Retail Interview
Channel Shopping
Situated on Jersey Island, Bambola Toymaster - the second generation family run independent toy shop has been supplying the channel island’s locals with the latest toys and trends for some 60 years. ToyNews catches up with owner, John Testori, to talk about the shop’s past, present, and future
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t’s without irony that John Testori, the second generation owner of Jersey’s popular Bambola Toymaster, tells us that his father was working as a barman in a cocktail bar, when he first struck upon the idea of opening a toy shop. What sparked the idea has been lost to memory. But then again, it was 60 years and we dare say a fair few Manhattans ago. That was in 1961. Right now, in 2021, and it is John Testori, the son of the man known to local customers and staff simply as Mr T, who fronts the Jersey toy shop. Popular as ever, the store has seen it all over those 60 years; the ups and downs of the toy industry and retail landscape, watched the UK both enter and leave the EU, and navigated a global pandemic that turned retail on its head, and yet it still lives to tell the tale. Its generation-spanning history certainly proves one thing; toy folk are a resilient stock, indeed. 28 | toy news | Autumn/Winter 2021
“I joined the business in 1978 as an interim job while looking for my ‘proper job’, recalls Testori. “43 years on and I am still trying to get my first job interview.” Testori - with his wife Sharon - took on the toy shop in 1992, when Mr T finally retired and sold the business on to his already industry-initiated son. In the hands of its next generation, Bambola Toy Shop has continued to play an integral part in the success and vibrancy of its local high street. “The Parade Store has been in the same location for all of our 60 years,” explains Testori. Its name draws on the family’s own Italian roots. Bambola means ‘doll’ in Italian and in its earliest years, sourced much of its stock from the southern European country. Testori notes that it was this that helped the store standout in the early days, billing its collection of large display dolls and electric ride-on vehicles - toys that might seem commonplace today - as ‘very avant-garde’ for the time.
“We have always tried to stay ahead of new trends and introduce new ranges in store, which has set us apart from competitors,” says Testori. It’s a modus operandi that Bambola carries with it today, whether with its historic Parade store, or its sister shop one which has moved locations a couple of times now over the course of its stay, before settling on its Don Street spot for the past 16 years. And it will no doubt continue to be the way in which Bambola operates when the toy shop makes a rather major move in the coming weeks. “We have now purchased the Don Street premises,” says Testori. “So long term it will be our main location and when we consolidate the shops, it will become 50 per cent larger at that location.” From making his first solo buying trip for the family toy shop at the age of just 17 (John recalls having to make the journey to the January Harrogate Toy Fair following an
