Retail Interview - with Paul Wohl, CEO of

Ringing the changes

Clare Turner chats to Paul Wohl, CEO of Essex retailer Argosy Toys, about trading through the pandemic, new products and being proactive

Argosy Toys has been open continuously since 1947, making it one of the oldest independent toy shops in the UK.

Based in the Essex town of Westcliff-on-Sea, the business was bought by CEO Paul Wohl’s parents back in the 1980s. Paul has been working in the store for 34 years, since he was 14 years old. He recalls: “I helped out after school, on Saturdays, and during school holidays, and became more and more involved every year. Then I went to college and started working in my own business doing something else. But in 2000 my dad said to me, ‘mum’s got to go into hospital for an operation - you couldn’t give us a hand in the shop for a week, could you?’ I said: ‘Of course I can.’ And I’m still here!” He describes Argosy Toys Like most of us “ as a traditional toy shop. “We deal with Hasbro and Mattel and do a lot of business with little toy shops, we’re Melissa & Doug, LEGO and Galt completely - the companies that are the stuffed to the ‘safer bets’, I guess,” he says. “Obviously, we do ‘go modern’ rafters with but I don’t like to go too far product 365 out on a whim. I try and stay away from very low margin products because I don’t know days a year ” if we necessarily have the turnover to handle them very well. By the time you’re the same price as the majors, you’re on 15% or 20%, and that doesn’t work for us little guys.”

Other key brands stocked

Guess what…

Argosy Toys is spread over two fl oors: 2,000sq ft downstairs and 1,200sq ft upstairs. In 1947 the store was opened from the front room of a shop that had previously traded as the Gas Light and Coke Company until 1939. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the shop was extended forwards, backwards and upwards and had a climbing frame showroom and dolls hospital upstairs. The upstairs closed in 1985 and was used as a stockroom until July 2020, when Paul reopened it as a showroom for bicycles, LEGO, Micro Scooters, roller-skates, Trybike 3 in 1 balance bikes, helmets, Games Workshop, Meccano, Airfi x, Hornby, Scalextric, Gravitrax, Geomag and skateboards.

are Gibsons, Galt, Depesche, Ravensburger and Brio. “Like most of us little toy shops, we’re completely stuffed to the rafters with product 365 days a year,” Paul says. “I don’t look at how much is in stock - ever - because it probably would give me a heart attack! If we sell it, we get some more.”

His product categories are education, outdoor, collectables, creative & science, LEGO & build, plush, role play, small worlds, baby & preschool, books, and games & puzzles. He describes his core performers as construction, baby & preschool, education, craft, and wooden (“we do loads of wooden railways”).

Argosy Toys is a member of the Toymaster buying group, “so we’ve got access to about 150 suppliers, but we deal with 70 to 80,” Paul says. “There’s a couple of suppliers that we deal with direct as well, such as Micro Scooters.”

So how has trading been over the past 12 months? “We’re very fortunate because about fi ve years ago we set up an all-singing, all-dancing website,” he says. “For the fi rst couple of years, it didn’t make us a single penny. In fact, it probably lost us money. But more and more customers were saying, ‘I looked on your website before I came here and you had this, so I’ve come to get it’. So I thought, well, the website is worth keeping,

because people are using it as an upto-date evolving catalogue of what’s in my shop.

“You’ll find about 5,000 to 6,000 live products on there. It really is an ‘argosy’ of products. People ask, ‘why are you called Argosy Toys?’ and I explain that when the shop opened in 1947, ‘argosy’ was still a word in common use. If you look it up, the definition is a rich cargo or a treasureladen ship or flotilla. So it means lots of lovely things, all in one place. We sell an ‘argosy’ of toys here. Of course Argos came along in the ’70s and from then on, its TV advertising has been doing me a world of good!”

A rollercoaster ride

Overall, he describes 2020 as “a rollercoaster ride”. He recollects that in Lockdown 1, educational products sold very quickly: lots of pens, pencils, workbooks and wipe-clean books for teaching pen skills. Plus, “paddling pools went crazy and jigsaw puzzles didn’t even touch the floor - they were in and out”.

The shop opened again on 15 June and didn’t go into Lockdown 2 because it sells, services and repairs bikes (categorised as ‘essential retail’). But when non-essential shops were closed across much of southern England on 19 December, Paul couldn’t get bikes because his suppliers had run out, “so we had to shut. It felt like the rug had been pulled out from under us, because the last week of December is always exceptional. You can do two months’ turnover in that one week; the stocking filler trade is brilliant. That hurt. I was stocked up on board games: usually I sell 100 to 150 between Christmas and New Year because everybody thinks ‘oh, so-and-sos coming round, we’ll pop out and get a funky new party game,’ but obviously no-one could visit each other. And of course people weren’t ordering online very much because they didn’t think they’d get it delivered in time.”

This year, the website has “really come into its own”. Paul describes trading in Q1 as good, with Argosy Toys fulfilling 40% of online orders via click and collect, 40% by local home delivery (in the company’s van) and 20% via Royal Mail. He is keen to ensure his ecommerce and social media platforms work well together and is a proactive content creator.

“We focus on a range every day, get a good photo or two of it, put it on our social media pages with a link, and it seems to work quite nicely - even if it’s stuff that we’ve had in stock for ages or it’s a very well established brand like LEGO or Brio,” he says. “Reminding people you’ve got it doesn’t hurt. And then you get a few little orders for it. I put photos up on Instagram all the time because I’m always trying to remind people we’re still here. You can’t have any shame with self-promotion when you’re an independent retailer. You can’t just say, ‘oh well, we’re here - we’ll wait for customers to come back to us. You’ve got to remind them every day, otherwise they’ll fall away.”

Paul also used Q1 to revamp the store’s interior and exterior. Projects included installing a new staff kitchen, repairing the roof, and completing “lots of those jobs that you can’t really do when you’re open because it’s so disruptive”. He introduced more middle racks and shelving units, so people now have room to safely socially distance. And he addressed what he calls “the creep”. He explains: “Over the years, suppliers send you stands and spinners and before long, your whole floor is taken up with them. We thought: ‘There’s nowhere to walk, let alone keep away from someone else.’ So we had a big chuck-out, which has given us more space. We refurbished and reset the shop ready for lots of new stock coming from the Toymaster spring/ summer catalogue.”

So what product launches have impressed him so far this year? He Not just Online travel site TripAdvisor has listed Argosy Toys a shop… as one of 12 ‘things to do’ in Westcliff-onSea, following multiple positive reviews posted by travellers which rate the retailer as ‘excellent’. Comments include ‘a great independent local toy shop, plenty of choice and value for money’ and ‘an absolutely great shop to visit; lots of stock and the staff are only too pleased to help with any enquiry’. Paul says: “We are an experience, as well as a shop. People with children treat trips to a lot of little shops as a break to the day. They think ‘let’s just go to that shop: it’s something to do, it’s free, and we can walk around and get a few ideas’… they don’t necessarily come to buy anything. It breaks up the morning before lunch for parents with toddlers.”

highlights Shining Fates from Pokémon and LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Friends (“which have been tremendous”), along with Hasbro’s new Play-Doh lines.

Best sellers

Current good sellers include LEGO and Gibsons puzzles, but his top performers are Pokémon and plush items such as Squishmallows and the Ty Squish-a-Boos. And, he adds, “we’re seeing signs of a skateboard craze. Whenever I drive round and see a few kids together, they’re often holding skateboards - not always my ones though. I must admit I’m a little bit upset about that; I might stop and have a word with them! Bikes have been good as well and scooters have been amazing.”

Looking back over the lockdown periods, Paul reflects that “my baby product was probably the hardest thing to sell, because a lot of people like to come in and see it in the flesh - that’s what clinches the deal. We’re one of those independents that loves to be heavily weighted in the baby and nursery section. We didn’t used to be, but we found that if you catch the customers really young, they’ll stay with you. When parents want a rattle, a shaker, a mobile or something very high-tech and you’ve got it, then they’ll come back to you for the next thing, and the next. And as the children grow, the parents keep coming to you.”

He has noticed that “we lose kids at a younger age now than we ever used to: some at eight or nine, some we keep until they’re teenagers, and some come back as young adults to buy Warhammer and the older LEGO. It’s fascinating. I’ve got customers that I used to deal with when they came in with their children and now, I’m dealing with them and their grandchildren, which is really nice. I’ve yet to have one with a great-grandchild, but I’m probably not far off. That’s what comes of 34 years behind the same counter, I think!”

So what’s next for Argosy Toys? “Honestly, I think we’re just going to have to take each day, week, and month as it comes, and not necessarily get our hopes up that we can remain open because who knows, really? We might have another lockdown. We all thought it was going to be over after number one, didn’t we? So I’m not getting my hopes up. But I’m very glad we’ve got a website. It’s been an interesting 2021 so far, I’d say. It’s still a bit of a rollercoaster ride - but not as much as last year. So I’m going to carry on trying to navigate the hand we’ve been dealt.”