Faster into tomorrow

Time's a strange thing sometimes. Production schedules—whether for a magazine to make it to the printer or for a manufacturer's new product line to make it to market—have a weird way of twisting time in your mind so that you always have one foot in the present and the other in the future. With the way our deadlines work here at Playthings, we're always writing stories with the realization in mind that they won't be read for weeks, yet they need to sound (and be, of course) as “now” as possible. I'm sure you know the feeling, especially if you're a manufacturer deep in the throes of putting together your 2007 product lines.

This is an interesting time of year for those of us who watch the toy trade. It's early in the fourth quarter and that, as you're well aware, means we're in the all-important run up to the holiday season, or at least half of us are—the retail half. The days of extended holiday shopping hours will soon enough be upon merchants big and small, and I imagine the tasks of getting in last-minute shipments, finding and training seasonal employees and putting the final touches on themed displays are well under way across large swathes of this globe we all call home. There's no time to waste; pumpkin pie is back on the shelves and Black Friday will be here before you know it.

What's making me feel out of sorts, though, is that the manufacturing half of the business is so deeply entrenched in 2007 product development that it's almost as if the fourth quarter's already happened. In a way, it probably did, in Hong Kong or Nuremberg or New York way back in January and February. Perhaps, it's just the truckers who are still busy, their tractor trailers full of T.M.X. Elmo toys chanting “No peeking!” at 24-hour gas station attendants too full of diesel fumes to figure out where that odd giggling is coming from. The result is that even I've lost some interest in the fourth quarter. To paraphrase Toys “R” Us CEO Jerry Storch from the interview that appears in this issue, no one really knows how well they truly did in the fourth quarter until January at the earliest anyway, so we'll give you all that info when it comes in—whenever that is. But right now, like those execs we've struggled mightily to corral for a fifteen minute interview in between line reviews over the last few weeks, what's got me excited is new product, and we're collectively about to see lots of it this month at the American International Fall Toy Show.

This year's “mass market show” will be memorable for the product it contains—trade shows almost always are—but what may linger longer in the minds of those who attend is the particular ambience of this one. It will be the culture clash of a traditionally private event instead being held very publicly at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York City for the very first time. I'm looking forward to experiencing it: a trade show where everything is still a secret, where every booth is, by intention, a fortress of solitude surrounded by Get Smart-style cones of silence and ringed with white noise machines. I'm expecting passwords and secret knocks, and that even the costumed characters will be in disguise.

Luckily, I like a good mystery. I hope you do too, but if you don't we've made it easy for you. Flip to page 47 and you'll see we've taken some of the guess work out of the mass market show this year thanks to several manufacturers (more than we expected, frankly) who just couldn't wait to tell the world all about their newest stuff. Go ahead, take a look—unlike the latest Elmo, we encourage peeking—but before you do, take a deep breath; 2007's about to begin.