Indie Opinion - Diary of a Toy Shop by Amanda Alexander, owner of Giddy Goat Toys

Diary of a toy shop

Amanda Alexander, owner of Giddy Goat Toys in Didsbury, Manchester, believes there will always be a cherished spot on the high street for the indie toy shop

Like the rest of the world, I’ve speculated with friends, family and colleagues about whether life will ever be sane again. And from a business perspective, I’ve wondered what the future will hold for my little Manchester-based independent toy shop.

I’ve been incredibly lucky personally and in business over the past 18 months or so. Plenty of friends have had Covid to varying degrees (but thankfully all relatively mild) and professionally, I’ve done okay through the online sales I’ve got via Down Your High Street, OnBuy and my own website, thanks to traffi c from Clearpay and Klarna.

Web sales

A year prior to signing up with these platforms, I had barely any web sales at all. So I realise how very fortunate I’ve been. But as online sales started to drop off once we hit the new year, I knew that we had to be able to reopen the shop soon if I wanted to thrive and not just tick over.

I used government grants to upgrade the shop - organising new LED light panels, an upgrade to fi bre optic broadband, a new card terminal and lots and lots of stock - but I honestly didn’t know what to expect: whether shoppers would fl ock in, or whether they’d all have converted to Amazon during the long, cold and bleak lockdown 3.

April 12 arrived and although I was excited at reopening, I didn’t go to work. It was my son’s birthday and, as a family, we’ve always taken the day off as his I feel really strongly that “

there is a place for the independent toy shop on our streets: a place just for kids, where they can browse and learn to interact with

‘the lady behind the counter'“

birthday is within the school holidays. So I left my two most experienced staff members to reopen.

Ironically, my child being now 15, he rose late and decided he didn’t want to spend his birthday with his parents after all. Our plan to take him shopping was ditched in favour of him playing basketball with his mates in the park, followed by pizza in the garden. So my husband and I cycled to Manchester’s Trafford Centre (I had a wristwatch that needed fi xing) without the birthday boy.

Reopening day

Once there, we shook our heads at the queue for Primark in an otherwise fairly quiet shopping centre, which left me worried about how my own shop was doing - though of course I checked in with the staff a few times. It’s the curse of the working mother - and I say mother, not parent, quite purposely here - that you often feel you’re in the wrong place: you should be at work when you’re with the kids and vice versa.

And I did feel bad that I wasn’t at work on the fi rst day of reopening but my marvellous staff did good, and takings were great - around four times what I would expect for a normal weekday. The rest of the week was pretty good, with takings two or three times more than those usual for weekdays, so I felt relieved and thankful.

Then the kids went back to school and sales plummeted below what I would have expected for an average weekday. I’m in a WhatsApp group with a lovely bunch of indie toy shops and the other English toy shops said the same, which was both a relief but sad.

Was reopening week just a blip of bored kids and parents? Would people be slipping down the side streets of our provincial towns? Or was there going to be a nation of panicked shopkeepers? The Scottish shops reopened with similar stories; their kids were already back at school so there wasn’t the mad rush we’d enjoyed in our opening week.

So here we are, a few more weeks on, and things have settled back down. Despite it having been largely cold and wet since we reopened, sales have been buoyant and I’m hopeful that once kids’ parties start up again that will help enormously, as party presents have been the mainstay of my shop over the years. I think we will have lost some customers to the convenience of shopping by smartphone but we will hopefully have gained some homeworking lunchtime shoppers.

I’m enjoying having people back in the shop, listening to children getting giddy about the toys, working out what they can afford with their ‘spends’, and chatting with my regulars. It’s also been lovely seeing reps face-to-face again and fi nding out about the new lines that are due out.

A place just for kids

I feel strongly that there is a place for the independent toy shop on our streets: a place just for kids, where they can browse, learn to interact with ‘the lady behind the counter’, and learn to budget and negotiate - I’ve seen some genuinely splendid negotiating between children and parents. A place they can be nostalgic about in the future.

I’m positive for myself and my fellow indie toy shops but I’ve also learned that you can’t have all your eggs in one basket. Online shopping is only going to increase, but thanks to the indiesupporting marketplace websites such as Down Your High Street and OnBuy, hopefully little shops like mine can elbow their way into the online mosh pit and carry on bringing fun, colour and joy to our local high streets.