Retailer profile D each. As a lifelong action figure fan, David was sure
he could turn a profit and a day later he sent the stock to Germany for £4 a figure. “I could have sold them for more but to be
honest I’d used my student loan to buy them, so I had to turn them over quite quickly,” says David with a wry smile. Just over a decade later, David’s Midco Toys
has two stores in Burton on Trent and Derby and has recently joined Toymaster. He’s also trading hard on the Internet and Amazon and developing his operation. With his tattooe’d arms, long black hair and jewellery, he doesn’t look like a traditional toy retailer. He isn’t. For a start he’s only 30 years old, and in an industry where most store owners are considering their pipe and slippers, David is still looking at new action figures and going: “Cooooool.”
What led you to the toy industry? I’ve never grew up: I’ve always been into
toys. When I was a teenager all my mates were going out and getting pissed and I was still looking in toy shops. I’d see a new cartoon on TV and then be off to the toy shop to see what had come out for it and that’s what I was interested in. I bought a copy of Lee’s Toy Review, which
was a kind of a price guide for the secondary market in action figures and then I thought I’m not alone, there’s something out there for me. This was 1995 so it was all a bit back alley- ish but next year Hasbro brought out the second range of Star Wars and that was it then for me.
What were you studying at university? Business. I related everything to toys. My dissertation was: The Globalisation and
22 Toyworld
Go Figure!
David Middleton of Midco Toys may not look like your average toy retailer, that’s because he isn’t. Toyworld found out what makes him tick.
avid Middleton did his first deal in the toy industry at university. Noticing that a local discount store had acquired dumped stock of Star Wars 1 figures, he bought 4,000 for £1
Standardisation of Hasbro Star Wars Products. I got an A for it.
It’s obvious why you would want to be a trader, but why a toy retailer? I’ve always been in
toy shops. No matter where I go the first job is to find the toy shops. In Orlando I went to every single toy shop. I’m just addicted to bloody toys. I used to go to Toys R Us in Northampton twice a day just to see what they’d got. Now I got to other stores just to see what they’re up to and if they’re doing anything different to us, which to be honest they rarely are. Smyth’s occasionally has got something they’ve brought FOB but Toys R Us I think has been poor for years. The only other guy who constantly surprises me is Alan Caswell in Dudley, he produces some stuff from out the woodwork.
And your first store was here in Burton? I opened a little toy shop in 2002 round
the corner from this one. We used to Star Wars figures - clearance and up to date and I thought it was all good stuff, cheap stuff and I thought everyone was going to come in because Burton’s not had a toy shop for ages. Yep we’re onto a winner. First day, brilliant but the rest of the week, tumbleweed and I thought: Bloody hell, what have I done, what’s gone wrong, what am I going to do? I’d got no idea, it was a little shop off the beaten track and the first week it was bad. Then Toymaster Kingdom announced it was opening in the town centre and I thought, oh shit, that’s it. But the one thing that we used to do brilliantly was Yu-gi-oh and Pokémon cards and they saved us really.
But then you moved to the High Street? Well we actually opened in Derby first in the
Westfield Centre, which was a massive jump. We went from a £10,000 a year rent here to six times that. It was a big step. The day I enquired, the Internet was slow and the shop was dead and I was thinking there has to be more than this. So I sent an email to Westfield asking if they had any opportunities for a small business and within 20 minutes they were on the phone asking us to have a look. We had to borrow money to do it and I built stock up slowly but the way I looked at it was Derby had a population of 250,000 people and this shop was right next to Woolworths so I thought, if we can’t do it here, we can’t do it anywhere. We worked out how much we had to take and it was scary but we did it and I’ve been in there five years and just signed another 10 year lease.
So you’ve got two stores, are there plans for a third? Not at the moment. We’re putting more into
the Internet and Amazon. It’s difficult but we’ve had a new system implemented that monitors the prices, which will automatically match what people are doing. I’ve just signed a lease on a new warehouse in Burton too. I’m going to treat the Internet as another shop and treat it as its own entity.
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