Page 28 - Toy & Hobby Retailer Magazine May-July 2019

INTERNATIONAL TOY FAIRS
LONDON TOY FAIR 2019
All about atmosphere
London Toy Fair thrives despite a challenging retail environment.
Publisher of Toy World magazine, John Baulch, reports from the London Toy Fair.
THE 66th annual London Toy Fair opened its doors on Tuesday 22 January, with more than 250 exhibiting companies on the show floor including Lego, which returned after sitting out the 2018 event.
2018 has been described as, “one of the most challenging and disruptive years that the UK toy trade has ever seen.” The British Retail Consortium didn’t pull any punches, describing Christmas as the, “worst in a decade.” The official NPD sales figures suggest that UK
toy sales declined by seven per cent to £3.3bn, driven by the closure of Toys R Us, a poor
year for licensed merchandise and a generally difficult year for the High Street, compounded by the uncertainty surrounding Brexit. You might therefore be forgiven for thinking
that the turbulent and uncertain economic conditions would have had an adverse effect on the UK Toy Fair. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
The buoyant mood which characterised the Hong Kong trip in early January was still very much in evidence in London – regardless of where the official 2018 sales figures finished up. One person summarised it perfectly: “I’m more pleased with the atmosphere than anything else. We’ve got a great line, but that would be irrelevant if retailers had a load of stock left and weren’t in a positive frame of mind.”
The feeling is that the UK toy retailers which were expected to do well in the run-up to Christmas did so, while the majority seem to have come out fairly clean in terms of carry over stock.
28 TOY & HOBBY RETAILER MAY / JULY 2019