Q&A
Rainbow Designs
Over the
rainbow
50 years of Rainbow Designs
It’s been a big year for Rainbow Designs as the company celebrates its half century. MD Anthony Temple chats to Sam Giltrow about the evergreen appeal of its classic characters and what lies ahead, including global expansion and an even bigger year for Paddington.
“
Once you are exposed to the toy industry, it gets into your blood and it never leaves your system.” A bold statement from Rainbow Designs MD Anthony Temple, but one which sums up perfectly why he went full circle in his career and ended up buying a company which
features some of the UK’s most cherished brands. Starting out in the toy industry at Hasbro in 1984, Anthony realised just four years later that corporate life was simply not for him and he moved on to set up a licensing company, DRI Licensing. This evolved into the Design Rights International Group, working on such licences as Forever Friends, Hasbro’s Hero Quest and Bluebird Toys’ Polly Pocket range, to name just a few. It was, he concedes, a big decision, but one that would eventually give him the necessary experience and confidence to acquire Rainbow Designs in 2005. “I ended up back where I wanted to be,” he says. “I don’t think my heart was really in third party licensing, and I was always keen to get back into product development and creativity. The acquisition of Rainbow gave me that opportunity.” Anthony explained that what brings him pleasure is being able to start something and to still be there when it happens, something which was missing during the days he spent in licensing. Looking back on his achievements since acquiring the company, he says probably his biggest was transforming the business model from that of a distribution company to a creative product development source. Part of that was to set up a strong supply chain, so he went to to factories in the Far East for improved margins and took personal control over the design of the range. A third component of Anthony’s strategy was to extend and expand the company’s national account and specialist retail portfolio. Prior to the acquisition, Rainbow was very much servicing the independent sector and specialist key accounts. While the company initially focused on retaining
those accounts, supplying them with dedicated product lines, it also set up a national account and key account sales force to develop that channel. “They were all necessary changes as I don’t think the business would have survived in the changing retail landscape,” says Anthony. “We now have an incredibly healthy business in the Grocery sector, with customers such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. We have also seen the demise of the department store and we lost a lot of customers there, but we’ve actually maintained and grown our business because we opened up the doors of garden centres, which we call the department stores of the future.” Like many companies, Rainbow Designs has, under Anthony’s tenure, taken advantage of the change in consumer and shopping habits through online growth with Amazon and other retailers, but he says the company has not turned its back on its independents. Indie nursery shops, toy shops and bookshops represent 30% of the company’s business, and they are serviced and supported extremely well. In the past 16 years, Rainbow Designs has seen its customer base grow to more than 1200 in the UK, and the company has plans to expand its offering even further afield. As Anthony explains: “We have ambitions, and we have some interesting developments in place regarding international business. Pre-Covid, we had taken a serious look at overseas territories and were ready to embark on new markets. Historically, our licences have been limited to the UK, but we’ve now expanded on that and extended territorial rights. We’re now looking at EMEA being a growth area in the next two to three years.”
