ToyTopic: With Ashley Holman

Almost a year on from its debut, ToyTopic is going from strength to strength, building its brand portfolio, agreements, retailer listings and sales. LSB sits down with co-founder Ashley Holman to find out how the last 12 months have gone and what the plans are for the future.

Making a splash

Partnerships with Wowwee and Hasbro kick started ToyTopic when the company launched in September 2021. The team had been busy working behind the scenes to set the foundations, but formalised themselves to the industry and began trading under the ToyTopic name just one year ago. And so far, so good. Co-founder, Ashley Holman, tells LSB: “Overall, we’re incredibly pleased with the way things are going, which is a positive and a bit of a relief. The last seven or eight months, the main focus has been the organisation itself, so the back office team, the processes, new systems, and really taking us from a true start-up, to a business with many ranges, with multiple retailers supporting us, so now we are investing in the company to be able to deliver that. “And that’s all helped us create an amazing amount of business that we’ve generated over the last year, and hopefully more to come.” The business created to date has included a raft of new brands, as Ashley explains: “When we did our strategic partnership with Wowwee, that gave us brands from Hasbro and Paramount. In addition to that, we had our own Peppa Pig licence from Hasbro and they’ve been very pleased with how we’ve done with that.

We’ve now extended the rights into new categories and added new brands as well.

“Without calling out specific products, we’re calling it interactive and novelty toys. And we now have that as ToyTopic across Peppa, we’ve taken on My Little Pony from Hasbro too. We’ve got our own agreement with Paramount now that includes PAW Patrol, Blues Clues and Baby Shark. And we have an agreement with Penguin Ventures for Peter

Rabbit. All of those new ranges will be hitting shelves for spring next year.”

Alongside the impressive new properties,

Wow factor

Ashley credits ToyTopic’s partnership with Wowwee as one of the key factors to the company’s strong launch: “We’re really proud of the relationship with Wowwee; that really was the catalyst to us being able to announce ourselves and say we’re here, look at this great partnership and look at the great products, and it sort of fast forwarded us as a business. It allowed us to jump about five years into the future as a new business.”

ToyTopic has also generated extraordinary results for its existing offering. Ashley furthers: “The Baby Shark toy range from Wowwee was already on the market and in the last year, we’ve doubled the size of the business and tripled the retail listings. We have a great working relationship with Paramount and to be able to take a significant range and double the business and triple the retail landscape has been a real highlight.” Other achievements include an award nomination and boost in sales thanks to the recent heatwave. “Under the Wowwee relationship we launched the Hasbro outdoor games and we’re incredibly thrilled to have been announced as a Licensing Awards finalist in September for that range,” Ashley enthuses. “To be nominated for something you are part of and as a new business is amazing. Fingers crossed for the win, but just to be nominated is fantastic. “Launching that range at retail, particularly given the heat we’ve had, has been amazing. It started off a little slow at the beginning of the summer, but with the heatwave, the orders on Amazon have come through thick and fast, so we launched at the right time.” Despite the successes, ToyTopic is careful to remain focused on its area of expertise. Ashley says: “We’re just carving out a bit of a niche for ourselves and finding opportunities that there’s not loads of people doing. We’re not trying to go up against the big guys, we’re still very small, but because we are so small, one of the positives is that we can move really quickly.” Being small brings other benefits, too: “Because we only have a few different categories, we focus entirely on them, rather than having a thousand categories and a thousand brands where things can get diluted. There are benefits to working with large companies and small and at the moment, everything we are doing, we’re seeing the benefits of being small and nimble and quick.” Looking to the future, Ashley concludes: “We’re planning to keep doing what we’re doing. At the moment, it’s going very well. Obviously we are shipping loads of product now for Q4, so fundamentally we need to make sure we deliver for that Q4 period. On that basis, just set ourselves up for the new ranges and more of the same. We’re still investing in more back-office staff to keep that developing.” He jokes: “2023, the plan is don’t muck it up.”