THE BIG INTERVIEW BANDAI UK
Building a solid
foundation This month TnP talks to Bandai UK CEO Nic Aldridge, who is celebrating 20 years in the toy industry What’s your background? I’m a toy industry lifer! I started my career at Vivid Imaginations in 2001 working across various operations, sales and marketing roles. I then moved to Flair Leisure Products as their marketing director in 2011 before I joined Bandai in 2017.
Tell us a bit about Bandai UK. We are the UK toy division of the Bandai Namco Group, which is a huge multinational, multi-industry entertainment group with an annual turnover of over $7bn.
What changes have you made in light of the restrictions that Covid-19 has created? From day one of lockdown in March 2020, we moved to working full-time from home. Our offices are based in Richmond with many of our team taking public transport, so we wanted to make sure everyone had the safest working conditions possible, and in the short term that was working from home. We’ve spent a lot of time and effort ensuring that our offices are Covidsafe, and we are now open again for limited numbers to be working in the office together.
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How much of your workforce are working from home and what challenges does this present?
The toy industry definitely follows the maxim of 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration
The whole team have been working from home with minor exceptions of reopening or reclosing, depending on the government advice. All in all, the team has performed exceptionally well given these challenges. But there is nothing like the personal touch for team spirit, so being able to go back into the office again will definitely improve working conditions.
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What opportunities has the pandemic created?
Some of our science and educational properties have really thrived under lockdown conditions, CoComelon Musical which has been a real positive Tractor: Watch your for us. In our plans and strategy child re-enact one for 2020 we had a strong focus of their favourite for ecommerce development, CoComelon videos so we were in the right place - Old MacDonald and time to capitalise on this with the CoComelon planned focus. Musical Tractor.
Suitable for children aged from 18 months, little ones can play and learn about farms, animals, and tractors.
How has Brexit affected your business? Like everyone else who exports to Europe, we encountered some difficulties at the start, but we seem to have navigated these now. It has definitely added another layer of cost and administration to our business, which isn’t particularly welcome!
How do you see the company developing over the next 12 months? Although 2020 was a very challenging year, it was a year of growth for Bandai. This has led us to build a very solid foundation for 2021 and beyond. We are in a very fortunate position where a number of our brands are really firing so we are carefully planning strong growth over the new few years.
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Will you be looking to expand into other categories in the near future? Our core toy categories are boys, girls, preschool and science/educational and these will continue and, where possible, expand. We also have a very strong kidult business, and this will be another key focus of growth and expansion for us over the next few years.
What are your core goals for this year? To build on the solid growth of 2020 and achieve further strong growth in 2021.
Where do you see opportunities for growth? We have huge opportunities with Tamagotchi, which has been growing in popularity again over the past few years, plus, we have a new product launch - Tamagotchi Pix - and the 25th anniversary to talk about! Both our CoComelon and Miraculous business goes from strength to strength and keeping up with demand is going to be the big challenge! Plus, our kidult business with collector/specialist retailers reopening for business will help us drive continued growth here.
toysnplaythings.media 28/05/2021 19:35
