative categories of products, such as mobile phones, whose appeal now reaches tweens and even younger children.

The toy market, however, is not disappearing in Italy; although slightly decreasing in the last few years, turnover and volumes are more or less the same. Contrary to what was the belief in the recent past, today it is no longer taken for granted that a huge TV campaign targeted at children will easily create a bestseller. Kids may have become a bit more selective, but most of all their parents—especially in a period of economic recession—want their money to be spent for something they feel is worth its price.

After a long period of head-to-head, and often fruitless competition with the mass market over TV-advertised items, the retailers who have survived (and there are many of them) have learned that their business depends on the ability to sell product throughout the year, usually with evergreen products, with games and toys that parents like and contain real play value. Unfortunately, for more passive retailers, this content must be communicated to the customer in order to obtain a sale, and many retailers who had grown accustomed to simply stocking their shelves with boxes sourced from the TV-advertising toy company under the theory that those TV-promoted playthings would sell themselves, are now in trouble.

The older generation of retailers, especially those who deal with toys and baby-care products under the same roof, still possess the know-how to actively sell the toys they offer, but are approaching the age of retirement. Who is going to replace them unless their sons and daughters, having learned from them, are willing to stay in the business?

With such a changing situation, it is now increasingly important for the toy industry to be able to count on expert retailers. The retailer's task must be to guide the consumer—more and more a parent or adult relative of the child as preschool toys are conquering an ever-wider share of the market—toward the choice of the product that fits their needs in terms of safety, play value, and even contribution to the child's physical and intellectual growth. And, at the same time, the retailer must offer products that satisfy the fundamental requirement of the final user, the child, to have fun with the toy.

The issue has already emerged in a recent meeting during the latest edition of the GIOSUN Exhibition of Outdoor Toys and Summer Games in Rimini, Italy, resulting in a request to join forces inside the business in order to start programs to groom a new generation of young retailers with the skills to more actively sell the toys they stock.