Company Profile - Craft Buddy

Get Crafty

Craft Buddy founders Dino and Gary Wadhwani chat to Toy World’s assistant editor Sam Giltrow about the meteoric rise of their hero product Crystal Art, new licences and gaining a firmer foothold in the UK toy sector.

Sitting in the offices of arts and crafts company Craft Buddy, it’s hard to imagine that just 10 years ago, Dino and Gary were doing business from a shed in their parents’ garden.

The rise of the company from humble beginnings is something of which the brothers are incredibly proud, along with the fact that they have followed in the footsteps of their father, who set up his own arts and crafts concern in the 1990s, supplying products to schools.

Dino explains: “As teenagers, we would always be involved in our father’s business somehow, whether we were attending retail or trade fairs with him or helping in the warehouse – that was how we spent our summers and our holidays.”

As the boys grew older, Gary went into a consulting career while Dino, just prior to starting university, spent his gap year working full-time in his father’s business, learning the trade and networking with arts and crafts buyers. Gary went on to work in Amsterdam for five years with a large Dutch retail group in a buying and sourcing capacity, during which time he visited manufacturing hubs like China, Vietnam and Indonesia several times each year. Although their father had been importing his products from Indianbased wholesalers, Gary began to see that the major emerging manufacturing hub was the Far East. It was this experience that sowed the seeds for the brothers eventually launching their own business in 2010 . That year, while both still working in other full-time jobs, they undertook their first sourcing trip together, visiting China and finding factories to supply arts and crafts items which Dino had identified were not yet being offered for sale in the UK.

While initially selling on eBay and Amazon, the brothers exhibited at their first creative trade show in 2011, displaying an initial range of arts and crafts items such as stick-on gems and accessories for papercrafting.

Their first big success in building a trade customer base came with the UK QVC shopping channel in 2012 and this was followed with QVC Germany the following year. Swiftly, they also built up some important trade customers including John Lewis, Paperchase and Hobbycraft, creating own- brand art & craft products for these retailers. They saw the opportunity to create and develop their own arts & craft brands and, in 2016, decided to take the business in this direction.

“2016 was a pivotal year, for several reasons” says Gary. “Firstly, we decided to focus on trademarking and developing our own arts & crafts brands. Secondly, I’d been working with other businesses until then, but decided to focus on Craft Buddy full time. And finally, we decided to move our operations from a London storage unit to a purpose-built office and warehouse facility in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. We remain here today, and now house twenty-five employees across two sites, both within five minutes’ drive of each other”.

In 2017, Craft Buddy launched its Crystal Art brand, capitalising on the trend for diamond painting, which first gained popularity in the Far East. As Dino explains: “That’s when things really started to take off.”

“With our Crystal Art Card Kit, we were the first in the UK to bring out a diamond painting product, and we had tremendous success,” he adds. “We quickly received orders from major TV Shopping and retail customers, and at consumers fairs, people would buy the kits from us. Today, we have developed a much broader and more sophisticated offering, but even in its basic form, people loved the Crystal Art product. It’s so pleasing to see how far the brand has come.”

Internationally, The Crystal Art brand first became popular in Holland and Belgium, and in 2018 Craft Buddy appointed a specialist toy distributor for those countries. Fast forward to the present day and Craft Buddy now has a network of 11 international distributors covering territories far and wide, including North America, Australia and New Zealand, and most major EU countries. Crystal Art is now a staple in major toy stores across France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and Scandinavia.

Following this success across the international toy market in the last three years, it is the UK toy market where the company is now seeking to gain a stronger foothold, and this has been hugely helped by the company gaining its Disney licence in July 2020, with the first Disney Crystal Art collection launched in March this year. Crystal Art products now have distribution in many major retailers such as John Lewis, Smyths Toys, Hobbycraft, Rymans, The Range, and ZSL London Zoo and Whipsnade, as well as more than 200 independent gift, craft and toy shops in the UK.

“Fortunately, it’s going fantastically well, and the Disney Crystal Art collection has been really well received by both our trade and consumer audience. In September this year, we launched our second Disney collection, this time a festive range,” says Gary. “The licence has opened so many doors for us. It makes people pay attention to your company – it’s like a stamp of approval. We’ve now added other licences and have exciting new announcements planned for the first quarter of 2022 - not just for Crystal Art but for some of our other brands too.”

Andrew Welch, head of marketing at Craft Buddy, adds: “What’s great with Crystal Art is that it is a product that can be enjoyed by all ages - from children through to adults. It’s a very wholesome hobby, with the final Crystal Art creations looking fantastic when complete. With the addition of the Disney range earlier this year, we are now getting more parents buying for their kids. From a marketing perspective, this is a huge opportunity. Our consumer base is very interactive with whatever we put up on social media, with consumers keen to share their latest crafting makes.”

Gary explains that, along with using independent artists, licensing is a growing part of how Craft Buddy sources its art. Early next year, the company will be adding new licences including Peter Rabbit and The Smurfs, plus more from Disney, as part of a long-term deal.

These new additions will help underpin Craft Buddy’s growth strategy for next year, in which the company is aiming to offer a varied portfolio of art & craft products to the toy, hobby and gift sectors, which includes Crystal Art, Paint by Numbers and their popular Forever Flowerz range of do-it-yourself flower kits, which has been a hit with its adult crafting consumer base. .

“We want to be known for our other craft brands too, because they are really great products as well,” says Gary, who added that the licences will be extended to run across other brands, not just Crystal Art. “Although we are becoming much better known in the UK toy market, we still have a long way to go to get to where we want to be. But we’re delighted that more and more toy retailers are coming to us, and we are growing our presence in the toy market.”

TV has played a huge role in Craft Buddy’s achievements, with the company enjoying massive success on shopping channels QVC and Create and Craft. During the pandemic lockdowns, the company also hosted twice weekly Facebook Live streams to demonstrate and show Craft Buddy products.

“It was something for people to look forward to, at a time when they had time on their hands and might have felt isolated and bored,” explains Dino. “We were delighted to connect with our customers in this way, and pleasingly we saw a big increase in sales too. Alongside puzzles and board games, crafting in general was a massive pandemic hit, and interest in our Crystal Art, Forever Flowerz and other brands spiked during this time. Fortunately, we’ve been able to sustain this momentum and it shows no sign of slowing down.”

Another big launch for Craft Buddy in November is Paint By Numb3rs, a series of high-quality paint by number sets that come with canvases mounted on a wooden frame, so the artwork is ready to display once completed. Also being released are 3D colour-in and wooden jigsaw puzzles.

Trade account manager Lisa Rayner says the new launches have been in response to feedback from retailers, who, based on the success of Crystal Art in their stores, want more from Craft Buddy. “Our aim is to be more of a one-stop shop of art & craft products for our toy and hobby accounts,” she tells us.

Dan Ward, head of sales, says that the company has been boosted this year by becoming a supplier to AIS and Toymaster members. “With Toymaster, we have got off to a very good start,” he says. “We already worked with a few AIS members, including garden centres, and we are also looking at going into more department stores with big toy sections.”

Dino adds that Craft Buddy’s independent customer base is very important, and he hopes the company can get back to hosting an annual indie get together at its showroom, as it did pre-Covid. “This gives us the opportunity not only to showcase our latest products, but also gives our independent customers the chance to discuss how we can best serve them.”

Summarising the year ahead, Gary says it is looking bright, with the chance to grow the Craft Buddy name even more and expand distribution in different parts of the world. “Our strategy for next year is to sign even more licences, something which is already underway; to develop and grow the product portfolio and following for all our art & craft brands and to enter more international territories. We are already in 25 countries but there are certain pockets where we could be doing more, and the US is one. Most of all, we want to be known by the end of 2022 as an arts and crafts specialist who serves the toy and hobby industry with fantastically compelling and engaging products for both children and adults.”