Sign up to our Free Toy Industry Journal e-newsletter for the latest articles, podcasts, trends and insights into what’s going on in the Global Toy & Games business, just click here to sign up: https://forms.aweber.com/form/54/1325077854.htm
Well, we nearly made it to the end of 2024. It's been another 'interesting' year in the Toy & Game biz. We'll wait & see the real market data for the full year, but it's going to go down as tough year in general. A weak movie slate, relatively weak consumer demand and a lot of geopolitical turbulence.
On the bright side, expectations were set fairly low in general, and I think that inventory should be reasonable at year end, unlike some of the previous few years.
The outlook for 2025 is better in my opinion. The movie slates look much stronger, which is a good start point. But also companies invested a lot in their own brands in 2024, and should be able to reap the benefits of that for a few years going forward in terms of higher sales on higher profitability products.
The big news in terms of turbulence heading into 2025 is of course the return of President Trump in the U.S. It was an interesting ride last time around, and this time it certainly looks like he has trade wars and tariffs in mind. Since his re-election, we have been very busy with customers scrambling around for alternative production sources to China. 2025 should be good years for the Toy factories we work with in Vietnam, India and Indonesia.
Anyway, I wanted to close out our content contributions for 2024 by sharing some recently released Videos where I run through some key topics related to Toys & Games:
VIETNAM TOY MANUFACTURING
This video looks at where Vietnam sits in the grand scheme of Toy & Game manufacturing. I recorded this on a recent trip to this very intriguing country. It was hot, so apologies in advance for my attire and bedraggled appearance, but the video gives a good overview of Vietnam's manufacturing and also explains why Vietnam will never be 'The next China' when it comes to production:
TOY DISTRIBUTORS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
This video is hopefully fairly self-explanatory, it looks at working with distributors, the pros, the cons and the things to watch out for. Very few Toy & Game companies have truly global distribution, pretty much every company in our industry relies on distributors to some degree, so this should be relevant for all:
BOARD GAMES BUSINESS: SUCCESS FACTOR No. 1
There is one underlying and annoyingly obvious success factor in the business of Games. Watch this video to find out more:
BOARD GAME BIZ Podcast
On that last topic of Games, one of my realisations in 2024 was that I wasn't doing enough work in the Games category, which has always been my favourite space in the broader Toy biz. So, as part of doing more in the Games world, I launched a new podcast recently in case you missed that. There are 7 episodes currently up, and more pre-recorded set to be released soon. So if you want to know more about the commercial side of the (non-digital) Games business, check out the podcast here: https://sites.libsyn.com/556277
Sign up to our Free Toy Industry Journal e-newsletter for the latest articles, podcasts, trends and insights into what’s going on in the Global Toy & Games business, just click here to sign up: https://forms.aweber.com/form/54/1325077854.htm
Comments