Company Profile - Golden Bear

It’s game on for Golden Bear

45-year-old Toys & Games specialist Golden Bear has undergone something of an evolution over recent years. Previously best known for being a preschool specialist, the company has diversified into new areas and categories including Games and Sports, with considerable success. As it heads into 2025 with a raft of new launches and an umbrella branding campaign that will consolidate each offering for retailers, Rachael Simpson-Jones sat down with Becky Matthews, Golden Bear’s Sales and Marketing director, Kate Goss, creative manager and head of Games, and Becs Henchey, Product and Innovation director, to discuss the company’s strategy and what they hope to achieve as it moves into a new golden age.

When Becky Matthews first joined Golden Bear, she tells me, the company was 100% dedicated to Infant and Pre-School toys based on The Snowman, Sooty, Noddy and Teletubbies. Its early pre-school plush and play sets were a hit and set the company up for success in the sector, but since then - particularly over the past four or five years – Golden Bear has gradually expanded its offering with own-brand and own-IP introductions. However, this is a fact some retailers and consumers in the Toy industry remain blissfully unaware of.

Nowadays, Golden Bear stands on four key business pillars: Games, Sports, Girls and, never one to forget its roots, Infant & Pre-School. Thanks to its own-brand ranges, the company is now also able to turn its attentions to global expansion. Previously, its focus was on the UK & Irish markets due to its dependence on licensed toys; Barry Hughes, Golden Bear MD, once told Toy World that the company was “at the mercy of whether licensors can get content onto the right platforms, in each of the international markets.”

“We’ve undergone a significant amount of change in what is actually quite a short amount of time,” says Becs Henchey. “Our diversification has allowed us to balance the business across all four pillars, rather than only relying on one. This has been a key part of our strategy, as has our international growth. The two factors have had a huge, very positive impact on the company.”

In summer 2020, Golden Bear took a bold step into the Games category with its Trapped at-home escape-room games. Since then, the portfolio has grown rapidly. Among multiple others, the family challenge game Wheel You Dare and Fart Yoga (in which you strap a gassy sloth to yourself, and attempt yoga poses without making it fart) launched last year, demonstrating the breadth of the company’s games portfolio and its family-friendly ethos. Autumn/winter 2025, meanwhile, welcomes Beak & Seek and No Brainer, plus many more.

“There’s an appetite for games out there and a real need for playfulness,” explains Kate Goss. “Our games are all about family fun. Golden Bear’s sweet spot is universally humourous games that are inclusive, bring people together and are easy to play right out of the box. We conduct a huge amount of playtesting to ensure our games are accessible to all.”

According to Becs, the development process of Golden Bear’s games has been quite the learning curve. Each new game is played repeatedly (sometimes down the pub), and the rules are read over and over again by multiple team members to check for clarity and ease of understanding. Everything is refined and stress-tested constantly, which, according to the team, is both the hardest and most joyous part of the job. And for 2025, Golden Bear has created a new sub-brand, Bear Faced Games, under which all its games will sit. The new brand logo will be on all packing for 2025’s new launches – there are seven coming down the pipeline this year - and can be viewed (or played) at London Toy Fair.

One of the company’s best-selling games, the football quiz game Fanzone, neatly brings us onto Golden Bear’s next core pillar – Sports. The company made waves in the sector with Smart Ball Counter Ball back in 2019 and has gone on to expand the range with Skills Ball, Kick Tracker and last year’s major hit, Soccer Bot, which has been a resounding success both domestically and internationally.

The importance and health benefits of physical exercise are known and understood by parents/guardians and health professionals alike, and Becs says physicality plays a core role in the development of Golden Bear’s sports toys. (Some of its action games also focus on physical play, such as Hyper Dash.) At the same time, the Smart Ball range offers kids the ability to practise their football skills whatever the weather – so Soccer Bot was created specifically for indoor use. It was also made to be useable in smaller spaces, so kids living in flats or compact houses have the same opportunity to hone their football skills as those with access to larger areas or training facilities.

“The Smart Ball brand is hugely giftable, and with consumers crying out for giftable sports toys it’s no wonder it has been such a huge success for us,” enthuses Becs. “We’ve brought technology and sports together to help kids elevate their game, to improve their skills and better themselves as sportspeople, whether it’s with Kick Tracker, which is a really small product used for keepie-uppies, or Soccer Bot, our hero line. It takes a long time to bring technical products such as Soccer Bot to market, but we’re pleased to say there’s a huge amount to come from us in this category this year.”

Golden Bear’s Sports category is also set to benefit from a rebrand this year, with all products – including this year’s big introduction, Power Launcher - being brought under the new Strikesphere banner. Again, expect to see a new logo on the packing of all existing Smart Ball products and new launches at London Toy Fair. The rebrand offers retailers the opportunity to really showcase Strikesphere toys as the standout proposition that they are. There are plenty of outdoor and sports products in the marketplace, but Golden Bear believes it is one of the only companies to truly combine sports with play in a way kids so obviously love.

“If you think about it, this is what we’ve done elsewhere in our portfolio too,” says Becky. “Games like Fart Yoga and Farty Freddie, for example, combine plush toys with gaming, our brand-new Soccer Dash combines sports with gaming, and TattooMeez, the brainchild of Becs and her team, combines plush with arts & crafts to create something new and unusual. One of our strengths is rooting out these new areas and answering unaddressed consumer needs.”

Behind the scenes, Golden Bear has looked at the structure of the business and created workstreams that allow each team to focus on one specialism and the brands that fall within it. These highly product-focused teams are leaning into the creation of own-brand and own-IP ranges, which gives Golden Bear the flexibility it needs to decide where to go with its products in terms of development, and where to market and sell them. To use Kate’s words, it makes Golden Bear the master of its own destiny.

Licensing still plays a fundamental part in the company’s ongoing success, with its Infant & Pre-School ranges all based upon beloved properties including the evergreen bedtime favourite, In The Night Garden; Hey Duggee (which is set to benefit from new content this year); Supertato (product launching spring/summer 2025); Mr Tumble; Sooty and Waffle the Wonder Dog, which has seen an uptick in online searches. Multiple conversations are also ongoing with other licensors, which should lead to some great new deals announced in 2025.

As touched upon earlier, Golden Bear has made huge strides internationally in recent years. The company enjoys strong distribution partnerships across a raft of countries, which have helped exponentially expand the retail presence of brands such as Curlimals (the range sold out in 56 territories), while it is also forming direct partnerships in the USA with retailers including Target, Walmart and Amazon.com. The team is also working on enhancing its presence in the German market, as well as its relationships with existing distributors.

Speaking of relationships, Golden Bear works very closely with the inventor community and builds on its ties with it year after year via its internal Inventor Relations team. This approach has borne much fruit for the company both in Games and Toys, particularly in the Girls space. Consumer insight is also vital to product development; very much in line with its specialised workstream approach, there’s a whole team dedicated to monitoring the marketplace for trends and consumer demands. This insight is then fed back to the wider teams, with a view to ultimately transforming it into another best-selling range.

One of the company’s biggest launches for 2025 is Foodibles, an on-trend, collectible scented plush range that sees everyday animals given a foodie twist (the Banana Dog is my personal favourite). The team has very high hopes for this adorable new range, which it says taps into the demand for plush based on both animals and food. The team is also preparing to relaunch Twisty Petz, part of a distribution agreement with Super Impulse. This is a brand with heritage in the marketplace and Golden Bear feels the time is right for it to make its comeback. Retail feedback for the refreshed range has been very positive.

Heading into the new year, it would appear that the company’s more balanced approach to product development and core categories has set it up for a strong year. Becs, Kate and Becky all speak very highly of the Golden Bear team and believe there are still numerous opportunities out there to go after. On Games, Kate is embarking on a quest to find next year’s games and getting stuck into playtesting, while Becky is excited to see how the Strikesphere brand lands at retail. There are also big plans afoot for Strikesphere consumer awareness campaigns, devised by the company’s in-house content creators and digital marketers, as well as global retail support. Ultimately, the goal is to deliver yet another best-selling brand.

Golden Bear remains committed to its sustainability pledge. The company has been on a long journey to lower its carbon footprint and transition its ranges to more eco-friendly materials. Its plush toy filling has been made from recycled plastic bottles for many years, and the fabric outers are now recycled material too. All packaging is FSC-certified and printed with soy-based ink, plastic windows and blisters have been significantly reduced, internal packaging ties are made of paper The Telford office has solar panels and electric car charging points and has a ‘zero to landfill’ policy. Golden Bear also challenges its suppliers and logistics partners to come up with solutions that will further bring down emissions and its impact on the environment.

Like most things worth doing, change doesn’t happen overnight. This is true of Golden Bear’s sustainability efforts, and of its evolution from Pre-School specialist to committed all-round toy supplier. But when everyone is behind the change – and everyone at Golden Bear is – then good things are sure to follow. And if one thing is sure, it’s that the toy industry should be following Golden Bear’s progress very closely indeed.