viewpoint
manager did not have the commercial savvy to run a a cake stall at a church fete, and I think if anything it has become worse. In the old days they lent you money if you met
Ali Mafi 50 Fifty Gifts
A good year to be had by one and all
So, four trade fairs down and one to go, but haven’t times changed? We used to start with Harrogate, then London, Nuremberg, followed by Birmingham then New York and finally a visit to Hong Kong two months after their fair. Orders used to be postponed from fair to fair,
but now they are just postponed until committees decide to convene but, by all accounts, there is an air of optimism. Okay, trade fairs are not as busy, and the
organisers are also having to dream about the days of waiting lists for stands, but the quality of visitors is much better and we certainly feel that we are in for a good year. The remaining problem is banks and their
support for businesses. Let’s be realistic, after paying half the profits in unwarranted bonuses and the other half as dividends, the poor blighters don’t have much money left to lend. You know what the funny part is? If you go to a bank and say look we are 20% down on profit but have increased our bonuses by 10%, they would question your sanity, call in their loans and show you the door, yet that’s exactly what they do. I stated many years ago that your average bank
certain criteria, but these days they don’t have anyone who actually understands their own criteria so they lend based on security and the so-called ‘products’ you are buying off them. Basically they have been turned into salesmen and pretty poor ones at that, as the big five are all busy refunding customers for selling services under false pretences. I was listening to a Radio 4 programme on the subject of MBAs in the US (where the concept was invented) and the UK. Other industrial countries are not so hot on it. The interesting fact is that very few self-made
entrepreneurs have an MBA but, by contrast, very few of the heads of the major listed companies haven’t. I remain totally unconvinced. A masters degree in business can only have one purpose and that is to teach you how to run a business and maximise your profits, i.e. make money and become rich. I cannot think of a single other purpose, so here’s my problem. I am unwilling to be lectured by someone who has chosen to be an academic on how to run a business. The preponderance of such courses, the cost, the lack of requirements for eligibility etc also concerns me. Okay, if you show up on my doorstep with such
a degree from Harvard, where it originated, I may consider that as a positive tick, but if it’s from the School of Business in Bootle I will, almost certainly, ignore it. I have no doubt that there are some well-run
large organisations out there, but they are rare, and the problem is a pretty simple one: it is almost impossible in a large organisation to motivate staff and create a state of belonging. The majority of
people employed in large companies are just doing a job. The sense of belonging you can create in a small company can only be achieved in large ones by breaking the business down into small, autonomous departments responsible for their own profitability and performance. I am astonished by how often friends I have in
large companies are tied up in meetings. What on Earth are they discussing in all these meetings? Who is responsible for implementing what they decide, if anything, and how is the success measured? I can tell you how often the directors of our company meet in a month. A maximum of once. We work in an open-plan office and just shout across the room at each other, stand up and have a chat or discuss issues over a beer, and last year we grew by 120%; a performance we are going to repeat again this year. How much time does it take to decide if an item makes it into the range or not? With us it takes five minutes. We can get an item from a very basic first idea to a working prototype in two weeks. That means having it designed, approved, named, and actually hand made. It will, normally, be fully functioning also.
I would imagine in some companies that
process takes weeks, if not months. I am told some organisations take longer than our two weeks just to decide whether to have it drawn up or not. Do you not see how ridiculously inefficient that is? And do you not also see that an MBA actually teaches you to do it that way rather than ours? Let’s be honest, these days it takes two clicks to establish if the product exists and who the competition is. Save some nuances and problems we create, the principle of business is simple: buy a product for £x, sell it for £y and make sure you spend less that £y-x selling it. It really isn’t rocket science. What we expend most of our effort on is solving problems we created, and that is the truth of it.
David
Ripley Chief Operating Officer of Winning Moves
Fair enough!
It was great to see the British toy trade out in force at both Olympia and Nuremberg; confidence is certainly returning to the toy industry and the economy as a whole. The NPD data showing a market decline in UK toy sales for 2013 could not dampen the enthusiasm of many of the retailers and suppliers I chatted to.
62 Toyworld
It is all too easy to predict toy market growth in 2014, but 2013 was not a bad year with some significant pockets of growth, particularly in the Games and Puzzles category, which was led by market leaders Hasbro with the success of Monopoly Empire and the Monopoly token ‘Vote’ marketing campaign early in 2013. For Winning Moves, the Toy Fair season started in
November in Deauville in France (by far my personal favourite toy fair) and finished with New York in mid February. After the product beauty pageants come the selection and formal product listings season from the major retailers. These provide an early view on the lines likely to make the retail Christmas top 10 charts, which typically coincide with the annual Christmas PR activity around July. Having worked on the buying side for many years I sympathise with the buyers at this time of year. The reality is that the vast majority of retailers are limited
to some extent by space, spend or unrealistic profit expectations. They attempt to fit highly edited mixed brand ranges into their stores or websites, to satisfy their differential customer target markets, the only exceptions being the limited number of retailers who attempt to list all products on their website and fulfil via third parties. As a pre-school toy buyer, every season I was offered
no fewer than 30,000 potential skus from circa 250 suppliers, with the reality of only listing 300 skus per season – 200 of which were existing bestsellers and were unlikely to be ‘churned’. This limited opportunity for new lines and ranges generated unavoidable disappointment amongst toy suppliers. I hope this year that disappointments are kept to a minimum, and all products that deserve their shelf space are indeed listed widely at retail in the main season.
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