Playing At Business - toy & game business podcast with Steve Reece

Regardless of which country is your home market, the opportunity outside your borders is greater...in this episode we take a look at some simple ways to significantly increase your export sales of Toys & Games.

Our business is a Consultancy to Toy & Games companies. We have worked with more than half of the biggest Toy companies in the world, as well as 100+ startups and small businesses. Our main areas of business are:

• Export Sales Consultancy - let us help you sell more of your products overseas.
• Growth Consultancy for start ups with funding
• 'Traditional' distribution Consultancy for companies who launched with success on Amazon and want a fast track acceleration into other 'traditional' Toy & Games distribution channels around the world.
• Strategic Sourcing Consultancy - we advise companies on how to diversify their sourcing from being over reliant on China to other geographies including India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico & Europe.
• Recruitment - many of our clients who we have helped with expanding their distribution come back to us to help them find key staff members to allow them to go direct to retail in key markets.
• Consultancy phone calls - this is the entry level service we offer, comparatively low cost, but normally rated 5/5 in terms of value & impact from our clients.

To find out more about our Consultancy services & how we can help your business, just click here: www.ToyIndustryJournal.com/toy-business-consultancy

Ep 94 - 5 Key Tips To Find & Validate New Toy Factories

In this episode host Steve Reece talks about his experience helping more than 100 Toy & Game companies find manufacturing around the world, and he shares 5 key tips for finding & validating new Toy factories. We look at why most companies make a massive mistake by focusing on manufacturing cost as the primary assessment factor for a new Toy & Game factory, and much more.

Our business is a Consultancy to Toy & Games companies. We have worked with more than half of the biggest Toy companies in the world, as well as 100+ startups and small businesses. Our main areas of business are:

• Export Sales Consultancy - let us help you sell more of your products overseas.
• Growth Consultancy for start ups with funding
• 'Traditional' distribution Consultancy for companies who launched with success on Amazon and want a fast track acceleration into other 'traditional' Toy & Games distribution channels around the world.
• Strategic Sourcing Consultancy - we advise companies on how to diversify their sourcing from being over reliant on China to other geographies including India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico & Europe.
• Recruitment - many of our clients who we have helped with expanding their distribution come back to us to help them find key staff members to allow them to go direct to retail in key markets.
• Consultancy phone calls - this is the entry level service we offer, comparatively low cost, but normally rated 5/5 in terms of value & impact from our clients.

To find out more about our Consultancy services & how we can help your business, just click here: www.ToyIndustryJournal.com/toy-business-consultancy

Excess inventory bleeds Toy & Games companies to death, unless the company makes bold steps to reduce the size of the problem. In this episode we cover in detail the issues caused by excess inventory, why inventory represents a recurring challenge which needs to be constantly managed and we look at some case studies of best and worst practise.

Our business is a Consultancy to Toy & Games companies. We have worked with more than half of the biggest Toy companies in the world, as well as 100+ startups and small businesses. Our main areas of business are:

• Export Sales Consultancy - let us help you sell more of your products overseas.
• Growth Consultancy for start ups with funding
• 'Traditional' distribution Consultancy for companies who launched with success on Amazon and want a fast track acceleration into other 'traditional' Toy & Games distribution channels around the world.
• Strategic Sourcing Consultancy - we advise companies on how to diversify their sourcing from being over reliant on China to other geographies including India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico & Europe.
• Recruitment - many of our clients who we have helped with expanding their distribution come back to us to help them find key staff members to allow them to go direct to retail in key markets.
• Consultancy phone calls - this is the entry level service we offer, comparatively low cost, but normally rated 5/5 in terms of value & impact from our clients.

To find out more about our Consultancy services & how we can help your business, just click here: www.ToyIndustryJournal.com/toy-business-consultancy

This episode reviews the 2023 Spielwarenmesse Toy Trade show in Nuremberg. This show is the biggest trade show covering the Toy business in the world. This show marked Steve's 21st visit, and in this episode he talks through how the show went, the outlook for the Toy business in 2023 and much more.

Our business is a Consultancy to Toy & Games companies. We have worked with more than half of the biggest Toy companies in the world, as well as 100+ startups and small businesses. Our main areas of business are:

• Export Sales Consultancy - let us help you sell more of your products overseas.
• Growth Consultancy for start ups with funding
• 'Traditional' distribution Consultancy for companies who launched with success on Amazon and want a fast track acceleration into other 'traditional' Toy & Games distribution channels around the world.
• Strategic Sourcing Consultancy - we advise companies on how to diversify their sourcing from being over reliant on China to other geographies including India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico & Europe.
• Recruitment - many of our clients who we have helped with expanding their distribution come back to us to help them find key staff members to allow them to go direct to retail in key markets.
• Consultancy phone calls - this is the entry level service we offer, comparatively low cost, but normally rated 5/5 in terms of value & impact from our clients.

To find out more about our Consultancy services & how we can help your business, just click here: www.ToyIndustryJournal.com/toy-business-consultancy

Report on UK Toyfair 2023, with a short UK Toy Market update based on newly available year end 2022 Toy market performance.

Our business is a Consultancy to Toy & Games companies. We have worked with more than half of the biggest Toy companies in the world, as well as 100+ startups and small businesses. Our main areas of business are:

• Export Sales Consultancy - let us help you sell more of your products overseas.
• Growth Consultancy for start ups with funding
• 'Traditional' distribution Consultancy for companies who launched with success on Amazon and want a fast track acceleration into other 'traditional' Toy & Games distribution channels around the world.
• Strategic Sourcing Consultancy - we advise companies on how to diversify their sourcing from being over reliant on China to other geographies including India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico & Europe.
• Recruitment - many of our clients who we have helped with expanding their distribution come back to us to help them find key staff members to allow them to go direct to retail in key markets.
• Consultancy phone calls - this is the entry level service we offer, comparatively low cost, but normally rated 5/5 in terms of value & impact from our clients.

To find out more about our Consultancy services & how we can help your business, just click here: www.ToyIndustryJournal.com/toy-business-consultancy

2022 was a tough year for the Toy business. But finally that's over...now we can look ahead to what 2023 will bring.

In this podcast we look at the 4 key factors driving 2023's Toy market:

1. RETAIL INVENTORY LEVELS

2. CHINA'S RE-OPENING

3. INFLATION RATE & CONSUMER DISPOSABLE INCOME

4. TOYETIC MOVIE SLATE

We explain in full detail on this episode of the podcast...

Our business is a Consultancy to Toy & Games companies. We have worked with more than half of the biggest Toy companies in the world, as well as 100+ startups and small businesses. Our main areas of business are:

• Export Sales Consultancy - let us help you sell more of your products overseas.
• Growth Consultancy for start ups with funding
• 'Traditional' distribution Consultancy for companies who launched with success on Amazon and want a fast track acceleration into other 'traditional' Toy & Games distribution channels around the world.
• Strategic Sourcing Consultancy - we advise companies on how to diversify their sourcing from being over reliant on China to other geographies including India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico & Europe.
• Recruitment - many of our clients who we have helped with expanding their distribution come back to us to help them find key staff members to allow them to go direct to retail in key markets.
• Consultancy phone calls - this is the entry level service we offer, comparatively low cost, but normally rated 5/5 in terms of value & impact from our clients.

To find out more about our Consultancy services & how we can help your business, just click here: www.ToyIndustryJournal.com/toy-business-consultancy

The Toy industry does not spend enough time worrying about available production capacity. For decades we have presumed that we can get our Toys & Games produced from the same old factories in China...but things have changed...

...and the pace of change may be set to accelerate. We discuss what Toy manufacturing will look like in the future in this episode.

In the third episode of this podcast series we take a further look at The Future Of Toys, this time looking at Toy & Game Consumers.

We discuss what areas could see the most change, the areas which will most likely stay the same as well as identifying one massive threat to the Toy industry and at the same time one massive opportunity.

In the 2nd in this series we take a look at the most fun part of the Toy business - Products! Most people who work in the Toy business do so because they love Toys, most of us have a collection of the Products we have worked on around us as we work.

The podcast looks at some fundamental factors of Toy products which are unlikely to change, even far out into the future, and we also look at how Technology will facilitate deeper play experiences and interactions with Toys.

In the 1st of a series of podcasts looking at the future of the toy business we begin with a look at Retail - how it's evolved, how it affects the toy business today and what future changes we can expect to see.

Many fundamentals stay the same, we discuss these key areas in this podcast, but we also look at how technology is evolving constantly and affecting Toy Retail as a result.