Out of the Toy Box

May 27, 3009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (3)

I was walking around SoHo in lower Manhattan yesterday when I noticed the Kidrobot store.  I had heard a lot about Kidrobot but had never actually been in one of their stores (they have 4, one each in NY, Miami, San Francisco and Los Angeles) so I decided to go in. 

 Kidrobot deals in ...Read More

July 1, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Tribes of Toy Nation: The Researchers

 

Access to good data can make the difference between success and failure in a business. The NPD Group is a worldwide research firm that tracks consumer buying data.   Toys are just one of a number of product categories they follow. 

 

Though well known to, and used by, a number of toy manufacturers and retailers, NP...Read More

June 29, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (5)

I am not a prophet but I am going to step out and make a prediction: We are seeing the beginning of the end for the traditional big box retailer with its huge suburban footprint. All of this talk about the recession is hiding the fact that the Internet is inexorably eating away at customer counts. All that has to happen is for a retailer to lose just enough customers for it to be no longer feasible to sustain the cost of supporting a store’s physical infrastructure.

 

Truth be told, big box retailers are clumsy artifacts of another age. ...Read More

June 29, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

The rapidly growing Mexican-American market is going bi-lingual and bi-cultural. At least that seems to be the case according to an interesting piece in the June 18, 2009 New York Times about the expanding Mexican-American market in the United States. Entitled “Thriving on Mexican-American Market,” the piece states that “[a] new economy is emerging that builds on the economic relationship between the countries."

 

What interested me about the article was...Read More

June 26, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

As I have written in the past, it is my strong belief that video game sales in 2008 did more to hurt traditional toy sales than the recession.  They were up 18% in the 4^th quarter of last year so you can imagine how that contributed to the toy industry’s 3% decline.

 

Due to their impact on toy sales, I have been tracking video game sales this year. As we have been seeing for the last few months, video games sales have been steadily declining. The latest data shows that May sales were off by 23% year over year.

...Read More