HOW THE ROUTE TO MARKET EVOLVED FOR TOY & GAME ORIGINATORS, CIRCUMVENTED THE OLD WAY OF DOING THINGS AND WHAT THAT MEANS FOR THE FUTURE OF THE TOY & GAME INDUSTRY.
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For a long time, the Toy and Game business ran on a simple, rigid, and—let’s be honest—annoyingly conservative pipeline. If you had a great idea, you had two choices:
GATEKEEPER 1: Convince a manufacturer to take a punt on it.
GATEKEEPER 2: Hope the manufacturer could persuade a retailer to put it on shelf.
If either gatekeeper said “no,” that was it. End of the road. Your brilliant idea died in a sample room or a buyer meeting, and when the manufacturer finally got round to telling you, it was ultimately very frustrating to feel so unable to influence things and so lacking in control.
Our first infographic captures that world perfectly: a straight, narrow line from Concept → Manufacturer → Retailer.
Efficient? Maybe, if you are the conservative Manufacturer and the ultra-risk averse Retailer
Innovative? Not really, anything even slightly risqué, niche or out there would quickly be filtered out, even if there was very clearly a market for it.
Friendly to new creators? Nope, quite the opposite!
This system shaped the industry for generations. It rewarded safe bets, familiar formats, and very small-scale incremental innovations. And it quietly filtered out anything too weird, too niche, too risky, too early, too anything other than bog standard down the middle.
I can give you a very real, and personally painful example of this…a long time in the past, the iconic and hugely successful Game – The Settlers Of Catan (now known simply as just Catan) was offered to me for UK distribution. At the time the product had sold a ‘mere’ 1 million units in other markets – mostly Germany. Unfortunately I found myself being one of the very same Gatekeepers I have described above – for really boring (and mostly stupid!) corporate reasons, I had to pass on this legendary Game…which has now sold more than 45 million copies! There was never any doubt that this Game would be successful in the UK market, at least to some degree. There was never any doubt that UK Gamers would want to buy and play the Game. But the issue was that the corporate ship I was sailing on was not the right vehicle for that particular product, and so I had to pass on a product which sold c. $1bn of products after I passed.
But that was then…the world changed just a little bit since back then, and faced with the same decision today, I would have had a lot more options and the answer may have been different!
The New Reality: Direct-to-Consumer Has Blown the Doors Off, And Opened The Gates To The Citadel
Today, the path from idea to consumer looks nothing like it did even ten years ago. Our second infographic above shows the modern landscape: a branching, creator‑led ecosystem where ideas can bypass the old gatekeepers entirely. It’s not that traditional Retail has disappeared, far from it – Walmart, Target, Carrefour, Smyths, Specialty stores – all still have their place and drive hefty chunks of the market.
BUT the reality is that concepts are no longer filtered out by two layers of Gatekeepers just to flounder in the graveyard of dreams, these days product originators who can’t get their products to market via the old way of working have so many more options to in effect sell directly to the consumer their product most appeals to.
THE GREAT WAVE OF ORIGINATOR ENTREPENEURS GOING BIG VIA DIGITAL MARKETING
Since the pandemic, one of our biggest client segments has been originators who launched and went big, who then requested our help to reach ‘traditional’ distribution channels to continue growing and to diversify risk away from whichever platform made them big – often (although not exclusively) that platform has been Amazon.
A single concept can now go straight to market through:
Crowdfunding
Creators can validate demand, fund production, and build a community before a single unit ships. No buyer meetings. No gatekeeping. Just proof.
Amazon
The world’s biggest toy aisle—open 24/7, algorithm‑driven, and accessible to anyone with a barcode and a plan. One of the biggest advantages new businesses have on Amazon is that when you have no revenues and no hierarchy of existing customers, you can build your business model around the needs of the platform you launch on. If you are an established business with decades of experience selling to Retail, you have a business model which will struggle to ‘overs spend’ on Amazon advertising. If you are a new company with a bit of funding, you can spend what you need to spend to create some commercially successful products. To put this in practical terms, most Toy & Game companies will struggle to spend more than c. 10% of revenues on marketing, so if you have a product which is likely to sell at retail for 20 dollars, euros or whatever currency, then you’re looking at deducting retail margin, discounts and maybe even sales tax depending on your country from the 20$. Let’s say you’re left with around $11, at 10% marketing spend, you have $1.10 per unit to spend on marketing.
If you’re selling only on Amazon, you have no established margin structure, and you can spend significantly more per unit versus those companies with a business model which has developed on the long-term model of selling to physical retail. As a newcomer on Amazon, you may be able to spend as much as $5 per unit, or even more. Faced with a choice between a long-standing company offering $1 per unit or a newbie offering 5 times that, which do you think Amazon’s algorithm is likely to choose? Well, judging by Jeff Bezos’s reported net worth, I’m suspecting the Amazon algorithm is banking the $5 and pushing that product to the front.
This is a real game changer for product originators who can reach the consumer ‘direct’ from Amazon’s platform. BTW, I’m certainly not suggesting that selling on Amazon is easy, it’s hard, demanding, mostly faceless, complicated and subject to change at any moment, but regardless it does represent the primary workaround vs the old skool Gatekeeper model we had before Amazon’s meteoric rise.
Shopify
Direct‑to‑consumer storefronts that let brands own the relationship, the data, and the margin. Admittedly you’re going to find it hard to drive traffic to anywhere near the levels you can find on Amazon, but you will for certain make a lot more per unit sold on your own e-commerce store vs what you’ll make on Amazon. If you want to find out more about how to get some Tech gurus to set up your own web store so you can sell direct to consumer, we are in a Joint Venture which offers that service – check it out here: www.PlayMetrix.biz
Social Commerce
TikTok Shop, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook Marketplace have all evolved into fully fledged retail ecosystems where content is the storefront and every swipe becomes a potential transaction. These platforms collapse the traditional funnel—awareness, interest, desire, purchase—into a single moment of discovery, driven by creators, micro‑communities, and algorithmic relevance.
Social commerce isn’t just about selling products inside apps; it’s about embedding commerce into culture. Short‑form videos, livestream demos, unboxings, and creator recommendations act as real‑time product pages, complete with social proof, instant feedback, and frictionless checkout. The platforms reward authenticity and speed, so the more native the content feels, the more it converts.
For brands, this shift means building a presence where audiences already spend their time and trust their peers (to a degree!). It’s about designing content that entertains first and sells second, leveraging creators as distribution, and treating every post as both a marketing asset and a retail touchpoint. Social commerce turns discovery into impulse, community into conversion, and everyday scrolling into a dynamic, always‑on marketplace.
The bottom line here is this: All roads now lead directly to the Consumer. You don’t have to go through a boardroom, a buyer who has all the power, or a stuffy committee room packed with suits (speaking as a former stuffy committee room suit myself!).
This shift has changed the type of products that can now reach the market and given product originators an admittedly much more hands on option to get their product out there into the hands of people.
Implications For The Global Toy & Game Industry
The ongoing impact and implications of all this are huge:
More innovation because creators aren’t designing to please buyers/give them what they want or ask for. Be outrageous, go on, I dare you…because now you can be.
More diversity in product categories, themes, and formats.
More speed from concept to market.
More global reach from day one.
More resilience for small creators who no longer rely on a single “yes.”
The industry hasn’t lost its gatekeepers, Walmart is still mighty, Smyths are still where it’s at - no doubt, but they’re no longer the Gatekeepers to the ONLY path to glory. The power balance has shifted, the product launch options have broadened, and our industry is genuinely better off as a result.
Conclusion
Product originators can still play the old skool game of being hands off Inventors, pitching Gatekeeping companies and letting the few products that land go, and then seeing what sticks/what gets reported on the royalty reports. But there is also another more entrepreneurial route open today – those creators with entrepreneurial skills, or at least those creators who can find partners with entrepreneurial skills – these people have more options and pathways to success. None of which is to say it’s now easy, it ain’t ever easy…BUT the most successful creators we’re seeing today are cutting out the Gatekeepers and going straight to the individual consumers who buy. In the past 5 years, we have Consulted with a couple of dozen companies who took this approach and are now running successful, profitable, $multi-million companies.
TOY RECRUITMENT
We're currently recruiting for the following roles:
Sales Director, HK
Sourcing Manager, Ningbo, China
Sourcing Manager, Hong Kong
If you, or someone you know, are interested in one of these roles AND have relevant experience in the stated country, please feel free to get in touch and we can discuss. If you are an Employer looking to fill roles, please just send me a DM to find out how we help companies around the world find great people. If you are a Jobseeker, unless you are applying for one of the above roles, sorry I can’t guarantee a reply to speculative applications due to a literally unmanageable volume of speculative enquiries, but you can sign up to our email newsletter at www.ToyRecruitment.com We do email out with any new Vacancies as they come in, so if you want to be advised as soon as we get new Job Vacancies in, that’s the most effective way.
INTRODUCING PLAYMETRIX
If you want to find out more about how we can help your company embrace the D2C opportunities we discussed in this Newsletter, check out www.PlayMetrix.biz. I’m using my quarter of a century of experience and knowledge in conjunction with some Tech gurus to enable the ongoing success of a broad selection of clients.
We’re manically busy following up all the leads and projects coming out of Toy Fair season this year, but we’ll be happy to discuss what we can do to help you ramp up your online and D2C sales, just send me a DM for more details/to ask direct questions.
FACTORIES
We consult with and/or represent the following factories:
· Games factories in China, India, Vietnam.
· Sensory compounds and STEM/Science experiment kit factories in China, Cambodia & Europe.
· Leading Scooter & Ride On vendor in India.
We also run paid for factory tour visits to India. If you’re interested in exploring India’s manufacturing options to deliver better geographical supply diversification, we can quote for a week of factory visits to India’s best factories, just get in touch.
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This article is copyright 2026 RG Marketing Ltd, all rights reserved. All contributors to this article contributed under a work for hire basis on behalf of RG Marketing Ltd. Please also note, this article was written and published in the United Kingdom.
