NPD Column The good old British weather…
Rory Partis takes a look at the impacy weather has had on the Outdoor Toys catagory, and analyses what happened in 2012.
where we are all having BBQs every evening and spending all our time in shorts and flip flops. However, the reality more recently has been for our Summers to be wetter and for our Winters to be colder and also filled with snow! We have just gone through the early part of 2013 where the weather was truly dreadful with more snow and more records for chilliness, March was the second coldest since records began and we started Spring with snow flurries and negative temperatures in April. So, now that I’ve depressed you with weather tales, what has all this got to do with toys? I hear you ask. Well, quite a lot really…. The main supercategory in toys that will be affected by the changes in our unstable climate is Outdoor Toys. Obviously we see sales of sledges go through the roof when we get heavy snowfall, but on the flipside toys aimed towards playing in the garden will be impacted by poor weather and, more specifically, rain. If you cast your mind back to March 2012 you may remember that the UK was basked in glorious sunshine and unseasonably high temperatures. Outdoor and Sports Toys as a whole category was showing value increases in March of +25% versus the year before. However, as we moved into April the skies turned dark and the heavens opened, and it basically rained for the whole month. This lead to an April performance in outdoor toys that was in stark contrast to March, being down -37% in value. Sales that are reliant on the British weather are a bit of a risky area to say the least. After April we saw no real improvement with the weather, and the rain continued into mid-July where it decided to give us a break for the Olympics. This meant that for the period from April to June there were 2 million less outdoor toys purchased than the year before, which is nearly £20 million less being spent on these types of toys in 2012, definitely a case of rain stops play. It is also worth mentioning that the improvement in weather and also the Olympics did give the category a boost in July and August. But when you consider that the UK was hosting the largest sporting event in the world in 2012 and outdoor and sports toys
I 20 Toyworld
f there is one topic of conversation in the UK that is sure to get everyone going then it has to be the weather. The British Summertime is viewed by us in the UK as something magical,
Outdoor & Sports Toys % Value Change Month by Month 2012
40 30 20
10
0 Jan-12 Feb-12 Mar-12 Apr-12 May-12 Jun-12 Jul-12 Aug-12 Sep-12 Oct-12 Nov-12 Dec-12 -10 -20 OUTDOOR TOYS VALUE % CHANGE -30
-40
The NPD Group, Inc.
| Proprietary and Confidential
Source: NPD EPoS Retail Tracking
1
were down for the year, then that performance really does point to the weather having a big impact. Moving into this year we have again seen some pretty poor weather, and we have also seen a fairly mixed start to the year for toy sales. I’ve highlighted the effect that poor weather can have on outdoor toy sales, but it also impacts total sales. Let’s face it, in the depths of Winter when it’s freezing outside it tends to put people in more of a lethargic mood. It can be very appealing to just settle yourself down on the couch and get lost in the TV or a computer game when it’s nice and warm inside. This is also more pertinent now with the popularity of tablets and handheld devices with children. Having a quick look at
the latest weekly trends for toys paints a rather telling story. Looking at the last few weeks’ sales for March we can see a decrease in value across all the weeks, bearing in mind the rather splendid weather last year. Again, if we focus on outdoor, the -51% in value for week 12 versus 2011 is big decrease. For a country that traditionally does not get
very good weather, it seems odd that we place so much importance on a little bit of sunshine, but looking at last year’s trends it would be great if the weather started to improve in 2013. Most of all sunshine makes people happy and it gets them out of the house, and hopefully into the high street. So let’s all cross our fingers and hope for a little bit of sunshine in the coming months….
“Sales that are reliant on the British weather are a bit of a risky area to say the least”
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