Worth Noting

June 25, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

Interesting development today in the Consumer Product Safety Commission's efforts to bring "common sense" to enforcement of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act's lead standards: Bicycle manufacturers are getting a two-year reprieve from enforcement.

What's most interesting to me is the rationale the commissioners used to justify their decision. 

While safety troubled toys get all the attention, bicycles have long been a major concern for CPSC when it comes to children's injuries. (It's not surprising considering the inherent danger of a product that in order to work calls for balancing on two wheels at high speeds...) As Moore points out in his statement, there have been nearly 35 bicycle-rela...Read More

June 19, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

So, it’s been about 48 hours since returning from St. Paul, Minnesota, for this year’s American Specialty Toy Retailing Association Marketplace & Academy. My take on the show two days removed is simple: It was good.

According to ASTRA, more than 80 manufacturers made their debut as exhibitors this week, boosting the event’s exhibitor tally by nearly 30 percent over last year. What ASTRA hasn’t yet said its how many retailers were on hand, but it looks to have been about 350, something I’m basing solely on the event’s official list of registered store owners/buyers. It could have been higher or lower, but regardless of the official figure, I’m pretty confident those who were there would tell you it was a worth the trip.

In fact—or probably more accurately “in perception”—this might have been the ...Read More

April 6, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

There aren’t many publicly traded toy companies. Most are giant manufacturers—Mattel, Hasbro, Jakks Pacific—that offer up juicy bits of data about themselves only when mandated by SEC regulations. They typically issue press releases when they’ve got something specific to promote, like a new product or a fresh licensing deal, but it’s rare they announce anything truly surprising, except for the odd acquisition now and then, and even rarer do they offer anything of real financial depth.

Then there’s Action Products, one of the few publicly traded toymakers that’s still a relatively small company. It offers up all sorts of unexpected press releases—usually, it seems, in an effort to give its stock price a boost in a much more overt way than its bigger competition. ...Read More

March 9, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (4)

A small toymaker posed a simple enough question to me today: "I'm looking for a safe factory in China. Can you help me?" 

I'll always be the first to admit that the sourcing end of the business is not one we here at Playthings spend time looking at. The rationale for that being our primary audience is retailers and that the overseas factories American "manufacturers" use to make the toys that our retail readers eventually buy from aren't much — or any — of a concern to the average merchant. Were I a retailer, I'd generally envision myself being trusting enough...Read More

November 14, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

The U.S. Census Bureau today announced bad news from the nation’s retailers: advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for October were down a record 2.8 percent from September to $363.7 billion and off 4 percent from October 2007.

It was the overall retail industry’s worst monthly drop since falling 2.65 percent in November 2001, a stall attributed to anxieties after that year’s terrorist attacks.

Removing food service figures from the tallied showed that retail trade sales were even worse—down 3.1 percent in October from September 2008, and off 5 percent versus October 2007. Particularly hard hit were motor vehicle and auto parts dealers, with combined sales down 23.4 percent from October 2007, and furniture and home furnishings stores, where sales slipped 13.5 percent.

There’s a sil...Read More