Special Feature - Bildo

Bildo a passion for creation

Founded in 1989, Greek toy company Bildo has grown from a domestic manufacturer and supplier of building blocks to a globally distributed and highly respected maker of quality licensed toys spanning blocks, roleplay, dough and cosmetics. Toy World spoke to Georgios Fotopoulos, commercial director, and Savvas Mouratidis, CEO, whose father George founded the company more than three decades ago.

How did Bildo start?

Bildo is a family-owned toy business, one of very few in Greece. It all started back in 1989 when George Mouratidis, Savvas’ father – who was always very interested in toys despite having trained professionally as a pharmacist – decided to take the bold step of starting his own toy company in partnership with his son. His first ever product was a bucket of building blocks.

When you launched, what were the strengths of the company and its core ranges?

What makes us stand out, and the reason we’ve weathered all the challenges thrown our way, is that George Mouratidis is a very hard worker. He never quit or backed down because he loves what he does – he’s 75 years old now and still spends a lot of his time playing with Bildo toys. His passion for toys has never wavered, and that passion has filtered down and through to other members of the family too, who have joined him in the business and grown up with it.

The family is heavily involved in the day-to-day running of the business, and not purely from a managerial ‘oversight’ aspect. Each member of the 65+ strong Bildo team is considered part of the family and treated as such, and this helps bring out the best in them. When it comes to business, there’s no ‘us and them’ mentality and the atmosphere is very welcoming as a result. When we look at company growth and strength, this is vital. We’re in an area of Greece that’s quite rural, Veria, and Bildo has made the conscious decision to remain here - where it all started - supporting the local community and providing employment. It could have been easier for us to move to somewhere like central Thessaloniki, which is a big, densely populated seaside city, but our team has been selected from the local area and leaving them would mean losing that talent: our ‘newest’ employee has been with us six years. We value loyalty, from their side as well as from ours.

How has the company evolved since the early days?

From its earliest days, when George and Savvas were simply producing blocks, Bildo now has presence all around the world and boasts some huge licensing collaborations with the likes of Mattel, Hasbro, MGA Entertainment, Disney and many more. It’s been an intense and exciting journey for Bildo. Our original generic blocks were a big success; our customers could see their retail potential in terms of enhancing their toy offering with new play patterns. This success ultimately opened the door to the world of licensing. Our first licensing deal was inked with Disney in 1991, starting with Disney Princess, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Frozen and more. For a young company that was also new to licensing, this was a massive deal for us and really helped kickstart the licensing side of the business. Sanrio followed with Hello Kitty, Hasbro with Peppa Pig, and Mattel came on board in 2017 with Barbie, Hot Wheels and Fisher Price.

In 1992, Bildo entered into Girls Role-Play toys with categories like cooking, baking and beauty, with Boys Role-Play following suit in 1995, and more recently the company invested in tooling to start manufacturing dough and cosmetics. Factory capacity doubles each year, from machinery and moulds to production and output, and now we’re entering a new year off the back of aggressive +40% YOY growth.

Bildo’s expansion is set to continue, too. We’re always looking for new categories we can move into, as well as new territories. Our products are now in retailers across EMEA, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, giving us a truly global footprint in over 620 stores, and this year we’re also exploring North America further.

What have been the key developments that led to the company growing from a domestic supplier to the Greek market into a major global supplier?

In the early years, our licensing deals were limited to local activity in southeast Europe – Spain, Italy and Greece – but in 2017 we struck up a major collaboration in the Middle East. The year after, we saw dramatic growth and that has continued apace for the past three years despite the many challenges the entire toy industry has faced. We’ve doubled the strength of our manufacturing base, with not one but two factories now producing Bildo’s products, and we’re already looking at opening a third, so each can be dedicated to one of our core three offerings: roleplay, dough and blocks. In total, our manufacturing and warehouse premises offer floorspace of 50,000sqm.

During the company’s history there were maybe three key item developments that really helped accelerate our growth. We tapped into classic play patterns while producing toys more quickly and at a better price. At the same time, we still maintained the high quality our customers had come to expect from Bildo. These items are our kitchen play set, our workbench playset, our pre-school building block sets. More recently, we’ve seen the introduction of dough take our growth to new levels.

When our international expansion took hold, Italy was the first region we moved into, followed by Spain, the Middle East, the UK, Mexico, Australia and so on. Since 1991, Bildo has turned into a global player in toys with distribution in over 55 countries, and our customers understand and appreciate the many reasons why buying from a Greek manufacturer makes business sense.

How have the Bildo production facilities and processes changed in recent years?

Bildo always looks for what’s new and has a passion for creation, meaning constant, rolling upgrades to (and expansion of) our facilities. We invest in our manufacturing and tooling every year, and continually examine our warehousing capabilities and speed to market to ensure we stay ahead and offer our customers both quality and rapidity. We have a set six-stage process for developing toys from ideas to final product, which helps increase production efficiency while also keeping quality and attractive pricing at the heart of what we do. We also have a dedicated in-house team of five R&D specialists that works collaboratively with an expert design agency to bring our ideas to fruition. However, whether to push ahead with a concept is a decision the entire team has a say in.

Ten years ago, half of our production was in China, and half was in Greece. Currently, it’s 90% in Greece, 10% in China, and in the next two years the goal is to have 100% of our production based right here in Greece. From 2022 we’re also investing into new technology that will speed up the process even more; injection moulding so we can make toys out of any kind of plastic, larger machines capable of making items like slides and ride-ons, and upscaled dough production lines. We hope to be able to cater to any request from any customer.

Rather than maintaining a very rigid production model, we listen to the market and the needs of our customers and aim to stay flexible and adaptable. We actually have three interchangeable business models, including distribution and direct to retail according to what’s required of us. In some countries we also operate a model that focuses very much on new business opportunities across new regions. Agents identify early areas of interest which we then explore further. From 2022, we’ll also be introducing a directto-consumer model.

How important is it for Bildo to develop ‘green’ initiatives across its product range and manufacturing facilities?

We’re bringing a tangible ‘green philosophy’ to Bildo by starting the switch to new, eco-friendly materials across both our toys and packaging. We want to wholeheartedly embrace sustainability, not because it’s a trend but because, as a toy manufacturer that produces plastic items, we feel it’s an obligation to do everything we can to improve our environmental footprint. This year, we expect to be using biodegradable or eco-friendly materials in 40% of our toys, but by 2025 this will increase to 70%. Even our dough will be made with majority bio-based materials. We’re also looking at bringing in new play patterns that help kids learn about sustainability, the environment, endangered species and anything else related to safeguarding and protecting the planet.

What are the advantages of manufacturing in Greece, especially over the past year?

Your readers may be aware that over the past 10 years there’s been a lot of economic uncertainty in Greece, and keeping the Bildo manufacturing base here has been challenging at times. That said, making our toys here means we can ship all over the world, from Latin America to Australia, with European delivery in under a week.

European compliance regulations, which are more stringent than Chinese ones, also make our manufacturing a major plus point for customers, who feel that we provide an additional safety net. Since striking up global distribution partnerships all over the world, we’ve also partnered with Intertek for safety testing services and have an in-house quality team too. This is a real rarity. Long-term, we’d also like to build our own lab within one of our factories so we can carry out some of the testing on-site.

How were you able to support your retail customers during the pandemic?

It’s been a very interesting couple of years. The pandemic obviously had an impact on Bildo as it did so many other companies, but paradoxically it also presented several major opportunities we couldn’t have anticipated. Covid-19 brought many positives for the business, even while it was sweeping Europe, causing economic and social chaos.

Keeping our workers safe and healthy was of paramount importance. We immediately shut down our factories and Bildo HQ for six weeks, so we had time to learn more about the virus and put measures in place to safeguard employee welfare. Our retail partners completely understood and supported our decision; compared to companies that manufacture in China, our six-week shutdown was tame by comparison. When we returned to the factory, it was in shifts that meant everyone had plenty of space to work, and we focused only on a selection of larger accounts instead of trying to cater to all needs.

We didn’t rest on our laurels during this period. We sat down daily with our design and product development teams, our technicians and raw material providers, to ask what could be improved, streamlined, made more efficient. It was a hugely creative time for us. We identified our strengths and weaknesses and pulled together as a team to adapt our processes to the new normal.

We also found that our global distribution model was a huge benefit to us. When Europe was facing strict lockdowns and stores were closed, Latin America and Australia were open for business and ready to be supplied. As each area closed another opened, so our production never stopped – somewhere in the world, our customers had open stores and needed our toys on their shelves. We don’t feel that 2020 was a blow to us, but in 2021 we began to feel the after-effects of the pandemic: shipping disruption, raw material price increases etc. Again though, we saw some definite upsides. New customers were coming to Bildo because they were struggling with shipping costs on containers sent from China: a $25,000 container sent from China to the USA would cost only $5,000 if it came from Greece. Pricing wasn’t the only factor influencing decisions either. Companies able to afford the steep container rates still had to find ships to carry them, and there was a shortage of those too. In Greece, carriers were always available.

Finally, post-pandemic, we could offer very fast delivery on orders: a maximum of six months from start to finish. For some customers, delivery was down to two weeks. For any senior buyer in these times, Bildo became a very smart choice.

How have you expanded your operation into a global business? Can you tell us about the distribution partnerships across the world.

When Bildo began to make its way out of Spain, Italy and Greece, it was initially with the help of experienced agents with deep knowledge of their individual markets. We then fleshed this out to exclusive distribution deals with carefully selected distributors that benefit from full penetration into their marketplace, wherever it may be. When targeting Europe, we identified respected and professional partners that we were confident could help our business, sitting down to share our goals and sales targets, and to find out how they can help us achieve them. One of the European distribution partners we settled on in the UK during this process was Hunter Price. The other was Sinco. Hunter Price aligns brilliantly with our strategy, as does Sinco, even though the basis of each relationship is quite different.

We now have distribution partners across the globe, including with the hugely respectable Samaco Toy in the Middle East. Latin America is a vastly growing market. In EMEA there’s a diverse retail landscape spanning supermarkets, toy specialists, indies, franchises, majors and so on, and all are strong in their own space. In LatAm, retail presence is very centralised. Coppel, which has 600 department stores in Mexico, is a big player on toys, and Falabella is a department store franchise in LatAm with stores in Colombia, Chile and Peru. If you can secure presence with those players, your business in that region is sorted. There aren’t many small retailers, meaning the few big names have a lot of negotiating power in terms of placement and pricing etc. Talks can be trickier. This is where local distributors within each country really are worth their weight in gold: they know the lay of the land and can have conversations on your behalf.

How have you strengthened your partnerships with licensing companies? What is the big advantage for them in working with you?

Our approach to investment in tooling and processes means we can make unique products for each partner depending on their requirements. We also invest in people who understand the brands we currently work with as well as the brands we want to work with. When we design a product, we know that our team completely gets what the end result should be. We’re also very communicative. We want to know what partners desire from us and in return we outline exactly what we can offer, at a price consumers find very attractive.

We also have existing relationships with major retailers across the globe, including those typically tricky to gain a foothold in, such as supermarkets and eCommerce specialists. It’s hard to gain entry to these sectors, but Bildo is already there and has proven success in the marketplace, from Lidl and Walmart to Argos, Tesco and Carrefour. In EMEA, our retailer network includes Smyths, Mothercare, ELC, Hamleys, Toys R Us, Maxi Toys, King Jouet and more. This year, we’re also working on a pan-European deal with Amazon: we’ve hired a dedicated eCommerce agency that will oversee the logistics of uploading, listing and promoting our products on Amazon EMEA. Our relationship with these retailers is a major plus point for our licensors, and we’re proud to be able to differentiate ourselves in this way.

Retail relationships are obviously paramount for all toy companies – what are the main benefits for retailers to work with you and how can you support them?

One of Bildo’s USPs is the fact every new deal, partnership or development will result in very attractively priced toys. Retailers can also look forward to a swift turnaround, consistent product availability, strong commercial deals with flexible payment terms and discounts (where appropriate), and tailormade product. There aren’t many licensees in Europe that can offer localised packaging in 10 different languages – but Bildo can. If a retailer says it needs something quite particular, our strong and talented internal development team is usually able to come up with a solution that ticks all the boxes. We have the manufacturing ability and experience to create bespoke toys for retailers, and even to help develop generic own-brand lines. Our categories are also expanding all the time, meaning buyers can opt for mixed containers that cover several the most popular bases.

What are going to be the biggest challenges for retailers in ’22 and how can Bildo help them?

We’re all aware of continued challenges in logistics, raw materials and supply chain disruption. It will take a long time for things to return to normal, if indeed they do at all. It also remains to be seen how price increases and inflation rates will impact the toy industry, and we’re already seeing many forced to put increases onto retailers because they can’t absorb the entirety of them themselves. We’re working hard to understand where the balance lies for us in order not to put too much strain on our customers. Of course, some cost prices will have to go up due to untenable materials hikes of 35% or 40% in some categories. What we’re agreeing with our customers, for now, is that we will rest certain lines for a year. One of Bildo’s major USPs is its competitive pricing ,and we have no wish to be forced, due to external situations outside of our control, to lose sight of what makes us special by increasing prices. We have already started finalising the ranges that will sit 2022 out, and have updated our key partners accordingly, letting them know what else is available to fill any gaps with something new, innovative – and attractively priced, of course. Our customers really appreciate this.

This year, we’re also welcoming power brands to our licensed portfolio including Ricky Zoom, Play Doh, L.O.L. Surprise!, Rainbow High, Little Tikes and many more. So even though pricing remains a challenge, Bildo is ready and able to offer supreme licensed lines in new categories not offered by these brands before.

It's worth bearing in mind that Bildo, as a Greek company, is used to facing and overcoming economic challenges – and has grown regardless. We’re here to listen and learn so we can be the best partner possible in this part of the world, and our roots are fundamental to that. We’re proud of who we are and what we do: an honest Greek company producing quality toys at great prices.