Company Profile
Toynamics
exceeding
expectations January 2021 marked Toynamics UK & Ireland’s first full year of trading, having undergone a significant rebrand at the start of last year. Despite the obvious challenges, the company has enjoyed double digit growth in 2020 and in 2021 has seen the same level of increase. Toynamics - at its core a distributor of brands including Hape, Skip Hop, Nebulous Stars, Dinosart, Nanoblock and Timio - continues to grow its retail distribution, ranges and reputation as a quality onestop-shop for toys. John Baulch and Rachael Simpson-Jones sat down with MD David Allan and head of marketing Emma Damerell to discuss the company’s outlook on what lies ahead.
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nder its Hape parent company, Toynamics’ portfolio of brands is expanding all the time, Wooden toy brand Hape, craft and creative brand Nebulous Stars, DinosArt, nursery and baby line Skip Hop and construction range Nanoblocks have now been joined by innovative audio brand Timio, while a high-quality metal bike range is also set to join the portfolio soon. Yet more big news is also on the horizon, but – as is so often the case - Toy World has been sworn to secrecy for the time being. Considering the tender age of this company, coming through the pandemic the way it has is deeply impressive. Fortnightly forecast and budget meetings, held throughout the year from March 2020, consistently under-called the company’s performance, as sales surpassed all expectations and brands took off with consumers. This was a pleasant surprise for David, who had expected sales to be challenged and the move to online shopping to impact the business somewhat. And while Toynamics’ brands proved themselves during the pandemic, David’s team did too - the appointment of Emma as head of marketing is highlighted as one of the most important decisions the company made during the disruption caused by Covid-19. “We needed to push our brand marketing; previously, we were mostly reliant on simply getting
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our salespeople ‘out there’, but they didn’t have that marketing support they needed,” explains David. “This year though, we’re a transformed company, with professional marketing in place and the appointment of Playtime PR, a new sales team, new products which have been freshly categorised, and the addition of new brands that will give us a firm foothold in new and expanding categories. We’ve massively improved our structure over the past few months, and our position with it.” The biggest wooden toy supplier in the world, parent company Hape International owns three Chinese factories (and is in the process of building a fourth), as well as a bamboo forest used to create sustainable toys crafted from the fast-growing, renewable natural resource. The company’s size and strength means Hape enjoys preferential deals on containers from China, and while there is inevitably still pressure on logistics, Toynamics is confident of receiving its shipments quicker than most. This is a major plus for retailers hoping to secure stock in a year that is likely to see serious shortages of toys, especially as we get nearer Christmas. David says the company has a great many containers arriving each month, guaranteeing good stock holding into the latter part of the year. However, with containers costing anywhere between $16,000-$22,000 each, and the
